How Did Judah Fall to Babylon? (11 of 15)

Judah watched the northern kingdom deported and lasted another hundred and thirty-six years.

It produced a genuine reform under a good king, and fell anyway, and the prophets of that final century are the ones who had to explain why.

What Happened When Sennacherib Invaded?

Jerusalem was delivered, and the deliverance may have been the problem.

2 Kgs 18-19. Assyria takes the fortified cities of Judah and besieges Jerusalem. The field commander stands outside the wall and addresses the people in Hebrew, deliberately, over the heads of their officials, telling them no god of any nation has delivered its people.

Hezekiah takes the letter into the temple and spreads it before the Lord. Isaiah delivers the answer, and the Assyrian army withdraws after catastrophic losses in the camp.

Sennacherib’s own prisms record that Hezekiah did not submit to his yoke and that he made him a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage. They itemise the tribute: thirty talents of gold, eight hundred of silver, and more besides.

Read the two accounts together and the divergence is precise. The prisms line up closely with 2 Kgs 18:13-16, which has Hezekiah paying tribute. They say nothing corresponding to 2 Kgs 19 and Isa 37, where the army is struck down.

But notice what Sennacherib does not claim. He besieged the city. He does not say he took it, and he does not say he killed Hezekiah, which for a king cataloguing his own victories is a conspicuous omission.

The deliverance became a theological problem. A century later Jeremiah is facing people who believe Jerusalem cannot fall because it did not fall, and he has to argue against a miracle they remembered correctly.

What Was Josiah’s Reform?

The last serious attempt, triggered by finding a book nobody knew was there.

2 Kgs 22-23. During repairs to the temple, the high priest finds a Torah scroll. Scholars generally identify it as containing the core of Deuteronomy, which fits the reform that follows, since the measures Josiah takes track that book closely.

It is read to Josiah and he tears his robes.

Read the implication. The scroll had been lost inside the temple, in the building dedicated to the God whose law it was, and its contents were sufficiently unfamiliar that hearing them was a shock.

The reform that follows is thorough. High places destroyed, the Asherah pole burned, the vessels for Baal removed, mediums and household gods purged, and the Passover kept as it had not been kept since the days of the judges.

And then 2 Kgs 23:26 says that in spite of all this the Lord did not turn from the heat of his anger, because of what Manasseh had done.

A genuine reform, and the verdict is that it came too late to change the outcome. Josiah dies at Megiddo and the last four kings are a rapid decline.

What Did Jeremiah Preach?

Surrender, and it made him a traitor in his own city.

He is called as a youth and objects that he does not know how to speak. His ministry runs about forty years, through the reigns of the final kings, and nobody listens.

The message that made him hated is that Babylon is God’s instrument, that resistance is futile, and that those who surrender will live. He tells them to settle in exile, build houses, plant gardens, and seek the welfare of the city where they are sent, because it will be seventy years.

He is put in the stocks, thrown into a cistern, accused of desertion, and imprisoned. The scroll he dictates is cut up and burned by the king a column at a time, and he dictates it again.

The temple sermon in Jer 7 attacks the confidence directly. They chant the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, and he tells them to go to Shiloh and see what happened to the place God’s name was first, and asks whether the house that bears his name has become a den of robbers.

Jesus quotes that phrase in the temple six centuries later.

What Is the New Covenant Passage?

Jer 31:31-34, and it is the high point of the book.

The days are coming when God will make a new covenant with Israel and Judah, not like the one made when he took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, which they broke.

The terms are different. The law written on hearts rather than tablets. Everyone knowing the Lord from the least to the greatest, with no need to teach one another. And their wickedness forgiven and their sins remembered no more.

That passage is quoted at length in Hebrews and it is the language Jesus uses over the cup at the Last Supper.

The most hopeful thing in the prophets was written by the man arguing that the city was going to burn.

What Did the Minor Prophets of This Period Say?

Three short books, three very different angles.

