586–539 BC

JOSIAH: THE REVOLUTIONARY SAVIOUR

It was a miracle: the evil empire of Assyria had fallen apart and the kingdom of Judah was free. King Josiah may have extended his kingdom northwards into the former lands of Israel, southwards towards the Red Sea and eastwards towards the Mediterranean, and then, in the eighteenth year of his reign, Hilkiah the chief priest found a forgotten scroll stored in the chambers of the Temple.

Josiah recognized the power of this document, an early version of the Book of Deuteronomy (‘Second Law’ in Greek), probably one of the scrolls brought southwards from Israel after its fall and hidden in the Temple during Manasseh’s persecutions. Having assembled the Judaeans in the Temple, Josiah stood by that totemic symbol, the royal pillar, and announced his covenant with the one God to keep the Law. The king set his scholars to retell the ancient history of the Judaeans, linking the mythical Patriarchs, the sacred kings David and Solomon and the story of Jerusalem into a single past, to illuminate the present. This was another step towards the creation of the Bible. Indeed these laws were backdated and attributed to Moses, but the biblical portrait of the Temple of Solomon surely reflected the real but later Jerusalem of Josiah, the new David. Henceforth the holy mountain became nothing less than ha-Makom in Hebrew: the Place.

The king had the idols burned in the Kidron Valley, and expelled the male prostitutes from the Temple; he smashed the child-roasters of the Valley of Hell and killed the idolatrous priests, grinding their bones into their altars.^* Josiah’s revolution sounds violent, frenzied and puritanical. He then held a Passover festival to celebrate. ‘And like unto him was there no king before him.’ Yet he was playing a dangerous game. When Necho, the Egyptian pharaoh, marched up the coast, Josiah, fearing he was about to swap Assyrian for Egyptian dominion, rushed to stop him. In 609 BC, the pharaoh crushed the Judaeans and killed Josiah at Megiddo. Josiah had failed, but his optimistic, revelatory reign was more influential than any other between David and Jesus. The dream of independence, however, ended at Megiddo, which became the very definition of catastrophe: Armageddon.²⁰

The pharaoh advanced on Jerusalem and placed Josiah’s brother Jehoiakim on the throne of Judah. But Egypt failed to stop the rise of a new Near Eastern empire. In 605, the Babylonian king’s son, Nebuchadnezzar, routed the Egyptians at Carchemish. Assyria vanished; Babylon inherited Judah. But in 597, King Jehoiakim saw his chance in the midst of this instability to liberate Judah and called a national fast to win God’s protection. His adviser and prophet Jeremiah warned, in the first jeremiad, that God would destroy Jerusalem. King Jehoiakim publicly burned Jeremiah’s writings.^* He allied Judah with Egypt, but no Egyptian help came as a new conqueror descended on Jerusalem.

NEBUCHADNEZZAR

‘In the seventh month of Kislev,’ declared Nebuchadnezzar’s chronicle, preserved on a clay inscription, ‘the Babylonian king marched to the land of Hatti [Syria], besieged the City of Judah [Jerusalem] and on the second day of the month of Adar [16 March 697] took the city and captured the king.’ Nebuchadnezzar plundered the Temple and deported the king and 10,000 nobles, artisans and young men to Babylon. There, Jehoiakim joined his vanquisher’s court.

Nebuchadnezzar was the son of a usurper but he was a dynamic empire-builder, who regarded himself as the viceroy on earth of Babylon’s patron god Bel-Marduk. Inheriting the Assyrian style of ferocious imperial repression, he promoted himself as a paragon of piety and virtue. At home ‘the strong used to plunder the weak’, but Nebuchadnezzar ‘did not rest night or day but with counsel and deliberation he persisted’ in giving justice. His Judaean victims might not have recognized the soi-disant ‘King of Justice’.

The exiles from Judah found themselves in a city that made Zion look like a village. While a few thousand lived in Jerusalem, Babylon boasted a quarter of a million in a metropolis so majestic and hedonistic that the goddess of love and war Ishtar was said to tiptoe through the streets, kissing her favourites in the inns and alleyways.

