Study Desk

"But now listen! Do you hear it? A cry out of Babylon! An unearthly wail out of Chaldea! God is taking his wrecking bar to Babylon. We'll be hearing the last of her noise— Death throes like the crashing of waves, death rattles like the roar of cataracts. The avenging destroyer is about to enter Babylon: Her soldiers are taken, her weapons are trashed. Indeed, God is a God who evens things out. All end up with their just deserts.

"I'll get them drunk, the whole lot of them— princes, sages, governors, soldiers. Dead drunk, they'll sleep—and sleep and sleep... and never wake up." The King's Decree. His name? God -of-the-Angel-Armies!

God -of-the-Angel-Armies speaks: "The city walls of Babylon—those massive walls!— will be flattened. And those city gates—huge gates!— will be set on fire. The harder you work at this empty life, the less you are. Nothing comes of ambition like this but ashes."

Jeremiah had written down in a little booklet all the bad things that would come down on Babylon. He told Seraiah, "When you get to Babylon, read this out in public. Read, ‘You, O God , said that you would destroy this place so that nothing could live here, neither human nor animal—a wasteland to top all wastelands, an eternal nothing.'

As far as God was concerned, Zedekiah was just one more evil king, a carbon copy of Jehoiakim.

The source of all this doom to Jerusalem and Judah was God 's anger. God turned his back on them as an act of judgment. Zedekiah revolted against the king of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar set out for Jerusalem with a full army. He set up camp and sealed off the city by building siege mounds around it. He arrived on the ninth year and tenth month of Zedekiah's reign. The city was under siege for nineteen months (until the eleventh year of Zedekiah).

In the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon on the seventh day of the fifth month, Nebuzaradan, the king of Babylon's chief deputy, arrived in Jerusalem. He burned the Temple of God to the ground, went on to the royal palace, and then finished off the city. He burned the whole place down. He put the Babylonian troops he had with him to work knocking down the city walls. Finally, he rounded up everyone left in the city, including those who had earlier deserted to the king of Babylon, and took them off into exile. He left a few poor dirt farmers behind to tend the vineyards and what was left of the fields.

The Babylonians broke up the bronze pillars, the bronze washstands, and the huge bronze basin (the Sea) that were in the Temple of God , and hauled the bronze off to Babylon. They also took the various bronze-crafted liturgical accessories, as well as the gold and silver censers and sprinkling bowls, used in the services of Temple worship. The king's deputy didn't miss a thing. He took every scrap of precious metal he could find.

The amount of bronze they got from the two pillars, the Sea, the twelve bronze bulls that supported the Sea, and the ten washstands that Solomon had made for the Temple of God was enormous. They couldn't weigh it all! Each pillar stood twenty-seven feet high with a circumference of eighteen feet. The pillars were hollow, the bronze a little less than an inch thick. Each pillar was topped with an ornate capital of bronze pomegranates and filigree, which added another seven and a half feet to its height. There were ninety-six pomegranates evenly spaced—in all, a hundred pomegranates worked into the filigree.

Her enemies have become her masters. Her foes are living it up because God laid her low, punishing her repeated rebellions. Her children, prisoners of the enemy, trudge into exile.

She played fast and loose with life, she never considered tomorrow, and now she's crashed royally, with no one to hold her hand: "Look at my pain, O God ! And how the enemy cruelly struts."

All the people groaned, so desperate for food, so desperate to stay alive that they bartered their favorite things for a bit of breakfast: "O God , look at me! Worthless, cheap, abject!

"And you passersby, look at me! Have you ever seen anything like this? Ever seen pain like my pain, seen what he did to me, what God did to me in his rage?

Zion reached out for help, but no one helped. God ordered Jacob's enemies to surround him, and now no one wants anything to do with Jerusalem.

" God has right on his side. I'm the one who did wrong. Listen everybody! Look at what I'm going through! My fair young women, my fine young men, all herded into exile!

"O God , look at the trouble I'm in! My stomach in knots, my heart wrecked by a life of rebellion. Massacres in the streets, starvation in the houses.

He plowed up his old trysting place, trashed his favorite rendezvous. God wiped out Zion's memories of feast days and Sabbaths, angrily sacked king and priest alike.

God abandoned his altar, walked away from his holy Temple and turned the fortifications over to the enemy. As they cheered in God 's Temple, you'd have thought it was a feast day!

God drew up plans to tear down the walls of Daughter Zion. He assembled his crew, set to work and went at it. Total demolition! The stones wept!

Her city gates, iron bars and all, disappeared in the rubble: her kings and princes off to exile—no one left to instruct or lead; her prophets useless—they neither saw nor heard anything from God .