Yirmiyahu Walks Through the Burning City

Four hundred and ten years have passed since fire fell from the sky on Shlomo's altar. In that time the kingdom split in two, and the ten northern tribes were marched away by the Assyrians and never came back. Eighteen years ago, the Babylonian emperor Nevuchadnetzar (Nebuchadnezzar) put a young king named Tzidkiyahu on the throne in Jerusalem to rule as his puppet. The prophet Yirmiyahu warned Tzidkiyahu, over and over, that if he tried to rebel, the whole city would fall. Tzidkiyahu rebelled anyway. The Babylonian army has been camped around Jerusalem for thirty months.

Inside the walls, starvation has done what starvation does. Mothers who used to have servants stand in the market with nothing to trade. Yirmiyahu himself has spent most of the siege at the bottom of a muddy pit for 'treason.' He kept saying the same thing: give in, and the people will live. They threw him in the pit for it. Now the walls are broken, the daily offering has stopped, and Babylonian soldiers are working their way street by street toward the Temple Mount.

On the seventh of Av the Babylonian soldiers walked into the Temple. On the eighth they wandered through the courtyards. On the afternoon of the ninth, under a general named Nevuzaradan, they set the Sanctuary on fire. The Talmud asks: since the fire kept burning through the tenth, why isn't the fast day on the tenth? Because, the Sages answer, the beginning of a disaster hurts more than the end. The mourning day is the ninth.

One story came out of the burning city that mothers told their children for centuries. Young priests, boys really, took the keys of the Temple and climbed up onto the roof as it burned. 'Master of the Universe,' they called out — the Talmud saves the exact words — 'since we didn't deserve to guard Your keys, take them back.' They threw the keys up into the sky. A hand, so to speak, came out of the sky and caught them. Then the boys jumped into the fire.

Down in the courtyard, Nevuzaradan noticed something strange. Blood on the stones of the floor was bubbling and would not stop. 'Whose blood is this?' he asked the priests he had spared. It was the blood of Zechariah, they told him — a prophet murdered on that spot centuries earlier by a king of Judah for rebuking the nation. It had been bubbling ever since. Nevuzaradan tried to calm it. He killed the Sanhedrin on those stones. Then the young priests. Then schoolchildren. The blood kept boiling. Only after he had killed nearly a million did it stop. 'If the Torah does this for one soul,' he said, shaken, and turned back toward Babylon a changed man.

The king had tried to run. Tzidkiyahu found a secret tunnel out of the city and got as far as the plains of Yericho before scouts caught him. They killed his sons in front of his eyes. Then they blinded him. Then they dragged him east in chains. In this way, two prophecies that had seemed to contradict each other both came true. Yirmiyahu had said Tzidkiyahu would be brought to Babylon. Yechezkel had said he would not see it. He was brought there — and he did not see it.

The Menorah, the golden altar, the table, the copper basins — all of it is being loaded onto Babylonian wagons tonight. The people who are left are being marched east after them. And Yirmiyahu, allowed to stay in the ruined land, is walking the streets in the dark. The words are coming to him one line at a time, one Hebrew letter after another. '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.' He does not know yet that he is writing the book Jews will read on the floor every ninth of Av from now until the House is rebuilt.

One note on the year. Two different traditions put this night in different centuries. Traditional Jewish reckoning (Seder Olam) says 3338 from Creation — 422 BCE. Historians working from Babylonian records say 586 BCE. This Chronicle notes both. The ninth of Av is the same day.