families was assiduously maintained by the returnees (cf. Ezra 2). Here we can see the real force of the identity created by the deportation experience. The people of the land and the returned descendants of the deportees both shared roots in the pre-destruction period—whatever forms of assimilation may have taken place in Babylonia and whatever the consequences of widespread rape during the Babylonian devastations of Judah and Jerusalem (Lam 5:11)—and were therefore in many senses kith and kin of
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