The Babylonian Exile as a Laboratory for the Collapse of Meaning

This paper analyzes the Babylonian Exile as a historically verifiable test case for observing how symbolic systems behave under total collapse of external supports. Land, temple, and monarchy are treated as regulatory hardware whose destruction forces a migration of meaning toward interiorized and textual forms.Rather than theological evolution, the analysis focuses on adaptive responses: liminality, interiorization, apocalyptic projection, and eventual re-closure. The Exile is framed as a laboratory condition in which the limits of interiorized meaning become observable.