Destruction of Solomon's Temple and the Jewish Exile
Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 or 586 BC and the population of Judah that mattered was deported to Babylon for fifty years. This was the second deportation. Nebuchadnezzar had taken the city once already in 597, removing the king, the court and the craftsmen, and had installed Zedekiah, who rebelled in his turn on the promise of Egyptian help that arrived and withdrew. The siege lasted about eighteen months and ended in famine. The walls were breached, the temple Solomon had built was burned, the palace and the great houses destroyed, and the walls pulled down. Zedekiah was caught near Jericho, made to watch his sons killed, blinded, and taken to Babylon in chains. The numbers deported were not enormous — Jeremiah gives figures in the low thousands, Kings gives higher ones — and the point was the class rather than the count: priests, scribes, officials, artisans. The poorest were left to work the land under a governor who was assassinated within months. What happened in exile is why the episode matters far beyond the politics of a small kingdom. A religion organised around one temple and its sacrifices had to survive without either, and what emerged was a religion of text, sabbath, circumcision and law — portable, and no longer dependent on a place. Much of the Hebrew Bible was assembled and edited by people asking why this had been allowed. Cyrus permitted a return in 538 BC, and a large part of the community stayed in Babylon regardless. The Persian permission to rebuild produced a second temple rather than a restored kingdom, and Judah remained a province of somebody's empire for the next six centuries. The word Jew, from Judah, dates its general use to this period.
- Year: 586 BCE
- Category: Religious
