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"I Sat Alone"

Jeremiah Among the Prophets

MICHAEL AVIOZ

T i g) r i $ 2009

First Gorgias Press Edition, 2009

trieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani cal, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written

permission of Gorgias Press LLC.

Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey

ISBN: 978-1-59333-854-1

T i 6) r i s An Imprint of

GORGIAS PRESS 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ

08854 USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Avioz, Michael, 1967-

[Nevu'ato shel Yirmeyahu. English] I sat alone : Jeremiah among the prophets / Michael Av

ioz. -- 1st Gorgias Press ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59333-854-1 (alk. paper)

1. Jeremiah (Biblical prophet) 2. Bible. O.T. Jeremiah- -Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title. BS580.J4A9513 2009 224 ' . 206--dc22

2009001234

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standards.

9 THE END OF THE KINGDOM OF JUDAH

According to the book of Kings, the kings of Judah were to blame for the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the people from their land to Babylon. The kings did not heed the advice of the prophets. They did not maintain the social orders and the fulfillment of the commandments. The Covenant between the people and their God was violated. For all these God punished the people with exile and destruction.

Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the law that I commanded your ancestors and that I sent to you by mv servants the prophets. They would not listen but were stubborn, as their ancestors had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God. They despised his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their ancestors, and the warnings that he gave them. They went after false idols and became false; they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do as they did. They rejected all the commandments of the Lord their God and made for themselves cast images of two calves; they made a sa cred pole, worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. They made their sons and their daughters pass through fire; they used divination and augury; and they sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, pro voking him to anger. Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight; none was left but the tribe of Judah alone. Judah also did not keep the commandments of the Lord their God but walked in the customs that Israel had introduced (2 Kings 17: 13-19).

The person blamed the most was Manasseh King of Judah. However, he was only the straw that broke the camel's back, or die "hammer blow", since he was preceded by a long history of the people's sins from the days of the exodus from Egypt (2 Kings 21). Judah's exile to Babylon was the last stage in a deterioration which began with the division of the monarchy into two kingdoms and continued with the exile of the Kingdom of Israel to Assyria and its destruction. The threat mentioned in the Reproaches of the Pentateuch was thus realized. For example:

62 I Sat Alone

The Lord will bring a nation from far away, from the end of the earth, to swoop down on you like an eagle, a nation whose language you do not understand, a grim-faced nation showing no respect to the old or favor to the young. It shall consume the fruit of your livestock and the fruit of your ground until you are destroyed, leaving you neither grain, wine, and oil, nor the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock, until it has made you perish. It shall besiege you in all your towns until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down throughout your land; it shall be siege you in all your towns throughout the land that the Lord your God has given you. In the desperate straits to which the enemy siege reduces you, you will eat die fruit of your womb, the flesh of your own sons and daugh ters whom the Lord your God has given you (Deuteronomy 28: 49-53).

The book of Jeremiah, like the book of Kings, comprises a bill of in dictment against the people and their leaders. Had they heeded Jeremiah's advice to mend their ways and especially to surrender to Babylon, the de struction and the exile would have been prevented. The unique aspect of the book of Jeremiah is that the essence of the story of the destruction is told by way of a dramatic plot. The prophet's biography is integrated in the history of the Kingdom of Judah.

Jeremiah's prophecy that the Babylonians will come to Jerusalem was realized in full. Jeremiah tried until the final hours to persuade Zedekiah, the last remaining king, to surrender to Babylon and not try to collaborate with Egypt against Babvlon. However, he did not succeed, although the relations between Jeremiah and Zedekiah were different from his relations with other kings. Zedekiah respected the prophet and believed him. The tragedy was that he was not courageous enough to employ his authority as king and refuse the advice of the ministers who instructed him to act in a way completely contrary to Jeremiah's advice. The contribution of the false prophets should also be mentioned. They cultivated the belief in Jerusalem's immunity.

As mentioned, the Babylonians appointed Zedekiah as King of Judah in 597 BCK. They made a vassal pact with him, within whose framework they were obligated to protect him from external threats, and in return he was committed to be loyal to them and support them at all times. However, the Babylonians soon understood that Zedekiah was not loyal to them as agreed in the pact made betw-een them. During this period Egypt began to recover and offered active aid to the Kingdom of Judah in getting rid of the Babylonians. The Babylonians, who until then gave their subjects great freedom of movement, decided that from then on they would be more in volved in the kingdoms under their domination.