Nebuchadnezzar stamped Babylon with his own aesthetic flair: grandiose gigantism tinted in his favourite colour, divine sky-blue, reflected in the canals of the mighty Euphrates. The four towers of the Ishtar Gate were faced with blue-glazed bricks, illustrated with bulls and dragons in yellow and ochre, leading into the city’s triumphal boulevard, the Processional Way. His palace, in his words an ‘edifice to be admired, a gleaming sanctuary, my royal abode’, was decorated with towering lions. Hanging Gardens embellished his summer palace. Honouring Babylon’s patron god Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar raised a ziggurat, an immense seven-storey, stepped tower with a flat top: his Foundation Platform of Heaven and Earth was the real Tower of Babel, its many languages reflecting the cosmopolitan capital of the entire Near East.

In Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar placed the exiled king’s uncle, Zedekiah, on the throne. In 594, Zedekiah visited Babylon to make obeisance to Nebuchadnezzar, but on his return he launched a rebellion, haunted by the prophet Jeremiah, who warned that the Babylonians would destroy the city. Nebuchadnezzar marched southwards. Zedekiah appealed to the Egyptians, who sent meagre forces that were soon defeated. Inside Jerusalem, Jeremiah, observing the panic and paranoia, tried to escape but was arrested at the gates. The king, torn between asking his advice and executing him for treason, imprisoned him in the dungeons under the royal palace. For eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar ravaged Judah,^* leaving Jerusalem until last.

In 587, Nebuchadnezzar encircled Jerusalem with forts and a siege wall. ‘The famine’, wrote Jeremiah, ‘was sore in the city’. Young children ‘faint for hunger at the topof every street’, and there were hints of cannibalism: ‘the daughter of my people is become cruel … The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction’. Even the rich were soon desperate, wrote the author of Lamentations: ‘they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills’, searching for food. People wandered the streets, dazed, ‘like blind men’. Archaeologists have found a sewer pipe that dated from the siege: the Judaeans usually lived on lentils, wheat and barley, but the pipe’s contents showed that people were living on plants and herbs, diseased with whipworm and tapeworm.

On the 9th of the Jewish month of Ab, August 586, after eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar broke into the city, which was set on fire, probably with flamed torches and burning arrows (arrowheads were discovered in today’s Jewish Quarter in a layer of soot, ashes and charred wood). Yet the fire that consumed the houses also baked the clay bullae, the seals of the bureaucracy, so hard that they have survived to this day among the burned houses. Jerusalem suffered the infernal depredations of fallen cities. Those that were killed were luckier than those who starved: ‘Our skin was black like the oven because of the famine. They ravished the women in Zion; princes were hanged up by their hand.’ Edomites from the south poured into the city to loot, party and gloat in the wreckage: ‘Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom … thou shalt be drunken and shalt make thyself naked.’ The Edomites, according to Psalm 137, encouraged the Babylonians to ‘rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof … Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’ The Babylonians ravaged Jerusalem while, beneath the royal palace, Jeremiah survived in his dungeon.

NEBUCHADNEZZAR: THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION

Zedekiah broke out through the gate close to the Siloam Pool, heading for Jericho, but the Babylonians captured the king and brought him before Nebuchadnezzar ‘where sentence was pronounced on him. They killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon.’ The Babylonians must have found Jeremiah in the king’s prison for they brought him to Nebuchadnezzar, who apparently interviewed him and gave him to the commander of the imperial guard, Nebuzaradan, who was in charge of Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar deported 20,000 Judaeans to Babylon, though Jeremiah says he left many of the poor behind.

