King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Lamentations 5
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Remember, O , what is come upon us: consider, and behold our . Our is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are and , our mothers are as . We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us. Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest. We have given the hand to the , and to the , to be satisfied with bread. Our fathers have , and are not; and we have borne their . Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth us out of their hand. We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of of . Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible . They ravished the women in , and the maids in the cities of Judah. Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of were not honoured. They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood. The have ceased from the , the young men from their musick. The joy of our is ceased; our dance is turned into . The is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have ! For this our is faint; for these things our eyes are dim. Because of the mountain of , which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it. Thou, O , remainest for ever; thy from generation to generation. Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time? Turn thou us unto thee, O , and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.
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.