9 The End of the Kingdom ofjudah 63

The Babylonians decided to abolish the rule of the House of David in Judah and destroy Jerusalem which resisted the rule of Babylon. They de cided to carm out a siege. The date is given to us in the book of Kings: the tenth of Tevet, the year 588 BCE. This siege lasted for almost two years.

The historian and biblical scholar Israel Ephal describes the reasons for using the technique of the siege in antiquity in a comprehensive research on siege in the ancient near East. The decision to find protection behind the city walls was made by the inhabitants of Jerusalem. They understood that they had no chance in face to face battle against the Babylonians and therefore preferred a prolonged static battle. It was assumed that the enemy would become exhausted in a prolonged siege. This would obligate the en emy to constant supply of equipment, and life opposite the walls would cause the enemy to withdraw and abandon. A plastic illustration of the siege techniques was preserved in the murals which were painted in the palace of Sennacherib King of Assyria in Nineveh, not far from the city of Mosul in today's Iraq. Copies of these paintings are also found in Israeli museums.

However, in the end the siege acted mainly to the detriment of the be sieged in Jerusalem. They were in quarantine. They could not leave the city or ask others to enter it. Food supplies ran out, and according to Lamenta tions, which describes the sights of the destruction, it appears that there was cannibalism in Jerusalem: women ate the meat of their children. The siege also led to the plague and outbreaks of disease because of impaired sanitary conditions. The description of the campaign of Sennacherib in the books of Kings and Isaiah indicate that the attackers sometimes used psychological warfare techniques. They tried to frighten the people, to create divides be tween the people and the government, to create despair among the warri ors. In parallel, they attempted to breach the wall using battering rams, and sometimes even penetrated under the walls by digging tunnels.

During the first stage of the siege Zedekiah sent a royal delegation to Jeremiah because he wanted to find out whether Jerusalem was destined to be saved by a miracle. This is told in chapter 21. Zedekiah assumed that God will perform a miracle for those besieged in Jerusalem just like he did during the days of the campaign of Sennacherib. However, the answer that Jeremiah gives to the king's messengers is disappointing. God wall not fight for Jerusalem, but against it. He will enable the Babylonians to conquer the city. The only way out is to surrender to the Babylonians voluntarily and thus save the lives of those remaining in Jerusalem.

Chapters 32 and 34 describe more stages of the siege. Here too Jeremiah continues to preach to voluntary surrender to the Babylonians. For this he is arrested and placed in prison, in a kind of detention house

64 I Sat Alone

adjacent to the palace. He personally informs Zedekiah that he will be caught by the Babylonians and will not be able to escape them.

The final stage of the siege is described in chapters 37-39. After over a year of enduring the siege, Zedekiah sends a second delegation to Jeremiah with the aim of receiving a Redempdon prophecy or a prophecy of salva tion for Jerusalem. This time the circumstances seemingly changed in favor of Judah. The King of Egypt did indeed appear in the Judah region and his arrival caused a withdrawal of the Babylonians. However, Jeremiah's answer was negative this time too. Jeremiah adds that all of Judah's reliance on Egypt is fundamentally mistaken, because the fate of Jerusalem has been decided. Nothing can save it, and there is no point in continuing to fight. The continued fighting will only make matters worse, because the with drawal is onlv temporary and tactical, and in the end the Babylonians will return. In the last chapter of the book, which lists the names of the exiled and the loot taken by the Babylonians, it appears that a group of about eight hundred people listened to Jeremiah and passed over to the Babylonian side after they declared their surrender (Jeremiah 32: 29). However, Zedekiah did not act in this manner.

After these events Jeremiah was arrested on a charge of treason. First he was placed in an especially crowded detention house and after he re peated his prophecy he was thrown into the pit, just like Joseph in the book of Genesis (Jeremiah 38). Jeremiah was beginning to drown, but nobody dared save him, except for one non-Jew named Ebed-melech the Ethio pian. He turns toward Jeremiah and Jeremiah is pulled out of the pit and returned to the prison, because the ministers refused to let him go. He re mained there until the Babylonians broke into the citv.

At the end of chapter 38 Zedekiah tries for the last time to ask Jeremiah "What will be", but nothing has changed. Jeremiah advises Zede kiah to surrender voluntarily in order to spare a Babylonian revenge on him and his people for forcing them to maintain a siege for such a long time. Zedekiah says that he is afraid of his ministers and is especially afraid of those who have already deserted to the Babylonian side, because he thinks that the Babylonians will hand him over to these people, and they will casti gate him.