A month later Nebuchadnezzar ordered his general to obliterate the city. Nebuzaradan ‘burned the House of the Lord, the king’s palace and all the houses of Jerusalem’ and ‘brake down the walls’. The Temple was destroyed, its gold and silver vessels plundered, and the Ark of the Covenant vanished for ever. ‘They have cast fire into thy Sanctuary,’ recounted Psalm 74. The priests were killed before Nebuchadnezzar. As with Titus in AD 70, Temple and palace must have been toppled into the valley beneath: ‘How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The stones of the Sanctuary are poured in the top of every street.’^*

The streets were empty: ‘How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people.’ The well-off were impoverished: ‘they that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets’. Foxes loped across the barren mountain of Zion. The Lamentations of the Judaeans mourned their bleeding ‘Jerusalem … as a menstruous woman’: ‘She weepeth sore in the night and her tears are on her cheeks: among her lovers, she hath none to comfort her.’

The destruction of the Temple must have seemed to be the death not just of a city but of an entire nation. ‘The ways of Zion do mourn because none come to the solemn feasts: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh … And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed. The crown is fallen from our head.’ This seemed to be the end of the world, or, as the Book of Daniel explained it, ‘the abomination that maketh desolate’. The Judaeans would surely vanish like other peoples whose gods had failed them. But the Jews somehow transformed this catastrophe into the formative experience that redoubled the sanctity of Jerusalem and created a prototype for the Day of Judgement. For all three religions, this inferno made Jerusalem the venue of the Last Days and the coming of the divine kingdom. This was the Apocalypse – based on the Greek word for ‘revelation’ – that Jesus would prophesy. For Christians it became a defining and perennial expectation, while Muhammad would see Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction as the withdrawal of divine favour from the Jews, making way for his Islamic revelation.

In Babylonian exile, some of the Judaeans kept their commitment to God and Zion. At the same time as Homer’s poems were becoming the national epic of the Greeks, the Judaeans started to define themselves by their own biblical texts and their faraway city: ‘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.’ Yet even the Babylonians, according to Psalm 137, appreciated the Judaean songs: ‘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?’

Yet it was there that the Bible began to take shape. While young Jerusalemites such as Daniel were educated in the royal household and the more worldly exiles became Babylonians, Judaeans developed new laws to emphasize that they were still distinct and special – they respected the Sabbath, circumcised their children, adhered to dietary laws, adopted Jewish names – because the fall of Jerusalem had demonstrated what happened when they did not respect God’s laws. Away from Judah, the Judaeans were becoming Jews.^*

The Exiles immortalized Babylon as ‘the mother of prostitutes and the abominations of the earth’, yet the empire prospered and their nemesis, Nebuchadnezzar, ruled for over forty years. However, Daniel claims the king went insane: he was ‘driven away from the people and ate grass like cattle, his nails growing like claws of a bird’ – a suitable punishment for his crimes (and wonderful inspiration for William Blake’s paintings). If vengeance was not complete, the exiles could at least wonder at the ironies of life in Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar’s son Amel-Marduk was such a disappointment that his father threw him in prison, where he became acquainted with Jehoiachin, King of Judah.

BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST

When Amel-Marduk became king of Babylon, he freed his royal Judaean friend from prison. But in 556 the dynasty was overthrown: the new king, Nabonidus, rejected Bel-Marduk, god of Babylon, in favour of Sin the moon-god and eccentrically left the city to live at Teima, far away in the Arabian desert. Nabonidus was struck by a mysterious disease, and it was surely he (not Nebuchadnezzar, as Daniel claimed) who went mad and ‘ate grass like cattle’.

In the king’s absence, the regent, his son Belshazzar, according to the Bible, held the depraved feast at which he used the ‘gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the Temple in Jerusalem’ and suddenly saw on the wall God’s words: ‘MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN’. Decoded, these were measurements warning that the days of the empire were numbered. Belshazzar trembled. For the Whore of Babylon, ‘the writing was on the wall’.

In 539 BC, the Persians marched on Babylon. Jewish history is filled with miraculous deliverances. This was one of the most dramatic. After forty-seven years ‘by the rivers of Babylon’, the decision of one man, in its way as seminal as that of David, restored Zion.²¹