Jerusalem Falls to Babylon After Thirty-Month Siege; First Temple in Flames

The Temple was burning by mid-afternoon. Babylonian troops under the general Nevuzaradan set the Sanctuary alight on the ninth of Av, two days after breaching the inner courts, and by nightfall the gold plating was running down between the stones. Four hundred and ten years after King Shlomo's dedication, the House built to hold the Presence of God was gone.

The end came slowly. For thirty months the army of the Babylonian emperor Nevuchadnetzar had sat outside the walls, tightening the ring around a city that would not surrender. Inside, the famine turned mothers into strangers to their own children. Wealthy women who had once kept servants stood in the markets with nothing left to trade. On the ninth of Tammuz, three weeks ago, the walls were breached. The daily offering, unbroken since Sinai, stopped that same day when the priests searched the city and could not find a single sheep.

None of this was a surprise to the prophet Yirmiyahu. For forty years he had told anyone who would listen — and most would not — that if Judah kept worshipping the idols of its neighbors and if its king kept plotting against Babylon, the city would fall and the Temple with it. He was called a traitor for it. He spent most of the final siege at the bottom of a muddy cistern, thrown there by court officials who wanted him silent. His message never changed: surrender, and the people will live.

King Tzidkiyahu, installed on the throne eighteen years ago as Nevuchadnetzar's vassal, chose the opposite course. He rebelled, and when the walls broke he ran. Scouts caught him on the plains of Yericho. His sons were executed in front of him. Then his eyes were put out, and he was taken east in chains — fulfilling, in a way no one had understood, two prophecies that had seemed to contradict each other. Yirmiyahu had said the king would be brought to Babylon. Yechezkel had said he would never see it. Both were now true.

Inside the burning courtyard, according to accounts preserved in the Talmud, Nevuzaradan noticed blood bubbling up from the stones and would not settle. Told by the surviving priests that it was the blood of the prophet Zechariah, murdered on that spot generations earlier by a king of Judah, the general tried to quiet it with more killing — of the Sanhedrin, of young priests, of schoolchildren. Only when the slaughter reached staggering numbers did the blood stop. The Talmud records that Nevuzaradan, shaken by what he had done, eventually turned back a changed man.

Another tradition, preserved in Tractate Ta'anit, tells of the young priests on the roof of the burning Sanctuary. They lifted the keys of the Temple toward the sky. "Master of the Universe," they called out, "since we were not worthy to guard Your keys, take them back." They threw the keys upward, and jumped into the fire.

The Menorah, the golden altar, the showbread table, the copper basins — the Babylonians were loading all of it onto wagons for the road east. The survivors were being marched after them. Yirmiyahu, released from prison by the invading army and permitted to remain in the ruined land, was walking the empty streets tonight. According to the tradition, the opening lines of the book that would become Eichah were coming to him one Hebrew letter at a time. "How does the city sit alone, that used to be full of people." Aleph. "She cries all night, and her tears are on her cheeks." Bet.

The Talmud asks why the fast day is set on the ninth of Av, since the fire kept burning into the tenth. The answer given is that the beginning of a disaster hurts more than the end.

A note on the year: traditional Jewish reckoning, following Seder Olam, places this night at 3338 from Creation — the year corresponding to 422 BCE. Historians working from Babylonian records date it to 586 BCE. This Chronicle records both. The ninth of Av is the same day.