Free The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz

craftsmen. A Babylonian puppet had been put on the throne, but the puppet had rebelled as well, and now Nebuchadnezzar’s army was once again at the walls of the city. The Babylonian soldiers had built siege towers and mounds and hunkered down. They had let neither water nor food into the city, and no one was allowed to leave. The corpses of the parched and the starved lay scattered in the streets, and no one still alive had the wherewithal to fight off the men in glintinghelmets who were about to pour in through the breaches they had just made in the walls.
    It is considered credulous to take biblical poetry as literal truth, but when it comes to the siege of Jerusalem there are several accounts written early enough after the city’s sacking and the destruction of its Temple to offer eyewitness testimony. The book of Lamentations, in particular, brings a specificity to its itemization of horror that gives it the force of documentary. “The emotion seems too raw for a poem,” the poet and Bible translator Stephen Mitchell has said of Lamentations. “The reality is too raw.” Skeptical archaeologists have not yet managed to contradict the biblical account of famine. On the contrary, some fecal remains found in a toilet in use at the time support its historical accuracy, revealing a diet light on nutrients and heavy on roadside weeds and the kinds of parasites that enter the stomach through rotting meat. Lamentations fills in the details. “The tongue of the suckling [child] cleaves to its palate for thirst,” the poet writes. (Because they convey the graphic concreteness of Lamentations with particular faithfulness, the translations given from that book come from the Jewish Publication Society edition of the Hebrew Bible. All other biblical citations in the book come from the King James Version, by far the greater work of literature.) “Those who feasted on dainties lie famished in the streets; those who were reared in purple have embraced refuse heaps.” (The King James Bible translates this, more bluntly, as “lie in dunghills.”) “Alas, women eat their own fruit, their new-born babes!”
    On the day that the Babylonians breached the wall, say the authors of the biblical histories known as First and Second Kings, they established a base at one of Jerusalem’s main gates but didn’t enter the palace. That night, Judah’s king, Zedekiah, and his soldiers and family sneaked out of the city through the palace garden and fled toward the Jordan. “But the Babylonian troops pursued the king,” we read in Second Kings, “and they overtook him in the steppes of Jericho as his entire force left him and scattered. They captured the king and brought him before the king of Babylon at Riblah; and they put him on trial.”Nebuchadnezzar had his officials kill Zedekiah’s sons in front of him, put his eyes out, chain him up, and take him to Babylon.
    The prophet Jeremiah adds that the king of Babylon “slew all the nobles of Judah,” too. Then Nebuchadnezzar’s troops set fire to Jerusalem, tore down its walls, and sacked the Temple, carrying off anything made of bronze, silver, or gold. They killed everyone who got in their way, rounded up the survivors, and marched them into exile, though not before singling out several top officials and sixty commoners for execution. Only the “poorest in the land” were allowed to remain, to be “vinedressers and field hands.”
    The Babylonian exile may be the most bitterly objected-to population transfer in all Western literature. Several of the later books in the Hebrew Bible dwell upon it with obsessive anguish, interpreting it self-laceratingly as God’s punishment of an insubordinate people. Many books—such as Exodus, with its tales of enslavement, and Deuteronomy, with its concern for the well-being of servants—have been interpreted as allegories of the experience, quasi-historical novels making an unbearable present palatable by setting it in the past. In every