7

Events Leading to the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.

Judah was desperate for a king who "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord" (2 Chron. 29:2). That need was fulfilled in Hezekiah, who reigned from 715 to 687 B.C. He kept the commandments and trusted in the Lord to a greater degree than had any other king during Jerusalem's three centuries as a political and spiritual capital. He ordered the Temple to be cleansed, appointed proper courses of priests and Levites, commanded that Israelites from Dan to Beersheba join in a grand Passover celebration once again, and decreed that they pay their tithes (see 2 Chron. 29-31). Hezekiah removed the high places and altars, broke down the images, and cut down the groves. He destroyed the bronze serpent that Moses had made in Sinai because the Judahites had been burning incense to it, thus perverting a symbol of the Messiah (see 2 Kgs. 18:4; 2 Chron. 31:1). Hezekiah also made plans to reunite all the tribes of the north and south, thus reasserting the claim of the house of David to rule over all the lands of Israel. 1 "And in every work that he began in the service of the house of God, and in the law, and in the commandments, to seek his God, he did it with all his heart, and prospered. And the Lord was with him; and he prospered whithersoever he went forth: and he rebelled against the king of Assyria, and served him not" (2 Chron. 31:21; 2 Kgs. 18:7).

A glance at Bible Map 10, which shows the extent of the mighty Assyrian Empire and the tiny tributary kingdom of Judah, is sufficient to convince anyone of the daring of Hezekiah in rebelling against Assyria. The map does not tell the whole story, however. With the death of Sargon in 705 B.C., cities up and down the coasts of Phoenicia and Canaan revolted against Assyria. Babylon also had a new and ambitious king. Egypt was ready to oppose Assyrian penetration. Hezekiah knew the time was right to break away from the Assyrian overlords, but he also realized that it was only a matter of time until the brutal armies of the empire would return to crush the rebellion.

Hezekiah's Preparations for War

Hezekiah began refortifying the city walls to prepare Jerusalem for the retaliatory invasion. A two-hundred-foot (sixty-five-meter) section of Hezekiah's wall has been uncovered in recent years in today's Jewish Quarter of the Old City. 2 The "broad wall," as it is called in Nehemiah 3:8 and 12:38, is twenty-five feet wide (seven meters), testimony of the serious fortification works of Jerusalem's king. As archaeologists cleared away the debris of centuries, they exposed to view houses that were destroyed along the course of Hezekiah's protective wall, just as Isaiah noted: "Ye have seen also the breaches of the city of David, that they are many: and ye gathered together the waters of the lower pool. And ye have numbered the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses have ye broken down to fortify the wall" (Isa. 22:9-10).

Hezekiah cut an underground tunnel to ensure a constant supply of water from the Gihon Spring into the city. Second Chronicles 32:30 says, "This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David." This refers to Hezekiah's famous water tunnel, which still exists today, twenty-seven hundred years later. An inscription discovered in 1880, twenty feet inside the south end of the tunnel, tells the story of how the two teams of workmen, one from each end, chiseled 1,748 feet (nearly one-third of a mile) through solid limestone and how they met in the middle. It is the longest biblical Hebrew inscription ever found in the Holy Land and the only monumental commemorative Hebrew text ever discovered on the west side of the Jordan. 3

With fortifications in place, Hezekiah and Judah awaited the Assyrian onslaught. 4 Sennacherib, King of Assyria, 705-681 B.C.

"Now in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them. And Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria to Lachish, saying, I have offended; return from me: that which thou puttest on me will I bear. And the king of Assyria appointed unto Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold" (2 Kgs. 18:13-14).

Another archaeological discovery that helps corroborate the Bible is King Sennacherib's record of the invasion called the Sennacherib Prism. 5 It confirms that Hezekiah did try to buy off the Assyrians, but the tribute imposed was eight hundred talents of silver and thirty of gold. According to 2 Kings 18:15-16, Hezekiah gathered together all the silver and gold in the Temple and in the king's house, even stripping off gold from Temple doors and pillars.

A contingent of Assyrian officials was sent to Jerusalem from Lachish, where Sennacherib was besieging Judah's strongest fortified position in the Shephelah, the region of low hills southwest of Jerusalem. 6 Of all the conquered cities and fortifications, Sennacherib must have been particularly proud of his siege of Lachish. When he returned to Nineveh he had his artisans carve thirteen panels at his palace—a magnificent battle panorama—depicting details of the siege of Lachish. It shows the battering rams used to penetrate the strong and heavily guarded walls of Lachish. The panorama also shows the fighting gear and apparel of Assyrians and Judahites and the barbaric methods the Assyrians used to kill their captives. These palace wall-reliefs were excavated in the mid 1800s in Nineveh and are now in the British Museum. 7 Excavations at Lachish reveal intense destruction in its thick layers of ash—Sennacherib's "calling card" at Lachish. 8

Sennacherib sent officers to Jerusalem to harass and threaten King Hezekiah and his people. The Assyrians "stood by the conduit of the upper pool, which is in the highway of the fuller's field"—in other words, across from the Gihon Spring—and taunted the citizens of Jerusalem in their own Hebrew language, warning them not to trust in Hezekiah or in the God of Israel or in the bruised reed of Egypt:

Let not Hezekiah deceive you: for he shall not be able to deliver you out of [the king of Assyria's] hand:

Neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, The Lord will surely deliver us, and this city shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria. . . .

Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered at all his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? . . .

Who are they among all the gods of the countries, that have delivered their country out of mine hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of mine hand? (2 Kgs. 18:29-30, 33, 35)

Sennacherib planned to remove systematically all opposition at Jerusalem's western approaches in the Shephelah and then advance on the political eagle nesting in the top of the hills. After heavy losses in the Shephelah, Jerusalem had no hope of standing up to Sennacherib's war machine.

King Hezekiah took a written message from Sennacherib up to the House of the Lord, and there, in the holy sanctuary, he spread the threatening letter before the Lord and prayed fervently (see 2 Kgs. 19:14-15; Isa. 37:14-15). In that very hour the voice of a lone man speaking for God was heard in the city, and word was sent to King Hezekiah, assuring him and his subjects that the place God had chosen to put His Name was still in His hands. The Assyrian blasphemers, Isaiah prophesied, would find only death and destruction for themselves if they came to Jerusalem:

Thus saith the Lord, Be not afraid of the words which thou hast heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me.

Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour, and shall return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land. . . .

Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria, He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow [here], nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it.

By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city, saith the Lord. (2 Kgs. 19:6-7, 32-33)

Miraculous Deliverance of Jerusalem

In 701 B.C. Sennacherib was poised to strike Jerusalem with full military might to reduce the rebels to humiliating submission. The following account of his view of the campaign is excerpted from the Sennacherib Prism:

As to Hezekiah, the Jew, he did not submit to my yoke. I laid siege to forty-six of his strong cities, walled forts and to the countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered [them] by means of well-stamped [earth-]ramps, and battering-rams brought [thus] near [to the walls] [combined with] the attack by foot soldiers, [using] mines, breeches as well as sapper work. I drove out [of them] 200,150 people, young and old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, big and small cattle beyond counting, and considered [them] booty. Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage. I surrounded him with earthwork in order to molest those who were leaving his city's gate. 9

Sennacherib's final statement is a boast that is historically untrue, as we learn from the biblical account. Isaiah had prophesied that the king would "not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow [here], nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank [a siege ramp] against it" (2 Kgs. 19:32).

Following is what actually did happen to Sennacherib and his hosts:

It came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning [those who were still alive], behold, they were all dead corpses.

So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh.

And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that . . . his sons smote him with the sword. (2 Kgs. 19:35-37)

The Greek historian Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ, suggested in his writings that mice caused the Assyrians to withdraw as some kind of plague swept through their camp. 10 That Sennacherib did return and dwell at Nineveh is confirmed in Assyrian annals, and that his sons later murdered him (twenty years later, in 681 B.C.) is also confirmed in Assyrian documents. Thus were the prophecies of Isaiah fulfilled. 11

The confrontation between Hezekiah and Sennacherib and the miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem made an indelible impression on the citizens of Judah. The episode has received further fame in a more modern day through the splendid poetry of Lord Byron in The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815). 12

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd
And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll'd not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

When Hezekiah was found to be deathly ill, he learned that the Lord intervenes not only in national crises but also in personal crises. The Lord granted good king Hezekiah another fifteen years to live (see 2 Kgs. 20; Isa. 39).

Another episode during this period should not go unmentioned. Hezekiah openly showed the treasures of the kingdom to a Babylonian delegation, which had undoubtedly come to Jerusalem with ulterior motives. Isaiah responded to Hezekiah's political naivete with a prophecy that the nation's treasures and some of the king's descendants would be carried away into Babylon, a prophecy that stood as a warning to Jerusalemites for the next century (see 2 Kgs. 20:12-18; Isa. 39).

During the reigns of the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon (681-669 B.C.) and his successor, Ashurbanipal, the empire was at its height, extending from Persia to Egypt. Esarhaddon destroyed the once-renowned Egyptian city of Memphis. And to the last strong Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (669-627 B.C.), is attributed the dubious honor of having sacked one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, Thebes in Upper Egypt, in 663 b.c13

Because of rivalry between the rulers of Assyria and Babylon, the Assyrian Empire rapidly deteriorated. Ashur, Nineveh, Calah, and Dur-Sharrukin all fell to the Neo-Babylonian Empire between 615 and 612 B.C.

Ironically, good King Hezekiah's son Manasseh (687-642) and his grandson Amon (642-640) were two of the worst kings Judah had ever seen. Manasseh, who reigned longest of all Judah's kings, introduced shockingly sacrilegious and profane practices into the Holy City: he set up altars to Baal and an asherah (a fertility-cult goddess) for worship in the court of the Temple of Jehovah. Manasseh led the people in worshipping the "host of heaven," sacrificing children, engaging in Satanic spiritualism, and murdering innocent citizens who refused to participate in such perversions. By God's own judgment Manasseh was characterized as worse than all the peoples who had been removed from the land so the Israelites could inherit it (see 2 Kgs. 21:3-11). 13 Manasseh's son, Amon, followed in his father's footsteps, continuing the spiritual havoc in Jerusalem. Note the prophetic pronouncement of what those evils would bring upon Jerusalem: "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle . . . and I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down" (2 Kgs. 21:12-13).

