King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Baruch 1
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is.
1And these are the words of the book, which the son of Nerias, the son of Maasias, the son of , the son of Asadias, the son of Chelcias, wrote in , 2In the fifth year, and in the seventh day of the month, what time as the took , and burnt it with . 3And did read the words of this book in the hearing of Jechonias the son of Joachim king of , and in the ears of all the people that came to hear the book, 4And in the hearing of the nobles, and of the king’s sons, and in the hearing of the , and of all the people, from the lowest unto the highest, even of all them that dwelt at by the river Sud. 5Whereupon they wept, , and before . 6They made also a collection of money according to every man’s : 7And they sent it to unto Joachim the , the son of Chelcias, son of Salom, and to the priests, and to all the people which were found with him at , 8At the same time when he received the vessels of the , that were carried out of , to return them into the land of , the tenth day of the month , namely, silver vessels, which the son of king of had made, 9After that king of had Jechonias, and the princes, and the , and the , and the people of the land, from , and brought them unto . 10And they said, Behold, we have sent you money to buy you burnt offerings, and , and , and prepare ye , and offer upon the of our ; 11And for the life of king of , and for the life of Balthasar his son, that their days may be upon earth as the days of : 12And will give us strength, and lighten our eyes, and we shall live under the shadow of king of , and under the shadow of Balthasar his son, and we shall them many days, and find in their sight. 13 for us also unto our , for we have against our ; and unto this day the fury of and his is not turned from us. 14And ye shall read this book which we have sent unto you, to make in the , upon the feasts and solemn days. 15And ye shall say, To our belongeth , but unto us the confusion of faces, as it is come to pass this day, unto them of , and to the inhabitants of , 16And to our kings, and to our princes, and to our priests, and to our , and to our fathers: 17For we have before , 18And disobeyed him, and have not hearkened unto our , to walk in that he gave us openly: 19Since the day that brought our forefathers out of the land of , unto this present day, we have been unto our , and we have been negligent in not hearing his voice. 20Wherefore the evils cleaved unto us, and the , which appointed by his servant at the time that he brought our fathers out of the land of , to give us a land that floweth with , like as it is to see this day. 21Nevertheless we have not hearkened unto our , according unto all the words of , whom he sent unto us: 22But every man followed the imagination of his own , to strange gods, and to do evil in the sight of our .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Babylon and the exile, 612 BC to 539 BC ›
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
- Babylon
- Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
- Egypt
- Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
- Judah
- Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
- Further afield
- An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.