Siege of Jerusalem (587 BC): Fall of Judah to Babylon

The siege of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BC was the campaign in which the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II captured and destroyed the capital of the Kingdom of Judah. His troops burned the Temple built by Solomon, demolished the city walls and deported many of the survivors to Babylonia. The event ended four centuries of rule by the House of David and opened the period known as the Babylonian Exile, which reshaped Jewish religion and identity.

Background: Judah between Egypt and Babylon

In the late seventh century BC the Assyrian Empire, which had dominated the Near East for generations, collapsed under attack from the Babylonians and the Medes. Egypt tried to fill the gap in the Levant, but in 605 BC the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar defeated the Egyptian army at the Battle of Carchemish. Within months he became king, and the small states of Syria and Palestine had to accept Babylonian overlordship.

Judah, a hill kingdom centred on Jerusalem, was one of them. King Jehoiakim submitted to Babylon around 604 BC, but after a costly and indecisive clash between Babylon and Egypt in 601 BC he stopped paying tribute. Judah had been caught between great powers before: a century earlier the Assyrian king Sennacherib had devastated its countryside, as described in the article on the siege of Lachish.

The first capture and Zedekiah’s revolt

Nebuchadnezzar’s response came in the winter of 598/597 BC. Jehoiakim died as the Babylonian army approached, and his young son Jehoiachin surrendered after a short siege. The Babylonian Chronicle, a series of cuneiform tablets recording events year by year, notes that the king of Babylon seized the “city of Judah” on the second day of the month of Adar in his seventh year, which corresponds to mid-March 597 BC.

Jehoiachin, the royal family, officials, soldiers and craftsmen were deported to Babylon. The Bible gives figures of 10,000 or 8,000 for this deportation, while a separate list in Jeremiah 52 gives 3,023, so the true number is uncertain. The prophet Ezekiel was among the exiles. Nebuchadnezzar installed Jehoiachin’s uncle Mattaniah as king and renamed him Zedekiah.

Zedekiah ruled as a vassal for about a decade, but his court was divided. One faction urged loyalty to Babylon; another hoped that Egypt, now ruled by the energetic pharaoh Apries (called Hophra in the Bible), would back a revolt. The prophet Jeremiah warned repeatedly that resistance would end in disaster and was treated as a traitor for saying so.

Around 589 or 588 BC Zedekiah broke with Babylon. Other small states in the region, including Tyre and Ammon, were also restless, and Nebuchadnezzar led an army west, setting up his headquarters at Riblah in central Syria. From there his commanders moved against Judah’s fortified towns and its capital.

The siege and fall of the city

According to 2 Kings 25, the Babylonian army arrived before Jerusalem on the tenth day of the tenth month of Zedekiah’s ninth year, in the winter of 589/588 or 588/587 BC, and built siege works around the walls. The book of Jeremiah records that the siege was lifted for a time when an Egyptian force marched north, but the Egyptians withdrew and the blockade resumed.

Elsewhere in Judah the fortresses fell one by one. Ostraca (inscribed pottery sherds) found at Lachish in 1935 contain letters from an officer to his commander. One of them reports that the writer was watching for the fire signals of Lachish because he could no longer see those of Azekah, which suggests that Azekah had already fallen.

Inside Jerusalem famine became severe. On the ninth day of the fourth month of Zedekiah’s eleventh year, in the summer of 587 or 586 BC, the Babylonians breached the wall. Zedekiah and his soldiers escaped at night through a gate near the royal garden and fled towards the Jordan valley, but they were overtaken in the plains of Jericho.

The king was taken to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah. According to the biblical account his sons were executed in front of him, he was blinded and he was led to Babylon in bronze chains. Several senior officials and priests were later executed at Riblah as well.

The destruction of the Temple

About a month after the breach, Nebuzaradan, the commander of Nebuchadnezzar’s guard, arrived in Jerusalem. 2 Kings dates his arrival to the seventh day of the fifth month and Jeremiah to the tenth. He burned the Temple, the royal palace and the houses of the city’s leading families, and his troops pulled down the walls.

