Fall of Jerusalem (586 BC)

Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar in 588 BC. The Babylonian army marched south, burned the fortified cities of the Shephelah (the Lachish Letters preserve dispatches from this exact moment), and laid siege to Jerusalem on 10 Tebet (January) 588. The siege lasted eighteen months. Famine grew so severe inside the walls that "the hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children" (Lam 4:10). On 9 Tammuz (July) 586 BC the wall was breached. Zedekiah fled by night and was captured near Jericho; his sons were killed before his eyes, his eyes were put out, and he was carried in bronze chains to Babylon (2 Kgs 25:7). A month later, on the seventh of Ab, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard burned the Temple, the palace, and every great house, broke down the city walls, and deported all but the poorest of the people. Solomon’s Temple, which had stood 380 years, was gone. Jeremiah, who had warned of this disaster for forty years (Jer 25:1–11), wrote the book of Lamentations over the smoking ruin. The seventy-year exile he had also foretold (Jer 25:11; 29:10) ran until Cyrus’s decree in 538 BC. Ezekiel, deported in 597, received the news of the fall in his fifth year (Ezek 33:21).