'In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, came
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army against Jerusalem, and
they besieged it. 2. And in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the
fourth month, the ninth day of the month, the city was broken up. 3.
And all the princes of the king of Babylon came in, and sat in the
middle gate, even Nergal-sharezer, Samgar-nebo, Sarse-chim, Rab-saris,
Nergal-sharezer, Rab-mag, with all the residue of the princes of the
king of Babylon. 4. And it came to pass, that when Zedekiah the king of
Judah saw them, and all the men of war, then they fled, and went forth
out of the city by night, by the way of the king's garden, by the gate
betwixt the two walls: and he went out the way of the plain. 5. But the
Chaldeans' army pursued after them, and overtook Zedekiah in the plains
of Jericho; and when they had taken him, they brought him up to
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon to Riblah in the land of Hamath, where
he gave judgment upon him. 6. Then the king of Babylon slew the sons of
Zedekiah in Riblah before his eyes: also the king of Babylon slew all
the nobles of Judah. 7. Moreover he put out Zedekiah's eyes, and bound
him with chains, to carry him to Babylon. 8. And the Chaldeans burned
the king's house, and the houses of the people, with fire, and brake
down the walls of Jerusalem. 9. Then Nebuzar-adan the captain of the
guard carried away captive into Babylon the remnant of the people that
remained in the city, and those that fell away, that fell to him, with
the rest of the people that remained. 10. But Nebuzar-adan the captain
of the guard left of the poor of the people, which had nothing, in the
land of Judah, and gave them vineyards and fields at the same
time.'--JER. xxxix. 1-10.
Two characteristics of this account of the fall of Jerusalem are
striking,--its minute particularity, giving step by step the details of
the tragedy, and its entire suppression of emotion. The passionless
record tells the tale without a tear or a sob. For these we must go to
the Book of Lamentations. This is the history of God's judgment, and
here emotion would be misplaced. But there is a world of repressed
feeling in the long-drawn narrative, as well as in the fact that three
versions of the story are given here (chap, lii., 2 Kings xxv.). Sorrow
curbed by submission, and steadily gazing on God's judicial act, is the
temper of the narrative. It should be the temper of all sufferers. 'I
was dumb, I opened not my mouth; because thou didst it.' But we may
note the three stages in the final agony which this section
distinguishes.
I. There is the entrance of the enemy. Jerusalem fell not by assault,
but by famine. The siege lasted eighteen months, and ended when 'all
the bread in the city was spent.' The pitiful pictures in Lamentations
fill in the details of misery, telling how high-born women picked
garbage from dung-heaps, and mothers made a ghastly meal of their
infants, while the nobles were wasted to skeletons, and the little
children piteously cried for bread. At length a breach was made in the
northern wall (as Josephus tells us, 'at midnight'), and through it, on
the ninth day of the fourth month (corresponding to July), swarmed the
conquerors, unresisted. The commanders of the Babylonians planted
themselves at 'the middle gate,' probably a gate in the wall between
the upper and lower city, so securing for them the control of both.
How many of these fierce soldiers are named in verse 3? At first sight
there seem to be six, but that number must be reduced by at least two,
for Rab-saris and Rab-mag are official titles, and designate the
offices (chief eunuch and chief magician) of the two persons whose
names they respectively follow. Possibly Samgar-Nebo is also to be
deducted, for it has been suggested that, as that name stands, it is
anomalous, and it has been proposed to render its first element,
_Samgar_, as meaning _cup-bearer_, and being the official title
attached to the name preceding it; while its second part, _Nebo_, is
regarded as the first element in a new name obtained by reading
_shashban_ instead of Sarsechim, and attaching that reading to Nebo.
This change would bring verse 3 into accord with verse 13, for in both
places we should then have Nebo-shashban designated as chief of the
eunuchs. However the number of the commanders is settled, and whatever
their names, the point which the historian emphasises is their presence
there. Had it come to this, that men whose very names were invocations
of false gods ('Nergal protect the king,' 'Nebo delivers me' if we read
'Nebo-shashban,' or 'Be gracious, Nebo,' if Samgar-nebo) should sit
close by the temple, and have their talons fixed in the Holy City?
These intruders were all unconscious of the meaning of their victory,
and the tragedy of their presence there. They thought that they were
Nebuchadnezzar's servants, and had captured for him, at last, an
obstinate little city, which had given more trouble than it was worth.
Its conquest was but a drop in the bucket of his victories. How little
they knew that they were serving that Jehovah whom they thought that
Nebo had conquered in their persons! How little they knew that they
were the instruments of the most solemn act of judgment in the world's
history till then!
The causes which led to the fall of Jerusalem could be reasonably set
forth as purely political without a single reference to Israel's sins
or God's judgment; but none the less was its capture the divine
punishment of its departure from Him, and none the less were
Nergal-sharezer and his fellows God's tools, the axes with which He
hewed down the barren tree. So does He work still, in national and
individual history. You may, in a fashion, account for both without
bringing Him in at all; but your philosophy of either will be partial,
unless you recognise that 'the history of the world is the judgment of
the world.' It was the same hand which set these harsh conquerors at
the middle gate of Jerusalem that sent the German armies to encamp in
the Place de la Concorde in Paris; and in neither case does the
recognition of God in the crash of a falling throne absolve the victors
from the responsibility of their deeds.