Reforms of King Josiah

In the later part of the seventh century before Christ, the Assyrian Empire weakened rapidly because of internal agitation and pressures in its widespread conquered lands. With Assyrian disintegration Judah was able to expand—its last period of greatness—under King Josiah (640-609 B.C.). Josiah extended Jerusalem's control to former Israelite territories that had been for most of a century provinces of greater Assyria. He also instituted some rigorous religious reforms, as his great-grandfather, Hezekiah, had done (2 Kgs. 22:4-20). He made repairs in the Temple, during which a copy of the book of the Law was found. No direct record identifies the book, but many of the king's reforms parallel Deuteronomy 16:2; 18:10-11; 23:2-4, 7, 17-18, 21, 24; 31:11. The king and the priests read in the book of the Law the terrible curses that would follow such spiritual rebellion and apostasy as had persisted during the previous two generations. They knew that the Lord was angry with the nation of Judah. They asked a prophetess, a woman named Huldah (a contemporary of Jeremiah and Lehi), whether the curses would be forthcoming. Huldah's response was specific and foreboding:

Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants thereof, even all the words of the book which the king of Judah hath read:

Because they have forsaken me, and have burned incense unto other gods, that they might provoke me to anger with all the works of their hands; therefore my wrath shall be kindled against this place, and shall not be quenched.

But to the king of Judah . . . shall ye say to him, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, As touching the words which thou hast heard;

Because thine heart was tender, and thou hast humbled thyself before the Lord, when thou heardest what I spake against this place, and against the inhabitants thereof, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and hast rent thy clothes, and wept before me; I also have heard thee, saith the Lord.

Behold therefore, I will gather thee unto thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered into thy grave in peace; and thine eyes shall not see all the evil which I will bring upon this place. (2 Kgs. 22:16-20)

Josiah called a solemn assembly with priesthood leaders, prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem listening as he read the book of the covenant that had been found in the Temple. The king and all the people covenanted to keep the Lord's commandments. The king and priests burned all Baalistic objects in the Kidron Valley. The statue of the fertility goddess that had been in the House of the Lord was ground to powder. Josiah ousted all idolatrous priests and destroyed all shrines from Geba to Beersheba, the borders of Judah at that time (see Bible Map 9). He ordered the destruction of all "the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had builded for Ashtoreth" and other idol gods. The king also ordered wreckers to break down and burn the altar and high place that were still at Bethel from the days of Jeroboam (see 2 Kgs. 23:1-15).

Josiah's enlightened reign ended with his early death at Megiddo, where he had gone to stop the Egyptian advance under Pharaoh Nechoh, who was marching towards the Euphrates River to help the last Assyrian king against Babylon. Josiah apparently wanted to keep Egypt, Assyria's loyal ally to the end, from acquiring any control over Canaan. Because Nechoh was detained by Josiah at Megiddo, his efforts to assist Assyria were seriously impaired, and Assyria was defeated by the powerful new Babylonian ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, in 609 B.C. Falling back to his Egyptian homeland, Nechoh imposed Egyptian authority over Judah, from 609 to 605 B.C., before the Babylonian invasions of Judah. Josiah's death marked the beginning of the end for the kingdom of Judah.

The history of the Holy Land is essentially an account of the struggles between Mesopotamia and Egypt to control the land-bridge of the Near East. The contest between Babylon and Egypt at the end of the seventh century before Christ is a classic illustration of this historical axiom. During this struggle Judah was eventually annihilated. By the year 604 B.C. the entire Levant was the domain of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon: "And the king of Egypt came not again any more out of his land: for the king of Babylon had taken from the river of Egypt unto the river Euphrates all that pertained to the king of Egypt" (2 Kgs. 24:7).

The Babylonian Empire

The southern part of Mesopotamia was known in antiquity as Babylon or Chaldea. Its chief cities were Babylon (Hebrew, Babel, literally, "gate of God"), Ur, Erech (Uruk), and Nippur (see Bible Map 11). The city of Babylon was itself one of the wonders of the ancient world, with its ziggurat and many miles of hanging (terraced) gardens. Babylon was the imperial capital of the Babylonians and was later the imperial capital of the Persians and of Alexander of Macedonia.

The Babylonian Empire was mighty, but it was short-lived. Compared to its predecessor, Assyria, and its successor, Persia, each of which endured for more than two centuries, the new Babylonian Empire rose to greatness, left its heavy mark on ancient Near Eastern history, especially Jewish history, and then was swept into oblivion—all within seventy years. Babylon's strength and evil grandeur became proverbial in later scripture as a symbol of the wicked. She is called the apostate, the whore of all the earth, the mother of harlots (a foil to Zion, who represents the righteous). 14 Doctrine and Covenants 133:14 records the Lord's warning to the Latter-day Saints: "Go ye out from among the nations, even from Babylon, from the midst of wickedness, which is spiritual Babylon." And in our modern hymns we still sing of Babylon as the representative of darkness in the earth: "O Babylon, O Babylon, we bid thee farewell" and "Babylon the great is falling; God shall all her towers o'erthrow." 15

The Voice of Warning: Jeremiah, Lehi, and Others

Jeremiah had begun his ministry in Jerusalem more than twenty years before the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. 16 He was unpopular and was considered treasonous by some factions in the capital because he advocated acquiescence 17—surrender to the Babylonians, submit to exile, and make the most of a new but temporary home: build houses, plant gardens, marry, rear families, even pray for the peace of Babylon! (see Jer. 29:4-7)—all to preserve a remnant that would return to Jerusalem just a few decades later, as prophesied. 18

