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Zedekiah Flees Jerusalem
2 Kings 24:18–25:30
The King of Judah ignores the prophet Jeremiah’s advice with disastrous consequences
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Where Are We?
We are standing inside an enormous cavern beneath the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Caves are an integral part of the limestone landscape in Israel. Subtly tucked away within mountains and beneath cities, for millennia caves have been used as hideaways, secret storage caches, and clandestine getaway corridors. Some scholars have suggested that this cave served King Solomon as far back as the tenth century BCE as a stone source for his building projects in Jerusalem (hence the name “King Solomon’s Quarries”). Hundreds of years later this cave was identified as the escape route of King Zedekiah as he fled Jerusalem. 2 Kings 25:4 relates that the king and his army were able to sneak out by night even though the city was surrounded by Babylonian soldiers. The legend says that Zedekiah and his men used this cave, an underground passageway unknown to the enemy, to reach the eastern desert.
This tradition can also be found in Rashi’s commentary on Ezekiel 12:13. He explains in his exegesis of the text of Zedekiah’s escape that as the king fled through the cave, a deer accompanied him above ground. The Chaldean soldiers chased the deer all the way to Jericho and thus intercepted Zedekiah as he emerged from the cave’s opening.
Fig. 19. Zedekiah’s Cave, Jerusalem
Although no unequivocal evidence exists to link this cave to Zedekiah, the ancients were captivated by the sheer magnitude of this invisible space and its irresistible link to Zedekiah. The tradition lives on until today.
Setting the Scene
Zedekiah’s Cave is the largest man-made cave in Israel. It covers an area underneath the Muslim Quarter of nine thousand square meters (over two acres) and rises to a height of five meters, or forty-eight feet (the same as a four-story building). The roof of the cave, up to the buildings of the Old City, is about ten meters (thirty-two feet) thick. The cave was an ancient quarry used for centuries by the builders of Jerusalem, who gradually enlarged it as they removed more and more rock. Its underground location away from the elements, the fine quality of its stone, and the cave’s proximity to the major construction sites of the Old City made it an ideal source for raw building materials.
However, it seems likely that Jerusalemites began quarrying here only in the late Second Temple period, first century BCE–70 CE. The quarry was used, on and off, until the early twentieth century, although it was probably sealed off by the Turks in the mid-sixteenth century against invaders. The cave was rediscovered entirely by accident in 1854 by the American Bible scholar James Barkley while he was walking his dog outside the Old City walls.
The Context
Two parallel dramas have been unfolding since the last time Jerusalem was attacked under Hezekiah in 701 BCE. On the international scene a major upheaval had been under way. The Assyrians, who ruled the ancient Middle East with an iron fist from the mid-ninth century BCE, were finally vanquished in 609 BCE by the Babylonians. Subsequently, a struggle ensued between the Babylonians and the Egyptians over control of the lands north of Egypt, including the kingdom of Judah and the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. Little Judah was caught between the two warring powers.
But in 605 the Egyptians were defeated by the Babylonians at Carchemish, and King Nebuchadnezzar (aka Nebuchadrezzar) took control of Judah. He arrived in the region and forced King Jehoiakim to submit to him. Jehoiakim probably hoped that Egypt would regain control. At subsequent key moments of Babylonian weakness, when revolts broke out in other areas of the empire, the Egyptians encouraged Judah to break free, although they ultimately did not provide the necessary support. In Babylon Jerusalem earned notoriety as a hotbed of resistance, and the king of Judah was branded a troublemaker. In 597 Nebuchadnezzar marched on Jerusalem to crush a revolt led by King Jehoiakim, who died or was murdered just as they arrived. Jehoiachin, his son and successor, immediately surrendered, but the Babylonians decided to teach the Judaeans a lesson. They took the young king prisoner and rounded up the strongest elements of the population—nobility, army, craftsmen, and the educated—and deported them all to Babylon, where they couldn’t cause any trouble. They then appointed Zedekiah, Jehoiachin’s uncle, king over the economically and militarily hobbled Judah, assuming he would be loyal to them (2 Kings 24:8–17).
