From Moses to Babylon to today: How exile sharpened the Jewish mind

I recently watched Ancient Skies, a PBS documentary about ancient Babylonia, and wondered: where did this ancient world of sky-watching, calculation, and record-keeping intersect with the story of the Jews exiled from Jerusalem to Babylonia?

More than 2,600 years ago, Babylonia was one of the great centers of astronomy, mathematics, record-keeping, and administration in the ancient world. Its achievements are especially striking because they came before telescopes, clocks, calculators, computers, or printed books.

Babylonian scholars watched the sky over long periods. They tracked the seasons,...