Jeremiah 52:1-16

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king. He reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah, of Libnah. He did what was displeasing in the sight of YAHWEH, just as King Jehoiakim had done. YAHWEH became so angry with the people of Jerusalem and Judah that he banished them from the land. Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon. In the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon attacked Jerusalem with his entire army and laid siege to it. After the city had been surrounded for a year and half, they broke through the city walls. On the ninth day of the fourth month, the famine was so severe in the city that there was nothing left to eat. That was when the Babylonians broke through the city wall. That same night, Zedekiah and his soldiers tried to escape through the gate between the two walls near the royal garden even though they knew the enemy had the city surrounded. They fled toward the Jordan Valley, but the Babylonians pursued King Zedekiah and overtook him in the plains of Jericho. All his army deserted him there and fled. The Babylonians captured him and brought him to King Nebuchadnezzar, who was based at the town of Riblah in the territory of Hamath, where he passed sentence on Zedekiah. Nebuchadnezzar had Zedekiah’s sons slaughtered at Riblah, and Zedekiah was forced to watch their execution. The king of Babylon also executed all the officials of Judah. Then he put out Zedekiah’s eyes and bound him with chains. Then they dragged him off blinded to distant Babylon and put him in prison till the day of his death. In the nineteenth year that Nebuchadnezzar was king of Babylon, on the tenth day of the fifth month of that year, the field general Nebuzaradan, who served the king, entered Jerusalem. He burned down the temple of YAHWEH, the royal palace, and all the homes of the wealthy of Jerusalem, and other buildings went up in flames. The Babylonians under the command of Nebuzaradan demolished all the walls surrounding Jerusalem. Nebuzaradan, the field general, took as prisoners some of the poor who were left behind in Jerusalem, together with the skilled workers and the deserters who had gone over to him. But he also left behind some of the extremely poor people in the land of Judah. They owned nothing, but he gave them vineyards and fields of their own.