From a covenantal perspective, all was not well in Judah. Although in Hezekiah’s day, the late eighth century, the Israelite God was worshipped and he instituted some religious reforms, according to the Deuteronomist (2 Kings 21:1–18) his son Manasseh, who ruled for fifty-five years, turned the wheel back to one of the darkest ages Israel had ever known. He worshipped pagan gods and raised altars to them in the temple of the Lord. He practiced black magic and consulted spirits and witches. He massacred innocent citizens and instituted child sacrifice, offering his own son in the cultic fire (v. 6). He and his subjects broke virtually every covenantal rule. Following a two-year reign by Amon, he was succeeded by Josiah, one of the most righteous of the Judaean kings. Josiah attempted to clean up the mess and institute major reforms, but the damage was done. In following Manasseh and his ilk the Judaeans had proven over and over again their complete disregard for the code of behavior to which they had committed. God was furious and vowed to destroy them, thundering, “I am going to bring such a disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that both ears of everyone who hears about it will tingle. . . . I will wipe Jerusalem clean as one wipes a dish and turns it upside down. And I will cast off the remnant of My own people and deliver them into the hands of their enemies” (vv. 12–14).
Amid the downward spiral of depravity and the impending doom, one voice rose above the chaos and urged a change of direction in Jerusalem. The prophet Jeremiah instructed the people that the only way to ensure their survival was to change their evil ways and to accept the inevitability of Babylonian subjugation. He repeated this message over and over, to kings Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah. Not surprisingly, no one listened.
The King’s True Colors
The account from 2 Kings 25 doesn’t reveal much about Zedekiah the man, other than that he (and his army) fled the city in a panic and was corralled not far from Jerusalem by the Babylonians. A king on the run is not an encouraging sight. Suspicions about his character raised by this compromising behavior are confirmed by reading about him in the book of Jeremiah, where a more three-dimensional portrait of him emerges, and it’s not pretty. In a series of encounters between the king and the prophet, Zedekiah shows his true colors, and he’s a wimp.
In the first encounter Zedekiah had recently been crowned king and was surrounded by a second-rate cadre of belligerent advisors. Jeremiah was a salty old prophet well known around Jerusalem for saying what no one wanted to hear. On the counsel of his officials, the new king publically treated Jeremiah as persona non grata and ignored all his advice. But when no one was looking, Zedekiah sent an emissary with a message to the prophet, asking him, nonetheless, to put in a good word for him with the Lord (Jer. 21:1–2). It seems the king was either extremely wishy-washy or simply too weak to publicly articulate his admiration of the prophet.
Shortly afterward Jeremiah was arrested by the king’s officials as he attempted to leave the city. Fed up with being harassed by the prophet, they accused him of treason, beat the living daylights out of him, and tossed him into the dungeon, hoping to silence him once and for all. But after a time Zedekiah sent for him, unbeknown to anyone. He queried the prophet, “Is there any word from the Lord?” (Jer. 37:12–17). Although still incapable of standing behind Jeremiah’s predictions, Zedekiah ordered an improvement in his conditions and moved him to a prominent location where he could continue to petition people (Jer. 37:20–21).
When the king’s officials heard Jeremiah’s same old broken record playing, they were incensed. They charged him with demoralizing the soldiers and the populace. They sentenced him to death and threw him into a muddy pit to die. Although Zedekiah respected and admired the prophet, he made no motion to intervene. Instead, he told the angry cohort, “He is in your hands, the king cannot oppose you in anything.” Luckily for Jeremiah, a servant in the palace came to his aid and asked the king to rescue him—and he did (Jer. 38:1–13).
In each of these encounters Zedekiah stands out as a weak, indecisive man, a puppet easily manipulated by his powerful advisors. In truth he’s pathetic. Yet his spinelessness is almost treated with understanding by the biblical author. In this drama the king isn’t the principle villain—he’s just part of the scenery. Instead, the main protagonist is the entire people of the Judaean kingdom, together with their kings, who are all guilty of terrible sins and wickedness. The hero is Jeremiah, but despised and rejected, he failed miserably in his undying attempts to convince people to change.
The Mouse That Roared
The Babylonians, who had inherited the Assyrian empire, had proven that their wrath was harsh. They invaded Jerusalem, tortured the king, deported most of the population of Judah, and razed the city to the ground. The biblical text is rife with powerful images of wanton destruction: the twenty-seven-feet-high pillars of the temple dismantled and pillaged for the king by hoards of soldiers; the murder of Zedekiah’s children before his eyes and his blinding; the wholesale execution of the remaining leadership. The Babylonians were clear—they would not tolerate any more rebellious kings. Before returning home they appointed the pro-Babylon, capable, but non-Davidic Gedaliah son of Ahikam to remain in Benjamin, north of Jerusalem and govern the last remnants of the population wisely. Almost predictably a faction led by a Davidic descendent revolted against Babylonian interference by assassinating him, a move that cost them their last remaining semblance of national identity (2 Kings 25:22–26).