On one occasion Jeremiah stood in the court of the Temple warning that the Lord was going to make his House like Shiloh, and the city of Jerusalem desolate without an inhabitant (see Jer. 26:9). 19 "All the people were gathered against Jeremiah in the house of the Lord," intending to kill him (just as when Jesus later prophesied the destruction of the next Temple at the same place; the people tried to kill Jesus; see Matt. 24:1-2; John 8:20, 37-59). Certain elders of the people reminded the crowd to be careful what they did with Jeremiah—other prophets had also spoken in the name of the Lord and prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem; for example, Micah of Moresheth-gath in the days of Hezekiah, and a contemporary of Jeremiah, one Urijah of Kiriath-jearim (see Jer. 26:17-20).

Yet another prophet was in the city at the time, teaching the same things. Lehi warned of the impending destruction of Jerusalem, and he testified of the people's wickedness and of the coming of a Messiah. "When the Jews heard these things they were angry . . . and they also sought his life" (1 Ne. 1:20). 20

The Book of Mormon says, "There came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed" (1 Ne. 1:4). Amos taught that God would do nothing without first revealing it to his prophets (see Amos 3:7). The Lord always gives plenty of warning. The Book of Mormon's "many prophets" is true: Jeremiah, Lehi, Huldah, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Urijah were all contemporaries.

Lehi's sons Laman and Lemuel did not believe that Jerusalem could be destroyed (see 1 Ne. 2:13). There was no historical precedent for such a bold prophecy: Jerusalem had never been destroyed in all of Israelite history, and in fact, Jerusalem may have been regarded by some as inviolable; for example, at the time of Sennacherib's siege it had been miraculously preserved. 21 The prophets, on the other hand, knew that the City's inviolability was based on her spirituality. Judah's God had been patient and long-suffering and had given ample warning and sufficient time to repent. Even after Lehi fled Jerusalem to escape its imminent destruction, fourteen years transpired before Nebuchadnezzar's armies leveled the City and the Temple.

Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon

Emerging as victor at the Battle of Carchemish on the Euphrates, Nebuchadnezzar II (Nabu-kudurri-usur; 605-562 B.C.) solidified his dominions in the Levant. Josiah's son, Jehoahaz, had been made king in Jerusalem after his father's death in 609 B.C., but Pharaoh Nechoh had taken him away to Egypt and put his brother Eliakim on the throne. Eliakim's name was changed to Jehoiakim.

Nebuchadnezzar pursued the Assyrian policy of population deportation. There were three major deportations: in 605, 597, and 586 B.C. One might suppose that by the third invasion of Babylon's armies, somebody would have been believing the prophets.

In 605-604 B.C. the Babylonian warrior-king exiled some Jews from Jerusalem, including Daniel and his three friends. Jehoiakim reigned for eleven years, until 598-597 B.C., after which Nebuchadnezzar carried him away to Babylon or had him killed. Jehoiakim's son Jehoiachin was allowed to rule as a vassal or puppet king of the Babylonians. His reign lasted only three months, as Nebuchadnezzar summoned him to Babylon along with "ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths" (2 Kgs. 24:14), including Ezekiel. 22 He also carried away the Temple treasures (2 Kgs. 24:13). Jehoiachin's uncle Mattaniah began to reign, and Mattaniah's name was changed to Zedekiah. The first page of the Book of Mormon dates to the commencement of Zedekiah's reign. 23 Lehi and his family fled Jerusalem by way of the wilderness, possibly taking the old desert road southeast to En Gedi and then turning south for another 150 miles to the Red Sea and beyond. 24

Zedekiah reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem; in his ninth year the Babylonian armies returned to conduct the two-year siege that culminated in the utter destruction of the city. 25 Zedekiah was the last of the royal Davidic dynasty to reign in ancient Jerusalem.

And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he, and all his host, against Jerusalem, and pitched against it; and they built forts against it round about.

And the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king Zedekiah.

And on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine prevailed in the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land.

And the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled by night by the way of the gate between two walls, which is by the king's garden: (now the Chaldees were against the city round about:) and the king went the way toward the plain.

And the army of the Chaldees pursued after the king, and overtook him in the plains of Jericho: and all his army were scattered from him.

So they took the king, and brought him up to the king of Babylon to Riblah; and they gave judgment upon him.

And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass, and carried him to Babylon. (2 Kgs. 25:1-7) 26

We know from Jeremiah 34:7 that two fortified positions were the last to hold out against the armies of Babylon: "When the king of Babylon's army fought against Jerusalem, and against all the cities of Judah that were left, against Lachish, and against Azekah: for these defenced cities remained of the cities of Judah."

Archaeological discoveries corroborate the biblical record of the Babylonian sieges and the destruction of Jerusalem. Three specific discoveries will be mentioned here.

