The deportation of a small but articulate group of the citizens of Judah to Babylon during the early years of the sixth century BCE may be regarded as an essential element in the birth of Judaism, in distinction from the ethnic religion of previous generations, for the traditional parameters of religious experience were suddenly removed. The state cult of Yahweh found itself bereft of those institutional supports of which it was itself the legitimization. Indeed, the destruction of the state might itself have been regarded as precisely evidence that the real condition of the nation was no longer legitimate, as was recognized by at least one redactional strand within the Deuteronomistic History. The power of Yahweh was not in question: what was open to doubt was his continued interest in his people. This is how the situation might be assessed from a theological perspective. From an anthropological one, both propositions might be regarded as true, since the effect was that the deportees must have undergone an identity crisis, the national deity being the natural focus of the society's symbolic structures of national and individual identity. R.W. Klein observed that ‘almost all the old symbol systems had been rendered useless (by the exile). Almost all the old institutions no longer functioned’ (Klein 1979: 5). The point Klein is making here is worth elaborating, as it provides an explanation of some of the innovations or transformations in ritual and social behaviour in the exilic age.