How did the exile in Babylon change Judaism?

The exile in Babylon pushed a people whose worship centred on one Temple to keep their religion going without it. Around 597 BCE and again after 587 BCE, when Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple were destroyed, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II took Judeans to Babylonia. There they lived in farming settlements such as Tel-Abib, near Nippur, and could no longer practise Temple-based worship.

So they mostly worshipped in private homes. They kept traditions such as circumcision, Sabbath observance and the reading of the Psalms and the Law. Scholars connect the exile with several lasting changes. The Torah gained a central role in Jewish life, and many historical-critical scholars think it was redacted, or edited into its final form, in this period. Scribes and sages emerged as leaders, and the Aramaic-based alphabet, which eventually evolved into the Hebrew alphabet, came into use.

The exile left a human trace in clay. Cuneiform tablets from Babylonia record the trade, taxes and debts of one exiled Judean family over four generations, and every member has a Hebrew name. Ration tablets in Nebuchadnezzar's archives list food for a captive king of Judah.

The Hebrew Bible recounts that the Persians later let the exiles return. Historians add nuance: archaeology suggests the return was a trickle over decades rather than a single event. Yehezkel Kaufmann called the exile a watershed: with it the religion of Israel ends and Judaism begins. After this period, there were always sizable numbers of Jews living outside the Land of Israel.