John Calvin Batchelor wrote, in a novel, of a place where there are billboards and neon arrows, all pointed to Plato's Cave.
"World's Oldest Continuously Operated Parable, Three Miles Ahead!"
Plato's Cave is a very old parable, to be sure. Not sure it's the oldest, tho. (One presumes we're speaking of the West. I have no clue what the oldest parable is in Asia.)
@[email protected] hmm. I think there's a difference here in that the cave was explicitly a story for teaching purposes, while the Babylonian exile was a record of historical events (of whatever accuracy, but it definitely wasn't considered made up to teach a specific point). No arguments with the commentary on the hypocrisy of effectively exiling people and then being surprised they find more truth in the old testament than your 'helpful' theology though...
The Babylonian exile, I think, 200(?) years before Plato, is the oldest parable/metaphor/story I know of.
The story is that, long before the Roman empire, the people of "Zion", that is, so furiously resisted Babylonian rule, their power-players were sent to Babylon as slaves.
Wait. Not slaves like African-American slaves. Slaves in Babylon, as later in Rome, as late to the Comanche, were still considered human, and had rights.
So these very wealthy powerful "slaves" did pretty much what they wanted, with the sole exception of not being allowed to leave Babylon and return home.
Eventually, the law was lifted. The exiles returned.
Their notion, their children's notion, was that they would return to Zion and once again take up the reins of power.
Except, you know, bereft of their power players, Zion had raised *other* power players.
And, as you can readily imagine, the current players in Zion were not actually welcoming back these former players who'd been gone for nearly a century.
They didn't call it a civil war, it was politics, but it was fucking brutal.
And, in the end, the exiles won.
And winners write history.
... by the rivers of babylon, where he sat down ...
... and there he wept. when he remembered Zion ...
