Waiting for “the End of the Exile”?

I love Tübingen library. Love it. It has so much, and I’m able to bring it all home for months on end. Yesterday I picked up a few real interesting books and one of them I wanted to mention. Namely the Catholic scholar, Brant Pitre’s new monograph, Jesus, the tribulation, and the end of the exile: restoration eschatology and the origin of the atonement (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005)

In an interesting excursus he examines Wright’s ‘End of the Exile’ theme. Wright’s proposal, that even those Jews living in the land were thought of as ‘in Exile’, has come in for some stinging critique from the likes of Dunn, Downing and Casey. Nevertheless, Pitre maintains that Wright’s position can still be maintained albeit with necessary adjustments. ‘Wright has the right insight’, he argues, ‘but the wrong exile. The Jews of the first century were certainly waiting for “the End of the Exile” – but not the Babylonian Exile. Rather, they were waiting for the end of the Assyrian Exile’ – and the restoration of all twelve tribes to Zion.

So, in answer to Wright’s ‘where are we?’ basic worldview question: ‘we have returned to the Land, but the rest of Israel is still in exile; the lost ten tribes of the northern kingdom have not yet returned’ (for all the above, cf. p. 35, italics reduced)

Food for thought.