The Prosperity of the City
"“Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease. Seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles. Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for if it prospers, you too will prosper.”"
— Jeremiah 29:5-7
In 597 BC the Babylonians carried the king and thousands of people away from Jerusalem, and several prophets were promising they would be home within two years. Jeremiah wrote them a letter and told them to settle in, because the exile would last seventy years. Babylon was no ordinary foreign city; it was the capital of the people who had wrecked their lives. In that world one prayed rather for an enemy's downfall, as another song of the exiles shows. Here comes the opposite. The Hebrew word shalom, rendered here as prosperity and prosper, appears three times in this one sentence and means not only the absence of war but also health, plenty and good order. God also says that he is the one who carried them there, so Babylon had not slipped out of his hand. Your peace is tied to the peace of the place where you live today.