The description ends: Zedekiah is not courageous enough to strongly object to the ministers. On the other hand Jeremiah has not changed his position. The Babylonians breach the walls on the ninth of Tamuz and en ter Jerusalem. Until the 10th of Av, the date on which the First Temple was burned, they apparendy hold trials at the city gate (as prophesied by

9 The End of the Kingdom of Judah 65

Jeremiah in chapter 1) and decide who will remain in the city and who will be taken to Babylon.

We will now take a break in order to clarify a problematic point in the stories. When was the First Temple burned by the Babylonians?

According to the book of Kings the Temple was burned by the Baby lonians on the seventh of Ab, whereas the book of Jeremiah records that it took place on the tenth of Ab. And if this confusion is not enough, the Rabbis set the ninth of Ab as the fast day. How can these contradictions be reconciled? The Rabbis took a harmonistic view according to which the Babylonians reached the Temple on the seventh of Ab and the entire proc ess ended on the tenth of Ab. However, a scientific approach to the biblical text cannot accept harmonistic solutions.

It therefore appears that the original date was preserved in the book of Jeremiah and that it is the tenth of Ab. A precise comparison of the two versions, in the book of Kings and in the book of Jeremiah, indicates that the book of Jeremiah contains a more complete version.

The Rabbis set the ninth of Ab as a day of remembrance for the de struction of both Temples. However, the ninth of Ab was actually the date on which the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 CE.

Setting the day of remembrance according to the date of the Second Temple apparently stemmed from the fact that this event was closer to their time than the destruction of the First Temple. In any case, they did not want to set two consecutive dates of fasting, one for remembering the de struction of the First Temple and one for the Second Temple, according to the rule that "one does not make an edict for the public, unless most of the public can uphold it" (Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 36a).

We will now return to the description in the biblical text. Zedekiah tries to escape from the Babylonians at night, because he knows what he can expect. He escapes until he reaches Jericho and there is caught. He ap- parendy tried to reach Ammon and Moab, which were among the nations that came to Jerusalem in the fourdi year of his reign, and which planned the rebellion against Babylon (Jeremiah 27). However, Zedekiah does not manage to reach a safe haven. He was caught and taken to the Babylonian headquarters in lliblah in northern Syria, where he was tried and accused of rebelling against the Babylonians. The Babylonians killed Zedekiah's sons before his eyes and then gouged out his eyes. This is how they also acted towards other nations and vassals that violated the conditions of the pact. Zedekiah's fate after this is not known. Did he die in Babylon or was he returned to Jerusalem?

66 I Sat Alone

The Babylonians burned the Temple and looted its treasures. The priests, functionaries and military leaders who remained in the city were killed, and others were exiled to Babylon. The Babylonians chose those who would go to Babylon carefully. They wanted to ensure that those exiled to Babylon would not disrupt arrangements that were already achieved with those exiled during the days of Jehoiachin in the year 597 BCK.

The kingship of the Mouse of David ceased, and has not been renewed to this day. There is no doubt that this action led to a very great crisis among the people, who believed that the Temple would exist forever, that the kingship of the House of David would exist forever, and that the people of Israel would inhabit the Land of Israel forever. Reality proved them wrong. Indeed, an argument between the people and their God on this mat ter can be found in several texts in the prophetical books and in Psalms. The prophets are convinced that the people and their leaders are to blame, whereas the people claim that there was no fault in their actions and point an accusing finger towards God himself. God is the one who violated his Covenant with them. A strong formulation is found in Lamentations 5: 7: "Our ancestors sinned; they are no more, and we bear their iniquities"; in Psalm 89: 39-40: "But now you have spurned and rejected him; you are full of wrath against your anointed. You have renounced the covenant with your sen-ant; you have defiled his crown in the dust"; and in Psalm 44: 18: "All this has come upon us, vet we have not forgotten you, or been false to your covenant".

The Babylonians find the prophet Jeremiah among the inhabitants of Judah (Jeremiah 39: 11). It turns out that they had received information about J eremiah's preaching to surrender to Babylon and therefore give him two alternatives: he can stay in Israel or go into exile (Jeremiah 40: 1-6). In the end Jeremiah remains in Israel, but his prophecy has not yet ended, be cause the entire people have not gone to Babylon.

In the next chapter we will discuss the reality in Judah after the de struction and Jeremiah's prophecies to those who remained.