Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Wall Is Broken Up
2 Kings 25:1-21
1 In the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and encamped against it; and they built forts against it around it. · WEB
Eighteen months of siege, a king blinded after watching his sons die, and Solomon's temple burned and its bronze weighed out for scrap.
In the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem 2 Kings 25:1.
The dating is exact to the day, and it stays exact through the chapter — the day the siege began, the day the famine broke the city, the day the temple burned. A book that has handled two centuries in regnal formulas slows to the calendar for the end, because these were dates its first readers observed as fasts.
On the ninth day of the fourth month, the famine was severe in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land 2 Kings 25:3.
Eighteen months. What that meant inside the walls has already been shown once, at Samaria under a lesser siege 2 Kings 6:28–29, and Lamentations records this one in detail. The account here gives it a single clause and moves on.
Then a breach was made in the city, and all the men of war fled by night... and the king went by the way of the Arabah 2 Kings 25:4.
The king leaves through a garden gate at night while his city is being entered, and is run down in the plains of Jericho with his army disintegrating around him 2 Kings 25:5. Jeremiah had told him for years that surrender would spare the city and that flight would not save him Jeremiah 38:17–18.
They killed Zedekiah's sons before his eyes, then put out Zedekiah's eyes, bound him in fetters, and carried him to Babylon 2 Kings 25:7.
The sentence at Riblah is deliberate cruelty with a purpose: the last thing a Davidic king sees is his heirs dying, and he is then kept alive blind in Babylon. Two prophecies that appeared to contradict are both kept — he would see the king of Babylon and speak with him Jeremiah 34:3, and he would not see Babylon Ezekiel 12:13.
He burned Yahweh's house, the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem. He burned every great house with fire 2 Kings 25:9.
A month after the breach, the demolition is carried out methodically by an officer sent for the job. The temple Solomon dedicated with a prayer that already anticipated captivity 1 Kings 8:46–51, the palace, the great houses, and then the walls pulled down.
The Chaldeans broke up the pillars of bronze that were in Yahweh's house and the bases and the bronze sea... and carried the bronze pieces to Babylon 2 Kings 25:13.
And here the book does something almost unbearable. It inventories the temple furnishings as they are broken up — the pillars, the stands, the great sea on its twelve oxen, the pots and shovels and snuffers — in the same style, item by item, in which their manufacture was described 1 Kings 7:15–45. Jachin and Boaz, the pillars whose names meant he establishes and in him is strength, are measured one last time 2 Kings 25:17 and cut up for metal. Solomon left their bronze unweighed because there was too much of it 1 Kings 7:47; now it is weighed, because it is scrap.
The king of Babylon attacked them and put them to death at Riblah in the land of Hamath. So Judah was carried away captive out of his land 2 Kings 25:21.
The chief priest, the second priest, the doorkeepers, the officers and sixty men of the people are executed at the imperial headquarters. Then the sentence that ends four hundred years: Judah carried out of its land, in the same words used of Israel 2 Kings 17:23.
What the book has been arguing for twenty-five chapters is what makes this bearable to read. This is not the defeat of Judah's God by Babylon's. It is the act of Judah's God, announced by every prophet he sent, executed on schedule — which means the people sitting in Babylon are not the property of Marduk. They are still in the hands of the one who said this would happen, and he has said other things too.
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