Why did the tiny, insignificant kingdom of Judah insist on confronting the monster head on, again and again, when all the odds were against it?
This stubborn refusal to acknowledge an imminent catastrophe can perhaps be explained by the iconic Israeli expression “imprisoned in the conception.” This turn of phrase comes to us from the most traumatic of all modern Israel’s military conflicts, the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Six years earlier in 1967, Israel had brilliantly defeated three very well-equipped Arab armies in a mere six days, capturing vast territories from each of them. The enemies that at first appeared to pose an existential threat to the young state turned out to be fumbling, inept armies that quickly capitulated to what turned out to be mighty Israel. Riding the wave of victory and awash in hubris, in the years following the 1967 war the Israeli military establishment was arrogantly confident that it had nothing to worry about. It was so “imprisoned in the conception” that when signs began to appear that Egypt and Syria were planning to attack it was blind to them. When the war broke out on Yom Kippur in 1973, the Israeli army was painfully unprepared thanks to the shocking inability of the military and the elected leadership to think outside the box. The result was over 2,600 casualties and a deep crisis of trust between the Israelis and their leadership that has yet to pass.
The Judaeans of 586 BCE were also imprisoned in a conception formulated on a previous military victory. One hundred fifteen years earlier the kingdom of Judah was devastated and the city of Jerusalem besieged by the Assyrians in what looked to be inevitable annihilation. However, against all odds, one morning the Assyrian army packed up and retreated back to Nineveh, and Jerusalem was saved. Years later this deliverance was understood as uncontestable evidence of God’s power and his promise to safeguard the city forever. The Judaeans facing the Babylonian menace were convinced that Jerusalem could never, ever be vanquished by an enemy. This belief was bolstered by a potent religious-nationalist fanaticism that probably ran very deeply in Jerusalem in the final years of the kingdom. Religious zealotry heavily influenced people’s conviction that God would not abandon them, and this zeitgeist ultimately overrode more pragmatic considerations.
The Prophet Pariah
Jeremiah understood this skewed perception and spoke out in no uncertain terms. “Don’t put your trust in illusions and say, “The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord are these [buildings]” (Jer. 7:4). In fact, Jeremiah had a dual message for the people of Jerusalem. The first point was the absolute futility of challenging the Babylonians. Jeremiah is sometimes referred to as the first pacifist, but more than an antiwar activist he was a pragmatist. His outlook was based not on the surprising delivery of Jerusalem in 701BCE but rather on the obliteration of Samaria twenty years earlier when the northern tribes of Israel attempted to overcome the Assyrians. The Samaritan rebellion of 722 marked the demise of the northern kingdom of Israel. With this painful precedent in mind, Jeremiah posited that the Judaeans hadn’t a ghost of a chance to defeat the Babylonians. As detestable as they were, it was infinitely wiser to submit to them and to live, rather than to die in vain. No gimmick was too over-the-top to challenge the palace prophets who predicted far rosier scenarios. To drive his exhaustingly argued point home, when a conclave of six nations was conferring in Jerusalem about a cooperative rebellion against Babylon, Jeremiah showed up at Zedekiah’s court with a wooden yoke affixed to his neck, pronouncing, “Put your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon; serve him and his people, and live!” (Jer. 27:12).
Jeremiah’s second message aimed straight for the heart of Judaean society. He continually castigated his contemporaries for their utter abandonment of the covenant that they had entered into at Mount Sinai. This betrayal was twofold; not only were they guilty of worshipping other deities, but they had turned their backs on the revolutionary moral code articulated in the Ten Commandments. In God’s name Jeremiah asked them, “Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely, and sacrifice to Baal, and follow other gods whom you have not experienced, and then come and stand before Me in this House which bears My name and say, ‘We are safe?’” (Jer. 7:9–10).
In a letter he wrote to the Judaeans who had been deported to Babylon, Jeremiah fostered no illusions of hope for an imminent return. He beseeched people to settle in for a long spell of exile: “Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease” (Jer. 29:5–6).