The Chronicle of Nebuchadnezzar II is a cuneiform inscription that mentions the siege of "the city of Judah" (Jerusalem) in 598-597 B.C., the displacement of Jehoiachin as king of Judah, and the appointment of Zedekiah to the throne (see 2 Kgs. 24:10-18). 27

The Lachish Ostraca were found by J. L. Starkey in the gateway guardroom at Tel ed-Duweir (biblical Lachish) in 1935. They are letters or drafts of letters communicating information between military commanders in Lachish and Jerusalem during the Judeo-Babylonian war before the fall of Jerusalem—written, therefore, about 588 B.C. 28 Lachish Letter 4 paints the same woeful picture as Jeremiah. One sentence from the letter reads: "And let [my lord] know that we are watching [over] the signals of Lachish, according to all the indications which my lord hath given, for we cannot see [the signals of] Azekah" 29—meaning that Azekah had fallen to the enemy. Only Lachish was left; then the Babylonians marched on Jerusalem. 30

The Babylonian armies camped on the hills overlooking Jerusalem. One principal camp was on the northern end of the Mount of Olives, also called Mount Scopus (which now includes the site of Brigham Young University's Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies). By surrounding the city, the Babylonians blocked efforts to resupply its citizens. The situation became extremely desperate when food storage was used up and starvation set in (see Jer. 37:21; 52:6; 2 Kgs. 25:3). The besieging armies systematically broke down the walls of Jerusalem, and Nebuchadnezzar's captain eventually "burnt the house of the Lord, and the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man's house burnt he with fire" (2 Kgs. 25:9; see also Jer. 52:13). Babylon thus earned undying opprobrium for having razed the nearly four-centuries-old Temple of God and leaving it in ruins. 31

Excavations in the City of David and in today's Jewish Quarter attest to the destruction in the 587-586 B.C. siege of Jerusalem: many arrowheads, a destroyed four-room house, a burnt room, and clay bullae (letter seals or stamps) 32 baked hard by a great conflagration that swept over the whole city. The bullae were found in what has come to be known as "the bullae house," which the excavator Yigal Shiloh speculated may have been an official administrative archive. 33 Inscribed on the bullae were fifty-one different names of scribes, court officials, and ministers, a high percentage of them with the theophoric suffix -yahu (Jehovah). Most of the names are known from the Bible and other inscriptions. One such name is Gemariah, son of Shaphan, likely the same man mentioned in Jeremiah 36, a sort of secretary of state in the court of Jehoiakim, king of Judah from 609 to 598 B.C. 34 Another seal mentions the scribe and friend of the prophet Jeremiah, Berechiah, son of Neriah. Berechiah is the long form of Baruch. This same Baruch ben Neriah served as scribe for Jeremiah and recorded his teachings, including predictions of the downfall of Judah and Jerusalem (see Jer. 36:10-25). 35

As late as 1962 the most widely used textbook on biblical archaeology lamented that "from Jerusalem no archaeological evidence of the Babylonian destruction has been recovered." 36 The excavations of Kathleen Kenyon and Yigal Shiloh make such a statement no longer true. There is now considerable physical evidence 37of the fulfillment of Lehi's and Jeremiah's prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem. 38 Numerous houses were destroyed in the Babylonian siege of the city. In or near one such four-room house, two Aramaic ostraca were found with the inscribed name Ahiel, possibly the owner of the house. 39 Other inscriptions found in excavations in the City of David are of interest in light of the Book of Mormon. Professor Shiloh reported finding three different sherds of local pottery inscribed with South Arabian names in the South Arabian script of ca. 600 B.C. According to Shiloh, "The discovery of such objects, in the Jerusalem of the eve of its destruction, is of particular importance in connection with the cultural ties between Judah and the Red Sea and South Arabia in this period." 40 Such finds support the authenticity of the story of Lehi's trek, for he, too, seems to have been acquainted with travel routes between Judah and the Red Sea, and South Arabia is the area to which he led his family, probably following the "Frankincense Trail" along the western edge of the Arabian peninsula. 41

Though Babylonians did carry out mass deportations, they did not follow the Assyrians' policy of transpopulation. Jews were forced away from their land, but nobody was brought in to settle it. The few remaining Jews, mostly poor, eked out a bare existence and paid tribute to their conquerors. The administrative center of the Babylonians was about seven miles north of Jerusalem, at Mizpah. Details of the political intrigue that ensued at Mizpah, the murder of the Babylonian governor, the release of Jeremiah from prison, the flight of many Jews to Egypt, and their forcing Jeremiah to accompany them are all recorded in Jeremiah 39 to 44.

The Great Exile

Both Israelite kingdoms had been destroyed and their people banished from the land of promise. The great Jehovah had desired from the days of Abraham and of Moses that his people would seek the Lord and live, keep his statutes, stay long upon the land, and make Jerusalem the City of Righteousness. "And the Lord God of their fathers sent to them by his messengers, rising up betimes, and sending; because he had compassion on his people, and on his dwelling place: but they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people, till there was no remedy" (2 Chron. 36:15-16; see also 1 Ne. 1).

The feelings of the exiles as they languished in the heart of Babylon are captured in Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. 42

Another Israelite psalmist described his people as a vine that the Lord planted in the vineyard of Israel, which flourished and expanded for a time and was then uprooted. The psalmist added a plea to the Lord of the vineyard to visit his vine and have mercy on it:

Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it.

Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land.

The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars.

She sent out her boughs unto the sea [Mediterranean], and her branches unto the river [the Jordan].

Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that all they which pass by the way do pluck her? The boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it.

Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine;

And the vineyard which thy right hand hath planted, and the branch that thou madest strong for thyself. (Ps. 80:8-15)

Unlike her predecessor—Melchizedek's Salem, which was taken up—Jerusalem was broken down and lay in ruins. Nevertheless, the Eternal City, with a divine foundation and with a divine destiny, was not to be left permanently in oblivion. A remnant would always return.

Notes

^1. Mazar, Mountain of the Lord, 54.

^2. Archaeologist Nahman Avigad unearthed the massive wall, which he believed encompassed the entire plateau of the Western Hill (see Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:755) and which is estimated to have stood more than twenty-five feet high. "Avigad reasoned that only a king could have ordered the building of so major a structure, and the fact that new housing had to be destroyed in the process indicates that the wall was erected during a crisis." Rosovsky, "Thousand Years of History in Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter," 26. Additional information and photos of the wall may be seen in Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem, 37, 46-49; New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations, 2:706; Bahat, Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem, 29; Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:756.

^3. Simons, Jerusalem in the Old Testament, 185. Read the biblical references to this amazing engineering feat of Hezekiah in 2 Kgs. 20:20 and 2 Chron. 32:2-4, 30. The inscription in the tunnel reads as follows in English translation: "This is the story of the boring through: while [the tunnelers swung] the pickax each towards his fellow, and while three cubits [yet remained] to be cut through, [there was heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellow, for there was a split [or fissure] in the rock on the right hand and on [the left]. And on the day of the boring through, the tunnelers struck through, each in the direction of his fellows, pickax against pickax. And the water started to flow from the spring to the pool for twelve hundred cubits; a hundred cubits was the height of the rock above the head of the tunnelers." (Cf. translation in Kenyon, Jerusalem, 70; Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 321; Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times, 210.) The Prophet Isaiah wrote: "You collected the waters of the lower pool. . . . You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool" (RSV Isa. 22:9, 11), indicating that Hezekiah had created a new pool for collecting the Gihon Spring water that flowed through his newly carved tunnel—and all within the newly built city walls. See Paton, Jerusalem in Bible Times, 105-6. Amiran said that Hezekiah's Tunnel is "properly considered to be the largest of the known ancient hydro-technical projects in [Israel]." Yadin, Jerusalem Revealed, 77. It has been estimated that the time it took to dig the tunnel, with workers laboring around the clock, twenty-four hours a day, was approximately seven to eight months. A photo of the inscription and more information on the tunnel may be found in Gill, "How They Met," 20-38, 64; New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations, 2:710-11; Ogden and Chadwick, Holy Land, 213-14. The original inscription is now in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, Turkey.

^4. See Aharoni and Avi-Yonah, Macmillan Bible Atlas, Map 152.

^5. Three original copies of the inscribed cylinder made in ancient Assyria have been found: one is in the British Museum in London, another in the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and the third in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. See Harker, Digging Up the Bible Lands, 41-44; Thompson, Bible and Archaeology, 150-51; Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times, 64-70 (all references include photographs).

^6. See Bible Map 9, C6; see also Aharoni and Avi-Yonah, Macmillan Bible Atlas, Map 154.

^7. See Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 427-35; Pritchard, Ancient Near East in Pictures, 371-74.

^8. Archaeologists working there have claimed that there is no other archaeological site in the Holy Land whose remains illustrate so accurately the records of the Old Testament. A detailed account of Sennacherib's siege of Lachish, with photographs and superb drawings, is contained in Conquest of Lachish by Sennacherib, a large volume by the head of the Lachish Expedition, Professor David Ussishkin.

^9. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 288; cf. Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times, 64-69.

^10. Herodotus, History 2.141.

^11. Scholars are often reluctant to attribute anything "miraculous" to the intervention of God himself. For example, Kathleen Kenyon, excavator of Jerusalem, explains that Jerusalem "was saved by a mixture of active defensive measures and diplomacy." Royal Cities of the Old Testament, 134. Mazar notes that "the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem was terminated abruptly (probably due to internal problems in Assyria), an event which was seen by the Judeans as a miraculous deliverance." Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 405.

^12. Norton Anthology of Poetry, 588-89.

^13. Ashurbanipal is also famous for his impressive library at Nineveh, the single most important source of Akkadian literature. He seems to have been one of the few literate kings of the ancient Near East—he could read his own texts. More than twenty-five thousand documents have been recovered, including the creation story called Enuma Elish and the Gilgamesh Epic, which preserves the tradition of the biblical Flood.

^14. Also 2 Chron. 33:2-9. The verses that follow, 2 Chron. 33:11-13, suggest that Assyrian officers bound Manasseh and hauled him off with hooks and chains to Babylon. His suffering brought him to humility and repentance, and he was restored to his throne in Jerusalem. This account is not confirmed by the parallel and subsequent accounts in the biblical books of Kings or by the prophets or by tradition.

^15. See 1 Pet. 5:13; Rev. 14:8; 17:5; and D&C 1:16; 35:11; 64:24; 86:3.

^16. Hymns, nos. 319, 7.