II. We have the flight and fate of Zedekiah and his evil advisers (vs.
4-7). His weakness of character shows itself to the end. Why was there
no resistance? It would have better beseemed him to have died on his
palace threshold than to have skulked away in the dark between the
shelter of the 'two walls.' But he was a poor weakling, and the curse
of God sat heavy on his soul, though he had tried to put it away.
Conscience made a coward of him; for he, at all events, knew who had
set the strangers by the middle gate. Men who harden heart and
conscience against threatened judgments are very apt to collapse, when
the threats are fulfilled. The frost breaks up with a rapid thaw.
Ezekiel (Ezek. xii. 12) prophesied the very details of the flight. It
was to be 'in the dark,' the king himself was to 'carry' some of his
valuables, they were to 'dig through' the earthen ramparts; and all
appears to have been literally fulfilled. The flight was taken in the
opposite direction from the entrance of the besiegers; two walls, which
probably ran down the valley between Zion and the temple mount,
afforded cover to the fugitives as far as to the south city wall, and
there some postern let them out to the king's garden. That is a tragic
touch. It was no time then to gather flowers. The forlorn and
frightened company seems to have scattered when once outside the city;
for there is a marked contrast in verse 4 between 'they fled' and 'he
went.' In the description of his flight Zedekiah is still called, as in
verses 1 and 2, the king; but after his capture he is only 'Zedekiah.'
Down the rocky valley of the Kedron he hurried, and had a long enough
start of his pursuers to get to Jericho. Another hour would have seen
him safe across Jordan, but the prospect of escape was only dangled
before his eyes to make capture more bitter. Probably he was too much
absorbed with his misery and fear to feel any additional humiliation
from the mighty memories of the scene of his capture; but how solemnly
fitting it was that the place which had seen Israel's first triumph,
when 'by faith the walls of Jericho fell down,' should witness the
lowest shame of the king who had cast away his kingdom by unbelief! The
conquering dead might have gathered in shadowy shapes to reproach the
weakling and sluggard who had sinned away the heritage which they had
won. The scene of the capture underscores the lesson of the capture
itself; namely, the victorious power of faith, and the defeat and shame
which, in the long-run, are the fruits of an 'evil heart of unbelief,
departing from the living God.'
That would be a sad march through all the length of the fair land that
had slipped from his slack fingers, up to far-off Riblah, in the great
valley between the Lebanon and the anti-Lebanon. Observe how, in verses
5 and 6, the king of Babylon has his royal title, and Zedekiah has not.
The crown has fallen from his head, and there is no more a king in
Judah. He who had been king now stands chained before the cruel
conqueror. Well might the victor think that Nebo had overcome Jehovah,
but better did the vanquished know that Jehovah had kept his word.
Cruelty and expediency dictated the savage massacre and mutilation
which followed. The death of Zedekiah's sons, and of the nobles who had
scoffed at Jeremiah's warnings, and the blinding of Zedekiah, were all
measures of precaution as well as of savagery. They diminished the
danger of revolt; and a blind, childless prisoner, without counsellors
or friends, was harmless. But to make the sight of his slaughtered sons
the poor wretch's last sight, was a refinement of gratuitous delight in
torturing. Thus singularly was Ezekiel's enigma solved and harmonised
with its apparent contradictions in Jeremiah's prophecies: 'Yet shall
he not see it, though he shall die there' (Ezek. xii. 13).
Zedekiah is one more instance of the evil which may come from a weak
character, and of the evil which may fall on it. He had good impulses,
but he could not hold his own against the bad men round him, and so he
stumbled on, not without misgivings, which only needed to be attended
to with resolute determination, in order to have reversed his conduct
and fate. Feeble hands can pull down venerable structures built in
happier times. It takes a David and a Solomon to rear a temple, but a
Zedekiah can overthrow it.
III. We have the completion of the conquest (vs. 8-10). The first care
of the victors was, of course, to secure themselves, and fires and
crowbars were the readiest way to that end. But the wail in the last
chapter of Lamentations hints at the usual atrocities of the sack of a
city, when brutal lust and as brutal ferocity are let loose. Chapter
lii. shows that the final step in our narrative was separated from the
capture of the city by a month, which was, no doubt, a month of
nameless agonies, horrors, and shame. Then the last drop was added to
the bitter cup, in the deportation of the bulk of the inhabitants,
according to the politic custom of these old military monarchies. What
rending of ties, what weariness and years of long-drawn-out yearning,
that meant, can easily be imagined. The residue left behind to keep the
country from relapsing into waste land was too weak to be dangerous,
and too cowed to dare anything. One knows not who had the sadder lot,
the exiles, or the handful of peasants left to till the fields that had
once been their own, and to lament their brethren gone captives to the
far-off land.
Surely the fall of Jerusalem, though all the agony is calmed ages ago,
still remains as a solemn beacon-warning that the wages of sin is
death, both for nations and individuals; that the threatenings of God's
Word are not idle, but will be accomplished to the utmost tittle; and
that His patience stretches from generation to generation, and His
judgments tarry because He is not willing that any should perish, but
that for all the long-suffering there comes a time when even divine
love sees that it is needful to say 'Now!? and the bolt falls. The
solemn word addressed to Israel has application as real to all
Christian churches and individual souls: 'You only have I known of all
the inhabitants of the earth; therefore I will punish you for your
iniquities.'