The Siege of Jerusalem and the Breach of the Wall
On the tenth of Tevet Nebuchadnezzar encamped against Jerusalem. The siege lasted some thirty months and ended in famine, a breach in the wall, and the flight of King Zedekiah.
Zedekiah, installed by Babylon, held nine years and then rebelled, counting on Egypt. Jeremiah warned that this was a verdict, not a policy: surrender and the city stands. They called him a traitor.
On the tenth day of the tenth month of Zedekiah's ninth year, "Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and encamped against it and built siege works around it." That day—Asarah be-Tevet—is still a fast: not because something was destroyed then, but because what ended in destruction began then.
The siege ran about thirty months. An Egyptian force approached once and the Babylonians briefly withdrew, then returned. Famine set in, described in Lamentations with unbearable directness: "The hands of compassionate women boiled their own children." On the ninth of Tammuz the wall was breached.
Zedekiah fled by night through the gate between the two walls toward the Arabah, but the Chaldeans overtook him near Jericho. He was brought to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah; his sons were slaughtered before his eyes, then he was blinded, bound in bronze chains and led to Babylon. Weeks later, in Av, the city burned.
How we know
On the chronology
Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.
Sources
Tanakh
- Melachim II 25:1–7 — the siege, the breach, and the fate of Tzidkiyahu
- Yirmiyahu 39; 52:4–11 — the chronicle of the city’s fall as seen by the prophet
- Eichah 4:10 — the famine of the siege: “the hands of compassionate women…”
- Zechariah 8:19 — the four fasts connected with the destruction
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Sanhedrin 39a — the two prophecies about Tzidkiyahu — “he shall come to Babylon” and “he shall not see it” (the folio needs checking)
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.
People and places
Jeremiah · Ezekiel · Jerusalem · Jeremiah · Lamentations · Zedekiah