This cuts clean across those who, reading what I and others have said, have spoken of this notion of continuing exile as an image or metaphor, an idea from the miscellaneous Jewish past picked up here to illuminate a different situation.5 It can of course be used that way, and obviously was and indeed still is, but that is not the basic point. The basic point I, and others, have made is that within the continuing narrative that a great many Jews believed themselves to be living in, many Second Temple