Page Content (OCR)
213 the Judean king Jehoyachin captive to Babylon. Taken into exile were also Judea’s nobility and learned elite—among them the Prophet Ezekiel—and thousands of its soldiers and craftsmen; they were made to reside by the banks of the Kha- bur River, near Harran, their ancestral home. The city itself and the Temple were left intact this time, but eleven years later, in 587 B.c.E., the Babylonians returned in force. Acting this time, according to the Bible, on their own volition, the Babylonians put the torch to the Temple that Solomon built. In his inscriptions Nebuchadnezzar of- fered no explanation other than the usual one—to carry out the wishes of and to please “my gods Nabu and Marduk”; but as we shall soon show, the real reason was a simple one: a belief that Yahweh had departed and was gone. The destruction of the Temple was a shocking and evil deed for which Babylon and its king—previously deemed by the Prophets to have been Yahweh’s “rod of wrath’—were to be severely punished: “The vengeance of Yahweh our God, vengeance for His Temple,” shall be meted out to Babylon, announced the Prophet Jeremiah (50: 28). Predicting the fall of mighty Babylon and its destruction by invaders from the north—events that came true just a few decades later—Jere- miah also proclaimed the fate of the gods whom Nebuchad- nezzar had invoked: Declare among the nations and proclaim, Raise the sign, announce, do not conceal, Say: Captured is Babylon! Withered is Bel, confounded is Marduk! JEREMIAH 50: 2 Divine punishment upon Nebuchadnezzar himself was commensurate with the sacrilege. Crazed, according to tra- ditional sources, by a bug that entered his brain through his nose, Nebuchadnezzar died in agony in 562 B.C.E. Neither Nebuchadnezzar nor his three bloodline successors (who were murdered or otherwise disposed of in short shrift) Darkness at Noon