^17. Jeremiah was a Levite from Anathoth (see Josh. 21:18), one of the Levitical cities, which lay about one hour's walk over the Mount of Olives northeast of Jerusalem (still called in Arabic Anata). He is mentioned in the Book of Mormon, and Laban, an elder of the Jews, must have been acquainted with him (see 1 Ne. 5:13; 7:14; Helaman 8:20). The first year of Nebuchadnezzar was 605 B.C. Jeremiah began his ministry about 627 B.C., and he continued prophesying right to the day Nebuchadnezzar entered Jerusalem in 587 B.C.—a total of forty years (see Jer. 25:3). People may have begun to wonder about Jeremiah's prophecies when five years passed, then ten, then twenty. They could have become a little complacent, especially with false prophets predicting opposite and more comfortable prophecies. ("The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so"; Jer. 5: 31.) Lamentations of Jeremiah are the prophet's eyewitness feelings over the destruction of Jerusalem. They are worth reading—aloud—for the depth of feeling in the loss of the City and Temple. The title of the book in the Greek Septuagint is Threnoi, and in the Latin Vulgate is called Threni, both meaning "tears." The Septuagint prefaces Lamentations with these lines: "And it came to pass after Israel had been taken away into captivity and Jerusalem had been laid waste that Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented this lamentation over Jerusalem and said . . ."

^18. Some people think prophets have no business involving themselves in politics. If so, they've never read the Old Testament. Elijah and Elisha were very involved in the politics of their day. Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, Daniel, and others, too, were also very involved in the politics of their day. The Lord is not limited in his sphere of influence.

^19. Jeremiah, like Isaiah and other prophets, followed the pattern of doom-hope. He foresaw doom-desolation-destruction, but he also foresaw a glorious time of reinstatement-restoration-redemption. Biblical scholars and archaeologists have also recognized this pattern in the prophets' writings. See, for example, Levine, Jerusalem Cathedra, 2:23. Specific references in Jeremiah to the Jews' return to Jerusalem ("the Jews" is used here in a national sense, meaning Israelites then living in the southern kingdom of Judah), and their prosperity in it are found in 3:17-18; 16:14-15; 23:3; 24:6-7; 30:3; 31:17; 32:37-38, 42; 33:15-16. Lehi similarly prophesied of hope in the future; see, for example, 1 Ne. 10:3.

^20. Read and compare Jeremiah 7, another scathing speech by the prophet in the court of the Temple. He condemned the people's false sense of security because of the Temple, and he cataloged the abominations for which they would be punished. The Lord's House would be destroyed, just as the holy sanctuary at Shiloh had been destroyed (see v. 12).

^21. On the flight of Lehi's colony from Jerusalem and the two return trips to the city for records and companions—for ancestry and prophecy and posterity—see Jackson, 1 Nephi to Alma 29, 17-33.

^22. "Some remarkable deliverance must be assumed . . . [which] served to strengthen belief in the inviolability of Zion until it became, in later years, a fixed national dogma. . . . The inviolability of Temple, city, and nation [became] in the popular mind . . . an indisputable dogma." Bright, History of Israel, 288, 332.

^23. Ezekiel envisioned the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence or Glory of God) departing from the Temple, leaving it vulnerable for destruction (see Ezek. 10:18-19; 11:23).

^24. Placing the date of the inauguration of Zedekiah's reign at 597 B.C., as most chronologies do, seems to be a discrepancy with the Book of Mormon account, which specifically identifies the first year of his reign as six hundred years before Christ (cf. 1 Ne. 1:4; 5:10-13; 10:4; 19:8; headnote to 3 Ne.; 3 Ne. 1:1). There is a similar discrepancy of three or four years when we date the death of Herod the Great at 4 B.C., after his attempt to kill the infant Jesus by his infamous extermination order. It is a problem of calendaring.

^25. During military clearing operations for a new road in the southeastern Shephelah in 1961 at a site called Khirbet Beit-Lei, an undisturbed cave, now called the "Jerusalem Cave," was broken into and discovered to contain some hastily carved figures and words. Some have wondered—because the figure of a man appears to have arms extended toward heaven and an inscription speaks of the God of Judah in Jerusalem, because the graffiti are so hastily scrawled on the cave walls, and because there is even the semblance of a ship—if perhaps this could have been the work of the prophet Lehi and company fleeing Jerusalem on their way to the Red Sea in the year 600 B.C. Some rather elaborate "evidences" have been devised to support claims about this "Lehi Cave." We do know, however, that—

(1) There is no evidence that the cave incisions date to 600 B.C. Some scholars suggest that the cave's temporary tenants could have been refugees from the Babylonians during the war atmosphere of the late seventh century before Christ, but others have proposed that the refugees were fleeing the Assyrians a century earlier.

(2) There is no evidence that Lehi or anyone else heading toward the Red Sea would have traveled southwest instead of southeast. Indeed, the Book of Mormon specifies that they abandoned their home in the land of Jerusalem and fled into the wilderness—in a southeastern route. See 1 Ne. 2:2, 4.

(3) There is no evidence that Lehi and his group knew anything about the future prospect of building a ship; that was yet eight years away.

For more information about the moribund controversies over this cave and its graffiti, see Berrett, "The So-called Lehi Cave."

The cave walls have been transferred to the Israel National Museum mainly because the graffiti represent the earliest known appearance of the name Jerusalem in archaic Hebrew. The inscription reads: "I am Jehovah thy God; I will protect the cities of Judah and will redeem Jerusalem." See Mazar, Mountain of the Lord, 60.

