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
THE PERSIANS
539–336 BC
CYRUS THE GREAT
Astyges, King of Media in western Persia, dreamed that his daughter was urinating a golden stream which squirted out the whole of his kingdom. His magi, the Persian priests, interpreted this to mean that his grandsons would threaten his rule. Astyges married his daughter to a weak, unthreatening neighbour to the east, the King of Anshan. This marriage spawned an heir, Kourosh, who became Cyrus the Great. Astyges dreamed again that a vine was growing from between his daughter’s fecund thighs until it overshadowed him – a sexual-political version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Astyges ordered his commander Harpagus to murder little Cyrus, but the boy was hidden with a shepherd. When Astyges discovered that Cyrus was not dead, he butchered and cooked Harpagus’ son and served him to his father as a stew. It was not a meal that Harpagus would easily forget or forgive.