History is mostly a series of cataclysmic, defining moments that begin a process of change in a people. They are course altering events; leaving behind who they had been and changing them into something they will become. The Book of Lamentations was not the first of its kind; it had been traditional for a lament to be written after a cataclysmic event. Several ancient examples have been discovered: Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, Lamentation of Sumer and Ur and Lamentation over the Destruction of Nipper. The biblical Lament over the destruction of Judah was an inspired expression of this ancient genre. More important than the literary category, however, was the historical importance of the siege by the Babylonians, Israel’s captivity and the changes that captivity brought to them. The captivity became a crucible in which Judah’s penchant for idolatry was purged. The Jews as a unique, covenantal people were preserved.
By the sixth century BC, the Hebrews had a long history of rebellion against their God. Cycles of rebellion, retribution, repentance, and restoration marked the pre-exilic history of Israel/Judah. In most cases, God’s response to the rebellion of His people was to raise up nations against them until they sought Him again. Eventually, God chose not to preserve the northern kingdom of Israel and the ten tribes were relocated and assimilated into the Assyrian empire, lost to future history. The greatest danger to the remnant in Judah was the allure of foreign women. Through intermarriage, false gods were introduced. To preserve His people and to purge them of their idolatry, God sent an event so traumatic and so horrific that it forever changed what it meant to be a Jew. Judah was put through the fire of captivity and threatened with assimilation, she lost her taste for idolatry forever. God had given an ominous foreshadowing of this event when the Temple was dedicated. In 1 Kings 9:8-9, God had warned of what would happen if Judah pursued false gods:
“For this house, which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and will hiss, and say, ‘Why has the Lord done this to this land and to this house?’ Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought their fathers out of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, and worshipped them and served them; therefore the Lord has brought all this calamity on them.’” 1 Kings 9:8-9
Yet the warning was not heeded. Solomon himself allowed the high places of his foreign wives to exist. When King Manassa revived the child sacrifices to Molech, the judgment was sealed. Despite the reign of good kings who followed, the Lord declared that the sins of Manassa had never been cleansed. Therefore, out of Babylon to the east, God raised up the instrument of His judgment in the form of Nebuchadnezzar and the Chaldeans.
The Chaldeans had conquered the Assyrians, who had conquered Israel. God had used the Assyrians’ wicked intentions to judge Israel, and then He judged the Assyrians. Initially, Judah was made a vassal state and allowed their own succession of vassal kings. However, the Judeans rebelled and Nebuchadnezzar put down the rebellion and gave the throne to Zedekiah. Zedekiah ruled in his name and kept Judea in peace. But conspiring with Egypt, Zedekiah broke his covenant with his suzerain king. In 588 BC, the Chaldean army swept into Judea to put down the rebellion. Within weeks, Judah lay devastated; only three Judean cities remained: Jerusalem and the walled cities of Lachish and Azekia. The events that followed were horrendous and would change the Judeans forever. Azekia fell first; archaeologists have uncovered messages between Joash, the commander of Lachish, and Jerusalem. They were scratched on little pieces of pottery called ostraca (pottery shards) and carried by a messenger. One of the last dispatches discovered was the ominous message that Jerusalem was no longer receiving signals from Azekia. It reads, “Let my lord know that we are watching over the beacon of Lachish, according to the signals which my lord gave, for Azekah is not seen.”
Joash would have known that Nebuchadnezzar was on his way. When he got there, the Chaldean king was in no mood for another long siege. He put his engineers in charge of finding a way to quickly subdue the city. What his engineers did was to deforest the land for miles around the city. Every bit of brush, every tree, every olive grove was cut down and brought to the city walls. The wood was piled as high as a house around the entire circumference of the walls and then set on fire. For days, Lachish was an inferno. Day and night, the Chaldeans kept stoking the fire until the white-hot stones eventually burst and the walls caved in. The entire population was put to the sword. The most common artifact unearthed from Lachish are burnt olive pits, reminders of the vast olive groves that were used in the fire.
Only Jerusalem remained. The city was protected by valleys on the three sides. Her walls were strong and there weren’t enough trees to repeat the inferno of Lachish. Therefore, the city lay under siege for eighteen months. The horrors of a siege are nearly inconceivable; a siege is a slow agonizing death of starvation and disease. Its victims are not armies, they are families and children; they are the young and the old. As the months passed by, the situation inside the city degenerated to the point that Jeremiah depicts the people as little more than the walking dead. Even as mothers consumed their own children, Zedekiah continued to look in vain to Egypt instead of God. To the end, Judah continued to play the harlot with other nations. Yet Egypt never came and in the summer of 586 BC, the Chaldeans finally breached the walls and the city fell. Zedekiah, who escaped during the night, was captured near Jericho and was brought before Nebuchadnezzar as a covenant breaker. He was forced to watch his sons being put to death before he had his own eyes plucked out—the typical Babylonian punishment for treason. In shame, the 400-year reign of the family of David came to end. “All over the land would be desolateness and stillness…keeping a long-neglected silent Sabbath unto God.”
