The Siege of Jerusalem and the Breach of the Wall

Zedekiah, installed by Babylon, held nine years and then rebelled, counting on Egypt. Jeremiah warned that this was a verdict, not a policy: surrender and the city stands. They called him a traitor.

On the tenth day of the tenth month of Zedekiah's ninth year, "Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and encamped against it and built siege works around it." That day — Asarah be-Tevet — is still a fast: not because something was destroyed then, but because what ended in destruction began then.

The siege ran about thirty months. An Egyptian force approached once and the Babylonians briefly withdrew, then returned. Famine set in, described in Lamentations with unbearable directness: "The hands of compassionate women boiled their own children." On the ninth of Tammuz the wall was breached.

Zedekiah fled by night through the gate between the two walls toward the Arabah, but the Chaldeans overtook him near Jericho. He was brought to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah; his sons were slaughtered before his eyes, then he was blinded, bound in bronze chains and led to Babylon. Weeks later, in Av, the city burned.