The king then died
and was replaced by his brother Jehoiakin, who also did evil in the eyes of
God.
I think they were so beyond it by then that they had no concept of right
and wrong.
In his 8th
year, Nebuchadnezzar led him and his best men captive and took all the wealth
of the treasury and the temple.
He left Zedekiah to
reign. He also did evil in God’s eyes. Indeed he rebelled against God, who
stiffened his neck so that Judah could be completely erased.
Then, in Zedekiah’s 9th
year, Nebuchadnezzar returned, laid siege to the city for 2 years and then
literally starved the city into submission.
When they surrendered,
Zedekiah’s family was executed and his eyes were removed. The city was utterly
crushed, burnt and denuded of every piece of value that remained.
Nebuchadnezzar then
left a garrison to watch over the city and left the poor to dress vines and till
the soil. Jerusalem, the city of peace, lay gasping in her death throes.
It’s a great mercy of
God that he spared them of the Assyrians.
Assyria would have brutalized
their leaders and many others, quite randomly, and then he would have dispersed
the remnant randomly throughout the Assyrian empire, to force assimilation and to
prevent them from regrouping.
That is why the northern
tribes were lost, and forever lost at that. However, it seems that God still
loved them, thus in Isaiah 11:11 we read: In that day the Lord will reach out
his hand a second time to reclaim the remnant that is left of his people from
Assyria, from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, from Cush, from Elam, from
Babylonia, from Hamath and from the islands of the sea.
Matthew 15:24 further
confirms that Jesus was sent to the lost sheep of Israel.
There are many legends
and stories about the lost tribes and some claim that Britain inherited many of
them. The hymn, “Jerusalem”, in Chariots of Fire, relives that idea.
Its not an idea
embraced by orthodox theologians and I don’t subscribe to it either, but I would
love to do a study on the subject anyway.
Now Judah had a
different fate. Thanks to the revivals under Hezekiah and Josiah, they were
spared the fate of Israel, but judgment fell anyway.
The Babylonians
destroyed the city of Jerusalem as Isaiah had promised and left it as a smoking
ruin.
Nebuchadnezzar also led the captives away in chains, but thereafter they
enjoyed a relatively benign exile. Babylon was provincialized and ruled by
Satraps, who decentralized the crown.
It meant that the
remnant of Judah could settle down, work, secure land, till the earth and live
relatively normal lives as regular Babylonian subjects.
Indeed, a number made
it into high office within the palace.
Thanks to that key
difference in military doctrine, God ensured that the Jews in exile survived
and held together long enough to return and recolonize Judah.
Thus his promise to
David was not forsaken. He exiled them for 70 years, longer than the generational
exile of the Wilderness, but timed to make up for the 70 Sabbath years neglected
by Judah. They made up for that in every way and never repeated the offence.
It served as a
wonderful instrument for acculturating Judah and ensuring that their feasts
were ingrained deep into their hearts and minds, never to be lost again.
Gedaliah, the Chaldeen
guard who was appointed to watch over them, was murdered, so many of those left
fled to Egypt.
Back in Babylon,
Jehoiakin was elevated and treated with dignity as a king: a sign of goodwill
from Nebuchadnezzar who needed to ensure a peaceful transition of the Jews in
Babylonian life.
He was the last king
of Judah or Israel. The age of kings had past.
A long period of lamenting and
hardship awaited all the residue of Judah, but God preserved them and brought
them home 70 years later.
What an amazing story
and how it still informs our present world. God help us to learn from their
lessons, lest we repeat their mistakes.
(c) Peter Missing @ bethelstone.com