The bronze pillars, basins and other furnishings of the Temple were broken up and carried off to Babylon. The Ark of the Covenant is not mentioned in the account of the looting, and its fate is unknown. Jewish tradition came to commemorate both the burning of this First Temple and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70 on the fast of Tisha B’Av.

Archaeologists have found clear traces of the destruction. Excavations in the City of David uncovered collapsed and burnt houses, including the so-called Burnt Room and the House of Ahiel. In the Jewish Quarter, Nahman Avigad found arrowheads, among them bronze three-bladed types, in a burnt layer near a fortification tower. Dozens of clay seal impressions (bullae) were baked hard by the fire that destroyed the building where they were kept; one names Gemaryahu son of Shaphan, an official who appears in the book of Jeremiah.

Key people

• Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned 605–562 BC) was the most powerful king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, famous also for rebuilding Babylon and its Ishtar Gate.
• Zedekiah was the last king of Judah, a son of Josiah placed on the throne by Babylon in 597 BC.
• Nebuzaradan was the Babylonian officer who carried out the destruction and organised the deportation.
• Jeremiah was the prophet who urged surrender; his book is a major source for the siege.
• Gedaliah, from a prominent family of royal officials, was appointed governor of Judah after the fall.

Aftermath and the Babylonian Exile

Judah ceased to be a kingdom. The Babylonians made it a province and appointed Gedaliah as governor, ruling from Mizpah north of Jerusalem. Within a short time he was murdered by Ishmael, a member of the royal family, and many of the remaining leaders fled to Egypt, taking Jeremiah with them against his will.

Deportations took place in several waves. Jeremiah 52 lists 3,023 people taken in 597 BC, 832 in Nebuchadnezzar’s eighteenth year and 745 five years later, a total of 4,600. These figures probably count only adult men or heads of households, and historians continue to debate how much of the population was removed. Archaeology shows that Jerusalem and its surroundings were badly depopulated, while the area of Benjamin to the north was less affected.

In Babylonia the exiles formed communities along the canals near Nippur. Cuneiform ration lists from Babylon record oil issued to “Ya’u-kinu, king of the land of Yahudu”, that is, the exiled Jehoiachin, and to his sons. The longer story of this community is told in the article on the Babylonian Exile.

Sources and debates

The main account of the siege comes from the Hebrew Bible, especially 2 Kings 24–25 and Jeremiah 39 and 52, supplemented by the books of Lamentations and Ezekiel and by Psalm 137, which begins with the exiles weeping by the rivers of Babylon. These texts were shaped by later writers who interpreted the catastrophe as divine judgement, but their outline of events fits well with external evidence.

The Babylonian Chronicle provides precise confirmation of the 597 BC capture, but the tablets for the years after 594 BC are missing, so no Babylonian narrative of the final siege survives. This gap is one reason why historians still disagree whether the city fell in 587 or 586 BC. The difference depends on how the reign years of Zedekiah and Nebuchadnezzar are counted and when each calendar year began.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 605 BC: Nebuchadnezzar defeats Egypt at Carchemish and becomes king of Babylon.
• c. 604 BC: King Jehoiakim of Judah submits to Babylon.
• c. 601 BC: After an inconclusive battle between Babylon and Egypt, Jehoiakim rebels.
• 597 BC, March: Jerusalem surrenders; Jehoiachin is deported and Zedekiah is made king.
• c. 589/588 BC: Zedekiah rebels, and the Babylonian army begins its siege of Jerusalem.
• c. 588/587 BC: An Egyptian army briefly forces the Babylonians to lift the siege.
• 587 or 586 BC, summer: The walls are breached; Zedekiah is captured near Jericho.
• 587 or 586 BC, about a month later: Nebuzaradan burns the Temple and the city.
• c. 582 BC: A third deportation, of 745 people, is recorded in Jeremiah 52.
• 539–538 BC: Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon and allows exiles to return.

Why it matters

The fall of Jerusalem destroyed the Judean state, but not the people who identified with it. In exile, priests and scribes gathered and edited traditions that became central parts of the Hebrew Bible, and worship began to focus on law, prayer and study rather than on a single temple. When the Persians later let exiles go home, as described in the article on the return from exile, they rebuilt the Temple on its old site. The memory of 587/586 BC has remained part of Jewish liturgy ever since.