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Notes -
They are extraordinary because of the degree of disaster they were able to absorb (there was arguably an element of luck imo: a lot of the same theological beliefs existed in the Northern Kingdom yet it never arose again, despite being stronger and richer, because the Assyrians were more thorough/there was no Cyrus/the groundwork hadn't been laid after watching another Israelite kingdom get wrecked).
They are not extraordinary in the sense of providing apologia for disaster. That is not really unique to these religions, it's moreso that their apologia survived and proliferated for other reasons (e.g. bookishness of the religion, likely as a response to being physically uprooted, monotheistic intolerance).
For example: we have the Mesha Stele which directly parallels the general Deuteronomistic view of geopolitics: "it's not that our God abandoned us or was powerless (as our enemies always say when they break the idols and temples), we were bad so he was mad at us and punished us. But I'm the good King so he rewarded me!". "Directly parallels" is honestly light: it's basically identical. Yahweh directly takes credit for the empires attacking Israel and the apologia around Josiah is similarly about a supposedly honorable king restoring Israel. Until that failed and then we got another story.
Which is why I retracted the "just" qualifier. But I still think "religious life continued" - given how I've explained my meaning- is a fair statement of the situation and I think it's fair to say that this doesn't apply in the same way to our world as it did to the world of soon-to-be late antiquity.
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