Nahum announces the fall of Nineveh. Read beside Jonah, where the same city repented and was spared, it is the second half of a story: mercy given, and a century later the account settled.

Zephaniah is the day of the Lord, and it is bleak until it turns. The last chapter has God rejoicing over his people with singing, which is one of the most unexpected images in the prophets.

Habakkuk is the one that asks the question directly. Why does God tolerate wrongdoing among his own people, and then, worse, how can he use a nation more wicked than Judah as the instrument of judgment.

He gets no clean answer. He gets Hab 2:4, the righteous will live by his faith, which Paul quotes twice and Hebrews once. And the book ends with the declaration that though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes and the fields produce no food, yet he will rejoice in the Lord.

Obadiah, the shortest book in the Old Testament, is against Edom for standing aloof and profiting while Jerusalem fell.

How Did Jerusalem Fall?

In stages, over roughly twenty years, with three deportations.

There may have been a fourth stage as well. After the assassination of Gedaliah, Nebuchadnezzar appears to have sent forces to restore order and remove suspected rebels, and a figure of 745 deportees is attached to it.

The first, around 605, takes members of the nobility including Daniel and his companions.

The second, in 597, takes King Jehoiachin, the leading citizens, the craftsmen, and Ezekiel, along with treasure from the temple.

The third, in 586, is the end. Zedekiah rebels, the siege lasts about eighteen months, famine reaches the point described in Lamentations, and the walls are breached. Zedekiah is captured, his sons are killed in front of him, and then he is blinded, so that the last thing he saw was his sons dying.

The temple is burned. The walls are broken down. The bronze pillars are cut up and carried off.

Four hundred years after Solomon dedicated it, the building was gone, and with it the assumption that the presence of the temple guaranteed the survival of the city.

What Is Lamentations?

Five poems written by someone standing in the ruins.

Four of the five are acrostics, running through the Hebrew alphabet, which imposes formal order on material that is otherwise pure grief. The discipline of the form against the content is the point.

It does not resolve. It describes the streets, the hunger, the mothers, the priests and elders who found no food, and it says these things plainly.

And in the exact centre, in the third poem, comes the turn: because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, his compassions never fail, they are new every morning, great is your faithfulness.

Those verses are sung constantly and almost always without the book around them. In place, they are spoken by a man looking at a destroyed city, and they are stronger for it.

Part of a series following the Old Testament timeline.

Footnotes2

1. That the Book of the Law was lost inside the temple is the single most damning detail in the account of Judah's decline. The building was operating, the priesthood was functioning, and the document the whole arrangement existed to serve had gone missing in it.
2. Jeremiah's temple sermon and the deliverance under Hezekiah belong together. A real act of God, correctly remembered, had hardened into a guarantee, and a prophet had to spend his career arguing against the wrong conclusion drawn from a true event.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: 2 Kgs 18-25, Jer 1, 7, 29, 31:31-34, 36, 38, Lam 3:22-23, Nahum, Zeph 3:17, Hab 1-3, and Obadiah.

Assyrian royal inscriptions describing Sennacherib's campaign against Hezekiah. Cited as the external record of the campaign.

Robert R. Cargill, The Cities That Built the Bible (HarperOne, 2016), 62-64. Supports the contents of Sennacherib's prisms, their alignment with 2 Kgs 18:13-16, and the account of Jeremiah confronting the inviolability theology.

Rolf A. Jacobson and Michael J. Chan, Introducing the Old Testament (Baker Academic, 2023), 447-448. Supports the identification of Josiah's scroll with the core of Deuteronomy and the sequence of the deportations.

Charles H. Dyer, "Jeremiah," in The Bible Knowledge Commentary (Victor Books, 1985), 1:1205-1206. Supports the possible fourth deportation following the assassination of Gedaliah.

Where the sourcing stops: the traditional attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah is early but not stated in the book itself. The exact dates and sizes of the three deportations vary slightly between the accounts in Kings, Jeremiah, and Daniel, and reconstructions differ.