Free Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore Page A

Nebuchadnezzar, routed the Egyptians at Carchemish. Assyria vanished; Babylon inherited Judah. But in 597, King Jehoiakim saw his chance in the midst of this instability to liberate Judah and called a national fast to win God’s protection. His adviser and prophet Jeremiah warned, in the first jeremiad, that God would destroy Jerusalem. King Jehoiakim publicly burned Jeremiah’s writings. * He allied Judah with Egypt, but no Egyptian help came as a new conqueror descended on Jerusalem.
    NEBUCHADNEZZAR
     
    ‘In the seventh month of Kislev,’ declared Nebuchadnezzar’s chronicle, preserved on a clay inscription, ‘the Babylonian king marched to the land of Hatti [Syria], besieged the City of Judah [Jerusalem] and on the second day of the month of Adar [16 March 697] took the city and captured the king.’ Nebuchadnezzar plundered the Temple and deported the king and 10,000 nobles, artisans and young men to Babylon. There, Jehoiakim joined his vanquisher’s court.
    Nebuchadnezzar was the son of a usurper but he was a dynamic empire-builder, who regarded himself as the viceroy on earth of Babylon’s patron god Bel-Marduk. Inheriting the Assyrian style of ferocious imperial repression, he promoted himself as a paragon of piety and virtue. At home ‘the strong used to plunder the weak’, but Nebuchadnezzar ‘did not rest night or day but with counsel and deliberation he persisted’ in giving justice. His Judaean victims might not have recognized the soi-disant ‘King of Justice’.
    The exiles from Judah found themselves in a city that made Zion look like a village. While a few thousand lived in Jerusalem, Babylon boasted a quarter of a million in a metropolis so majestic and hedonistic that the goddess of love and war Ishtar was said to tiptoe through the streets, kissing her favourites in the inns and alleyways.
    Nebuchadnezzar stamped Babylon with his own aesthetic flair: grandiose gigantism tinted in his favourite colour, divine sky-blue, reflected in the canals of the mighty Euphrates. The four towers of the Ishtar Gate were faced with blue-glazed bricks, illustrated with bulls and dragons in yellow and ochre, leading into the city’s triumphal boulevard, the Processional Way. His palace, in his words an ‘edifice to be admired, a gleaming sanctuary, my royal abode’, was decorated with towering lions. Hanging Gardens embellished his summer palace. Honouring Babylon’s patron god Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar raised a ziggurat, an immense seven-storey, stepped tower with a flat top: his Foundation Platform of Heaven and Earth was the real Tower of Babel, its many languages reflecting the cosmopolitan capital of the entire Near East.
    In Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar placed the exiled king’s uncle, Zedekiah, on the throne. In 594, Zedekiah visited Babylon to make obeisance to Nebuchadnezzar, but on his return he launched a rebellion, haunted by the prophet Jeremiah, who warned that the Babylonians would destroy the city. Nebuchadnezzar marched southwards. Zedekiah appealed to the Egyptians, who sent meagre forces that were soon defeated. Inside Jerusalem, Jeremiah, observing the panic and paranoia, tried to escape but was arrested at the gates. The king, torn between asking his advice and executing him for treason, imprisoned him in the dungeons under the royal palace. For eighteen months, Nebuchadnezzar ravaged Judah, * leaving Jerusalem until last.
    In 587, Nebuchadnezzar encircled Jerusalem with forts and a siege wall. ‘The famine’, wrote Jeremiah, ‘was sore in the city’. Young children ‘faint for hunger at the topof every street’, and there were hints of cannibalism: ‘the daughter of my people is become cruel … The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction’. Even the rich were soon desperate, wrote the author of Lamentations: ‘they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills’, searching for food. People wandered the streets, dazed,