Fall of Jerusalem

What Happened

For roughly eighteen months the Babylonian army besieged Jerusalem, and inside the walls the food ran out slowly — first the markets, then the storehouses, then the last hidden jars. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had come because Zedekiah had broken his word. Years earlier Babylon had taken Jerusalem once already, carried off its young king and its treasures, and set Zedekiah on the throne as a vassal who was meant to stay loyal. Instead he looked to Egypt for help, and he refused the word of the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, who told him plainly that resistance was fatal both to himself and to the city. Yet he continued in rebellion, and so the army came back.

The Babylonians built earthworks against the walls and settled in to wait. For a while there was hope, because Pharaoh's army marched out of Egypt on its way to help Zedekiah. When the Babylonians learned of it, they lifted the siege for a time to go and deal with the Egyptians first, and the city breathed. But the Egyptians retreated, and the army returned and resumed the siege. By the summer of that year the famine inside the city had grown so severe that when the walls were finally broken, it came as a strange relief to the people trapped within them.

The walls of Jerusalem were breached in the fourth month, in the eleventh year of Zedekiah's reign; the year was 586 BC. The Babylonian soldiers poured into the city, and Zedekiah ran for his life, slipping out by night through a small rear gate toward the Jordan valley. He did not get far. The Babylonians caught him on the plains near Jericho and brought him back to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah, and there they killed his sons in front of him. That was the last thing his eyes ever saw, for they put out his eyes next and led him to Babylon in chains, where he remained in prison until the day of his death. The prophet Ezekiel had said years before that this king would be carried to Babylon and yet would not see it.

¹³My net also will I spread upon him, and he shall be taken in my snare: and I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there.

Ezekiel 12:13·KJV

A month later the destruction proper began. Nebuzaradan, the captain of Nebuchadnezzar's guard, came to the city with orders to raze it to the ground. He burned the Temple that Solomon had built — the house of God, the center of the whole nation's religious life — and he burned the king's palace and the great houses. His men then tore down the walls of Jerusalem stone by stone, until the city that had stood for four centuries as the capital of the nation God himself had planted was reduced to rubble and ash. The bronze and the gold of the Temple were carried off, and most of the survivors were marched to Babylon. Only the poorest were left behind to tend the vineyards, and a governor named Gedaliah was set over them.

Jeremiah, who had wept over this city for forty years and been imprisoned for saying it would fall, was found in the wreckage and treated with unexpected care, for Nebuchadnezzar had given orders that he not be harmed. He stayed among the poor of the land. Out of that ruin, tradition holds, came the five poems we call Lamentations, written by someone who had watched it unfold.

Why It Matters

To understand why this event sits at the theological center of the Old Testament, you have to understand what Jerusalem was. It was not merely a capital. It was the place where God had put his name — the city of David, the city of the Great King, the site of the Temple, the visible sign that the Lord dwelt among his people and kept covenant with them. As long as the Temple stood, the nation believed that God was with them no matter how they lived. The fall of Jerusalem broke that belief.

For centuries the prophets had warned that the covenant ran both ways. God had bound himself to Israel, and Israel had bound itself to God — to worship him alone, to do justice, to keep faith, and to make his name known throughout the whole earth. Generation after generation had turned instead to other gods and let injustice run, and generation after generation the prophets had said, in effect, that the Temple could not save a people who were not faithful to God. Judah did not believe them. False prophets promised that Jerusalem was untouchable, that God would never let his own house fall. In 586 BC God let it fall.

This is the hard center of the event: the destruction was not God's absence but God's judgment, the covenant discipline he had threatened for centuries finally came. Lamentations does not flinch from it. It sits in the ashes and says the suffering was deserved, that the people had broken faith and this was the cost. That honesty is what makes the book so unlike anything else in ancient literature, because it does not explain the grief away.

And yet the same grief holds onto hope, and that is the turn that makes the fall bearable to read. In the middle of the darkest of the five poems, the writer lifts his eyes:

²¹This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. ²²It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. ²³They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. ²⁴The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. ²⁵The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. ²⁶It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.

Lamentations 3:21–26·KJV

The judgment was real, but it was not the last word. God would not cast off forever. Jeremiah had already told the exiles that they would be in Babylon seventy years, and that afterward God would bring them home. The fall of Jerusalem was not the end of the nation.

Aftermath

The seventy years came, and then the return. When Persia overthrew Babylon, the exiles were allowed to go back, and they rebuilt — first an altar, then a second Temple, and at last, under Nehemiah, the walls. But the nation that came home was changed. It had learned, in the hardest school there is, that its God could not be presumed upon, that the Temple was a gift and not a guarantee, and that faith was a matter of the heart and not the building. The prophets of the exile — Ezekiel among the captives, and the voices that followed — began to speak of a new covenant written not on stone but on the heart, and of a shepherd-king who was still to come. The fall of Jerusalem, for all its horror, taught Israel to wait for something the first Temple had never given them.