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• In fact, the Talmud, in Pesachim 87b, tells us that, after the destruction of the First Temple, God specifically chose to exile the Jews into Babylon because of how similar the Aramaic language was to Hebrew, to make the exile easier. Ur of the Chaldees, after all, was where Abraham had come from. The Jews were not yet ready to be exiled by the Romans, a people with a completely different language - one which the Jews, unlike Aramaic, never adopted as a national language. But banishment of the Jews by the Romans was coming - first in A.D. 70 when the Second temple was burnt to the ground, and again in A.D. 135, when Hadrian ploughed Jerusalem as a field.
• And so, as we saw in our earlier lessons, the Jews were now in exile, in the diaspora, in Babylon. But, as Jeremiah had prophesied, the captivity in Babylon was not permanent, but would last for seventy years.