However, the new ethic did not achieve the status of law until the exile, and even then it did not totally supplant the old one. It was at this time that the proto-Jews probably sought to distance themselves from the perceived sins of their ancestors. Perhaps the inevitable injustices of exile prompted this ethical recalibration. It is the kind of ethic we could expect of an exiled population, especially of those born in exile, which as a mass could no longer abide an ethic that doomed them for circumstances they had had no part in and that earlier had been so casually applied against the individual, the minority, and the outsider. However, old religious notions rarely die overnight.
Tradition alone has a tendency to keep things in play long after their day.
Because the older ethic had long been in place, it could not help but crop up in ancient tales or the historian's older source materials. It also appears that some had already accredited this traditional value to Moses and, therefore, it showed up in various legal commentaries. Even as late as the exile, the severity of the old ethic undoubtedly helped to explain national disaster. Whether because of the lingering strength of the old ethic or the newness of the higher ethic, even the late historian could not break totally free of the old morality. Interestingly, Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in the third generation after Manasseh, and the initial defeat during the reign of Jehoiachin represented a fourth generation disaster along a different genealogical branch.