King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Jeremiah 16
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also unto me, saying, Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. For thus saith concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land; They shall of grievous deaths; they shall not be ; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the of the earth: and they shall be consumed , and by ; and their carcases shall be meat for the fowls of , and for the of the earth. For thus saith , Enter not into the house of , neither go to nor bemoan them: for I have taken away my peace from this people, saith , even and . Both the great and the small shall in this land: they shall not be buried, neither shall men for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them: Neither shall men tear themselves for them in , to comfort them for ; neither shall men give them of consolation to drink for their or for their mother. Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting, to sit with them to eat and to drink. For thus saith of hosts, the of Israel; Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes, and in your days, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the , and the voice of the . And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our ? or what is our that we have committed against our ? Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith , and have walked after other gods, and have them, and have them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept ; And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil , that they may not unto me: Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye other gods day and night; where I will not shew you . Therefore, behold, the days come, saith , that it shall no more be said, liveth, that brought up the out of the land of ; But, liveth, that brought up the from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers. Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith , and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks. For mine eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hid from , neither is their hid from mine eyes. And first I will their and their double; because they have defiled my land, they have filled mine with the carcases of their and things. O , my strength, and my , and my refuge in the day of affliction, the shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have lies, , and things wherein there is no profit. Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods? Therefore, behold, I will this once cause them to know, I will cause them to know mine hand and my might; and they shall know that my name is .
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.
All of Jeremiah