Jeremiah was a relentless, hounding critic, despised and rejected. One of his few friends was the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, who faithfully recorded his messages. In the forty-five years he was active as a prophet, few came over to his side. Ultimately, his terrible predictions came true. Egypt was defeated, and Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple and the city of Jerusalem. The people of Judah were banished from their homeland and sent to Babylon. Jeremiah himself was forced into exile following the murder of Gedaliah, abducted to Egypt by fleeing refugees. He continued to preach his message and eventually died there, far from Jerusalem. Yet despite the horrors he had witnessed throughout his life, Jeremiah remained a man of faith, believing that God’s punishment was an act of justice on a sinful nation. He trusted that better days would return, even though he never lived to see them.
In recounting their calamities, the exiles in Babylon acknowledged that all Jeremiah had foretold had come to pass, a realization that prompted some serious soul searching. The destruction of the temple and Jerusalem was a powerful object lesson to the Judaeans, who finally sat up and took stock of their errors. They noted that while Jeremiah prophesied violent ruin, he also revealed a light at the end of the tunnel. Inherent in his message was the possibility of change. No one is a hopeless case—everyone gets a second chance.
Jeremiah’s message was, in our terms: Jews, get cracking. Each morning when you wake up in exile, look in the mirror and ask yourselves: “How did we get here? Were we faithful to the agreement we signed? Is this where we want to be?” Then sit down at your desks and start studying the Torah. Read, memorize, analyze, deconstruct, and debate those laws from every possible angle. Internalize them so deeply that the Jewish people will never stray from the path again. Then one day soon, we will return to Jerusalem.
Postscript: Remains of the Day
Fascinating evidence for the Babylonian destruction of Judah has been unearthed in a number of places in Israel. At Tel Lachish, a sizable city from the sixth century BCE southwest of Jerusalem, a cachet of missives known as the Lachish letters was found among the burned layer corresponding to the Babylonian invasion. Written on broken pieces of pottery, the letters record the correspondence of a Judaean military officer and his subordinate in the city of Azekah, another important stronghold not far away. They were probably written shortly before Lachish fell around 588/586 BCE, during the reign of Zedekiah (Jer. 34:7). The most intriguing letter mentions the daily search for a signal fire from Azekah, indicating the city was still holding out against the enemy. When the fire at Azekah was no longer visible, the soldiers at Lachish understood that the city had fallen and the Babylonians were closing in.
Archaeological excavations at Area G in the City of David have revealed some additional fascinating evidence dating to the time of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. In a building that seems to have served as a public archive, a collection of close to fifty clay stamps, or bullae, were found. When Nebuchadnezzar burned the city, the documents written on papyrus and stored in the archive were incinerated, but the bullae that sealed them were baked at high temperatures and preserved for posterity. Many of the inscriptions on the bullae were beautifully legible and included individuals’ names. Archaeologists were thrilled to discover that among those names was someone mentioned specifically in the book of Jeremiah: the scribe Gemaryahu ben Shafan (Jer. 36:10). Subsequent excavations in the City of David yielded three more bullae with biblical signatures: Jucal ben Shelamiah and Gedaliah Pashtur, two of the ministers responsible for Jeremiah’s arrest (Jer. 38:1), and Azaryahu ben Hilkiyahu, a member of a priestly family mentioned in 1 Chronicles 9:10.
Also, a small annex off one of the homes in Area G contained a square-cut block of stone with a round hole in its middle, resting over a lime-covered cesspit—in other words, a 2,700-year-old toilet. Utilizing fascinating new disciplines that combine archaeology with the study of ancient pollen and parasites (both of which are extremely durable), scientists analyzed the fecal matter excavated from the cesspit in an attempt to discover what was going on in the intestines of sixth-century BCE Jerusalemites during the twenty months of the Babylonian siege.
Based on the kinds of pollen present, it appears that their diet was hopelessly meager—mostly salad greens and herbs, with virtually no grains or legumes, which means the besieged residents were probably gathering wild plants from the hillsides within the city walls. An abundance of tapeworm eggs and whipworms means that the little meat they ate was not properly cooked and that sanitary conditions were poor—there probably wasn’t much water to clean their hands with, and they may have eaten unwashed produce from gardens fertilized with human waste. 2 Kings 25:3 tells us that “by the ninth day (of the fourth month) the famine had become acute in the city; there was no food left for the common people.” Judging from the remains beneath a fancy toilet that hearkened back to better days, on the eve of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem its residents were clearly on the brink of starvation.