"If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him...You must count him as one of your countrymen and love him as yourself- for you yourselves were once strangers in Egypt."

I find the evolution of Judaism very complex and interesting. I never knew that in the ancient past, people felt they had to be in their homeland, at the shrine they created for their God, in order to make contact. Today religions still have symbolic and scared places in which the few have the opportunity to visit and place of worship where people go daily, weekly, monthly, but there is no loss of hope if these places are not visited. Religious people of today can feel close to their God, in all or most circumstance. Armstrong shows the importance of the place in the past when she says, “The loss of homeland meant that the link with heaven, which alone made life supportable, had been broken. In the sixth century, the Judahite exiles expressed this by saying that their world had come to an end.”

I also found it interesting that in the time period of Ezekiel, the goal of creating a holy city was to radically separate the place and it’s people from the rest of the world, “just as God is radically separate from all other beings, so too Israel…” Not only was the city being isolated, but laws were put in place in an, “attempt to make Israel a ‘holy’ and separate people [and] marriage ‘outside’ was equivalent to leaving the sacred enclave and going out into godless wilderness…”

“A ruthless tendency to exclude other people would henceforth become a characteristic of the history of Jerusalem, even though this ran strongly counter to some of Israel’s most important traditions.” This quote, along with the ones above, shed light on the dynamic of religion and politics intertwining. The exiled were treated well and encouraged to participate in Babylonian life when there, and religion gave them hope of the return to their homeland. Yet, once the exiled returned, kindness and openness to others, in return, was stricken down by a religious- political agenda. This, as in many cases in the past, show to me, why religion and politics cannot co-exist in formal policy making and why Jerusalem has always and will always be a overwhelmingly complex case.