It was the summer of 586BC in what was a series of God planned Judgments for the punishment of the Kingdom of Judah, that the remaining tribes of Benjamin, Levi and Judah experienced 8 months of morbidity that only siege warfare can teach.
The king, now known as Zedekiah, the third son of King Josiah, the last good and successful King of the Jews, had his name changed from Mattaniah, by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon when Mattaniah's brother, Jehoiachin, who led a rebellion against the Chaldeans of Babylon, lost and was deposed.
God's plans of punishment in the time of Jeremiah the Prophet, produced a king of what was left of Judah with the princes and advisers who learned nothing from the insurrection, in Zedekiah made an alliance with Pharoah Hopra of Egypt, which brought down the wrath of Babylon, as the army was sent to crush the rebellion by seige warfare.
There is always anxiety and hope when the rumors begin about the coming of an invasion force. Soon preparations for the seige take place, and soon enough the city is sealed and those dust clouds of the invading army arrive, and that horde begins it's work of the seige engine in building ramps and making the city a prison.
Judah in 586BC had three fortresses. Jerusalem the capital. Lacish the impregnable city of the Philistine plain of the Canaanites who under King Rehoboam, Solomon's only son, became a fortress city. The last being Azekah as a stronghold.
The Babylonian army sealed Judah off and the cities became all that was left of the Kingdom of David, so powerful, prosperous and just.
A group of messages was located in Lachish which sums up everything of the last days of Judah. On the broken pieces the, Ya'osh the Governor has given orders for the watch, and in a plaintive message the scribes relate the following text.
"We are watching for the signals of Lachish, according to all the indications my Lord has given, for we can not see Azekah.
What the orders were, for the watchmen to keep track of the signal fires of the fortresses, as this was their only means of communication. If the fires were burning, it meant the cities were still under seige. If the fires were out, the entire city was dead.
That is the message at that moment in 586BC in the watchmen have noted that Azekah has been destroyed by the Babylonians, and the urgency is to see if the fortress of Lachish is still holding out.
None of the cities survived. In a desperate move, King Hezekiah, after having Jeremiah rescued from certain death by the princes, cut through the walls of Jerusalem one night and made a mistake.
Jeremiah the Prophet had warned the entire leadership of Jerusalem to go out to the Babylonians and save themselves, but Hezekiah was terrified of his own princes and even more terrified of his own people who had gone out to the Babylonian army, whom Hezekiah presumed would torture him for sport to gain favor with Babylon.
For the warnings Jeremiah was deemed a traitor and a Babylonian agent was thrown into a muddy well to die.
Saved, Jeremiah was in the king's court until the Babylonians entered the city, and given a daily ration of bread until the bread ran out.
King Hezekiah and the entire royal troop were captured Under guard, Nebuchadnezzar summoned them for judgment at Riblah, where Nebuchadnezzar having enough of Jewish rebellion, executed every Jewish prince before their father's eyes, and after complete, Zedekiah's eyes were gouged out so the last thing he saw was his sons slaughtered.
Nebuzarradan, the General of the Babylonian army, then proceeded to crush and burn Jerusalem to a pile of rubble.
After the slaughter, rapes, looting and enslavement, the best were taken in Daniel to serve the empire, while the poor were left to tend the vineyards.
Considering all what took place in the revolt, the kindness of Nebuchadnezzar still allowing self rule, and the further revolt, the Babylonians were quite civil in when the Romans faced the same continuous Jewish problem, in 70AD obliterated the city and sold every Jew into slavery.
It must be something to be caught in a city in a country, your own, and knowing mass rape and murder is your end.
The signal fires went out as they watched the horizon in hope.
Lame Cherry
Coming to America in the future events.
agtG
