King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Jeremiah 19
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Thus saith , Go and get a ’s earthen bottle, and take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests; And go forth unto the valley of the son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the east , and proclaim there the words that I shall tell thee, And say, Hear ye the word of , O kings of Judah, and inhabitants of ; Thus saith of hosts, the of Israel; Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, the which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle. Because they have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and have in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers have known, nor the kings of Judah, and have filled this place with of innocents; They have built also the of , to burn their sons with for burnt offerings unto , which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my : Therefore, behold, the days come, saith , that this place shall no more be called , nor The valley of the son of Hinnom, but The valley of slaughter. And I will make void the of Judah and in this place; and I will cause them to fall before their , and by the hands of them that seek their lives: and their carcases will I give to be meat for the fowls of the , and for the of the earth. And I will make this city desolate, and an hissing; every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss because of all the plagues thereof. And I will cause them to eat of their sons and of their daughters, and they shall eat every one of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their , and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them. Then shalt thou break the bottle in the sight of the men that go with thee, And shalt say unto them, Thus saith of hosts; Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a ’s , that cannot be made whole again: and they shall bury them in , till there be no place to bury. Thus will I do unto this place, saith , and to the inhabitants thereof, and even make this city as : And the houses of , and the houses of the kings of Judah, shall be defiled as the place of , because of all the houses upon whose roofs they have unto of , and have poured out drink unto other gods. Then came from , whither had sent him to ; and he stood in the court of ’s house; and said to all the people, Thus saith of hosts, the of Israel; Behold, I will bring upon this city and upon all her towns all the evil that I have pronounced against it, because they have , that they might not hear my words.
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