^26. Jerusalem fell to Babylon in the summer of 587 or the summer of 586 B.C., depending on whose calendaring system is used. See the discussion of the chronology problem in Hayes and Miller, Israelite and Judaean History, 474-75. The year 586 seems to be the most accepted date. See Horn, "When Was the Babylonian Destruction of Jerusalem?" 63.

^27. In Jeremiah 39:6 we have another record of Zedekiah's sons being killed. From Helaman 8:21 we learn that one son, Mulek, escaped, and helped lead a colony of Jews to the other side of the world.

^28. Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times, 80-81; see also Avi-Yonah, Our Living Bible, 156; Mazar, Mountain of the Lord, 59.

^29. Eighteen letters were discovered, all written with carbon ink on potsherds. They constitute one of the greatest archaeological evidences of the Old Testament ever discovered. Torczyner, who wrote the definitive commentary on the subject, noted: "In these letters we have the most valuable discovery yet made in the biblical archaeology of Palestine and the most intimate corroboration of the Bible to this day." Lachish I: Lachish Letters, 18. See also Nibley, "The Lachish Letters," 48-54; Kenyon, Royal Cities of the Old Testament, 146-47; Thompson, Bible and Archaeology, 158 (photo).

^30. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 322; Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times, 216; Aharoni and Avi-Yonah, Macmillan Bible Atlas, Map 162; Hayes and Miller, Israelite and Judaean History, 473-74.

^31. Note the setting for all this action on Bible Map 9; Azekah is near Socoh. See also Aharoni and Avi-Yonah, Macmillan Bible Atlas, Map 162.

^32. The biblical account (see 2 Kgs. 25:13-17; 2 Chron. 36:18) lists the objects taken from the Temple by the Babylonians. The sacred Ark of the Covenant is not mentioned; it may have been carried away in some previous depredation of the Temple treasures, or it may have been—during the previous occasions and again on this occasion—hidden up and preserved. In any case, the Ark is now lost to our knowledge. Josephus described the plundering of the Temple as follows: "Now it was that the king of Babylon sent Nebuzaradan, the general of his army, to Jerusalem, to pillage the temple; who had it also in command to burn it and the royal palace, and to lay the city even with the ground, and to transplant the people into Babylon. Accordingly, he came to Jerusalem, in the eleventh year of king Zedekiah, pillaged the temple, and carried out the vessels of God, both gold and silver, and particularly that large laver which Solomon dedicated, as also the pillars of brass, and their chapiters, with the golden tables and the candlesticks: and when he had carried these off, he set fire to the temple . . . he also burnt the palace, and overthrew the city." Antiquities 10.8.5.

^33. In the ancient Near East seals were used much as we use a signature to indicate ownership and to authenticate documents. Egyptian private seals were most often in the shape of scarabs, and Mesopotamian seals were cylinders. They were made of semiprecious stones, limestone, bone, glass, or metals. Most contained a name and an artistic design. Some seals were used to seal rolled-up papyrus documents. Such written documents were tied with a string, and then a small wet glob of clay was applied to the tie and impressed with a seal. These clay seal impressions are called bullae (singular, bulla). The importance of sealing a document is reflected in the account of a business transaction involving the prophet Jeremiah (see Jer. 32:9-14).

^34. Anchor Bible Dictionary, 3:755.

^35. "If our identification is correct, the personage whose name appears on the bulla from the City of David was one of the scribes active at the royal court in Jerusalem. His father was a scribe at the court of Josiah in his 18th year (622 B.C.E.). Eighteen years later . . . Gemariah son of Shaphan, and his son Micaiah, are also mentioned. The location of Gemariah's chamber, in 'the upper court at the entry of the new gate' of the Temple (Jeremiah 36:10), where Baruch the scribe read Jeremiah's scroll, certainly testifies to the importance of this personage." Shiloh, "Group of Hebrew Bullae," 34. See also New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations, 2:708; Anchor Bible Dictionary, 2:59.

^36. Avigad, "Baruch the Scribe and Jerahmeel the King's Son," 52-56; Schneider, "Six Biblical Signatures," 26-33. See also Geva, Ancient Jerusalem Revealed, 55-61.

^37. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, 182.

^38. Shiloh writes: "The Babylonians' destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. is well documented in the biblical sources (2 Kgs. 25:8-10; 2 Chr. 36:18-19), which describe the destruction, burning, and collapse of houses and walls. The archaeological evidence for this phase in Jerusalem's history, which rounds out the historical account, can be counted among the most dramatic at any biblical site." In New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations, 2:709; see also Anchor Bible Dictionary, 2:59.

^39. Specific prophecies concerning the destruction of Jerusalem are as follows:

Lehi. 1 Ne. 1:4, 13, 18; 2:13; 3:17; 7:13; 10:3; 2 Ne. 1:4.

Jeremiah. Jer. 1:14-15; 9:11; 13:13-14; 19:7-9; 21:9-10; 34:2; Helaman 8:20-21. (Cf. Ezek. 4:1-3; 5:5-12; 11:1-10; 14:21; 15:6-8.)

^40. New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations, 2:708.

^41. Shiloh, Qedem 19, City of David I, 19. See also Shanks, "Yigal Shiloh," 22.

^42. Ogden and Chadwick, Holy Land, 207.