Early in January in northern Canada the sun peeks above the horizon for the first time after six weeks of hiding. An important dawn for Canada. Imagine how the lives of people in the northern latitudes would be different if they got used to the darkness and never even expected that a dawn would ever lighten their horizon again.

The people to whom the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah witnessed and preached so long ago were a people whose hope for dawn had been all but extinguished. First the northern kingdom, Israel, had been conquered by Assyria and sent into exile in 721 B.C., and then the southern kingdom, Judah, was conquered by the Babylonians in 587 B.C., and exiled to Babylon, hundreds of miles to the east.

A generation of Jews then lived with waning hope of ever seeing their homeland agai…