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Zedekiah was the last King of Jud ah, in whose reign it collapsed under the onslaught of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, on the Ninth Day of Ab in the year 586 BCE. We may gain some better understanding of this disaster if we summarize the cataclysmic events that preceded it.
• Nebuchadnezzar’s actions: he invaded Judah and took captive some youth and utensils from the temple (Dan 1:1-2); he invaded Judah a second time and emptied the treasures of the temple and the palace and carried into exile Judah’s leaders and skilled craftsmen.
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The book of Jeremiah interprets the Babylonian invasion of Judah as a symbol of God's rejection of injustice. It is a typological identification, but an imperfect one. Much of what the Babylonians did cannot be applied to God's judgment against evil.
- Michael Graves
Five poems, combined as the book of Lamentations, give realistic answers to these questions. However, Lamentations is more than a crying complaint against God. It explains the cause of Jerusalem’s fall and thereby give a proper perspective to their calamities.
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- God’s Justice and Sour Grapes
- Two Biblical Accounts of Judah’s Demise
- Divine Justice in Kings: The Accumulation of Sin Theory
- Divine Justice in Chronicles: The Fairness Theory
- An Alternative Theology – An Alternative History
“The fathers eat sour grapes and the children’s teeth fall out.”* This saying appears to have been one of the ways that the final generation of independent Judahites, living during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, explained their predicament to themselves. They are God-fearing people; they did not sin. Their ancestors sinned and they, the childre...
The great historiographical works in the Bible, Kings and Chronicles, each tell the story of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah from the period of the United Monarchy until the destruction of Judah (586 BCE). Each work tells the story in a different way, including different and often contradictory facts. Although sometimes these differences may refle...
Manasseh’s Sins
According to the book of Kings (2 Kings 21), the kingdom of Judah fell (586 BCE) because of the sins of the evil King Manasseh (ca. 687-642 BCE), who lived almost a century before: Despite Manasseh’s sins being so great that they cause the destruction of Judah, he felt none of the negative effects of his actions during his entire 55 years of rule (2 Kings 21:1); these were saved for his great-great-grandchildren.
The Implications of this Ideology
The implications of this ideology are somewhat startling; it means that: 1. If you sin, you may not be punished; instead, the punishment may fall to your descendants. 2. If you are exemplary, you may still be punished due to the sins of your ancestors. 3. Even if you repent your sins and the sins of your ancestors, it may not be enough to be absolved of your ancestors’ sins.
Josiah’s Insufficient Repentance
The book of Kings states this last point explicitly with regard to the repentance of Judah in the time of Josiah being insufficient to save them from God’s wrath against the (long dead) generation of Manasseh. After describing the greatness of Josiah and how much he accomplished in Judah to make the country’s practices in line with those of the Torah, 2 Kings 23 states:
Chronicles, written after Jeremiah and Ezekiel’s ideas became more prevalent, takes great issue with the perception of Divine Justice expressed here in Kings. The Chronicler’s religious belief system could not fathom God acting in such an arbitrary manner. Punishment and reward had to be carried out during the relevant individual’s lifetime.Otherwi...
This version of history is very different than that of Kings. In this version, God is extremely fair and everyone gets what they deserve. The only problem is, for Chronicles to get history to conform to his theology, he has to rewrite it. The texts cited above are just a handful of examples of over twenty accounts of reward and punishment not found...
Jeremiah was not to intercede, for Judah and Jerusalem, that the Lord would relent from the calamity that He had planned. Look at these verses: As for you, do not pray for this people, and do not lift up cry or prayer for them, and do not intercede with Me; for I do not hear you (Jeremiah 7:16).
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The prophet Jeremiah came early in Jehoiakim’s reign, saying that repentance would bring the cancelation of impending calamity. Otherwise God would make the temple a desolation and Jerusalem “a curse to all the nations of the earth” (Jeremiah 26:1–6).