The judgment that God placed upon Judah would forever alter these people. Scripture itself does not hold anything back from the depiction of its horrors. Jeremiah reminded his readers of the fulfilled warning to Solomon referenced earlier:
“All those who pass by clap their hands at you; they hiss and shake their heads at the daughter of Jerusalem. Is this the city that is called the perfection of beauty? The joy of the whole earth? All your enemies have opened their mouth against you. They hiss and gnash their teeth; they say we have swallowed her up. Surely this is the day we have waited for, we have found it, and we have seen it.” Lamentations 2:14-16
Here was an event that no Jew was going to forget, for God would not allow them to forget it through the inspired narrative of Jeremiah. In his lament, Jeremiah captured the images of a people who were ravaged by their own sins. From the depths of his heart, Jeremiah observes and records a scene of horror. Summarizing the verses:
“My eyes fill with tears, my heart is troubled, my bile is poured on the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people. Because the children and the infants faint in the street. They say to their mothers where is grain and wine as they swoon like the wounded in the streets of the city. As their life is poured out in their mother’s bosom. See O Lord and consider to whom have you done this. Should the woman eat their offspring? The children they have cuddled? Should the priest and the prophet be slain in the Sanctuary of the Lord? Young and old lie on the ground in the streets. My virgins and my young men have fallen by the sword. You have slain them in the day of your anger; you have slaughtered and have not pitied. The tongue of the infants clings to the roof of its mouth for thirst. The young children ask for bread but no one breaks it for them. Now their appearance is blacker than soot. They go unrecognized in the streets, their skin clings to their bones it has become dry as wood. Those slain by the sword are better off than those who die of hunger. For these pine away stricken by lack of the fruits of the field. The hands of the compassionate women have cooked their own children. They became food for them in the destruction of the daughter of my people.” ff. Lamentations chapters 1-4.
Faced with such destruction, Jeremiah makes it clear that the catastrophe was not happenstance but was the judgment of God upon the sins of Judah. Matthew Henry comments on these verses that while the Chaldeans may be the instruments, “God is the author of all these troubles; it is the Lord that has afflicted her and He has done it as a righteous judge for she has sinned.”
Yet in the midst of judgment, Jeremiah recalls the mercy of the Lord. Judah was not consumed; “I have hope through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed because his compassion fails not. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion says my soul, for I hope in Him.” In many churches, these verses are a popular chorus; yet the context is often forgotten. Ultimately, the message that God was sending Judah was not lost on Jeremiah: “Is it not from the mouth of the most high that woe and well being proceed? Why should a man complain for the punishment of his sins?” Jeremiah knew that those who were devastating his nation were merely an instrument. God would enforce His judgment upon His people; yet this was not an arbitrary act of God, but would ultimately preserve them as a covenant people.
A month later, in August of 586 BC, the captain of Nebuchadnezzar’s guard put the Temple to the flames. The walls were torn down and the city was left desolate. Thousands of Hebrews began an 800-mile forced march to Babylon and into captivity. Most of these were craftsman and the aristocracy. The poorest of the people were given land in Palestine and left to meek out whatever existence they could find. Just like the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel, they soon melded into the people around them. The resulting mixture of races melded together with those who would become the Samaritans.
The once great people of God became a nation of refugees; the most privileged of peoples suffered one of the most severe punishments. But surrounded by the depraved paganism of Babylon, the Hebrews built hedges around their culture and left behind their flirtations with foreign gods. The Jews preserved their identity; instead of assimilating, they mourned for Zion. A psalm from the exile says that “by the waters of Babylon they sat down and wept, when they remembered thee, O Zion” . In Spurgeon’s commentary on this passage, he captured the longing despair for the Land: “They sat in silence; they remembered in silence; they wept in silence.”
At the end of the captivity, the Jews who returned to Jerusalem were profoundly different than the Hebrews who had left. In the larger picture, John Sailhammer’s commentary on Genesis describes a continuing theme of judgment and restoration within the recurring expulsions and returns to Canaan. He believes that Eden and Canaan are in the same location and when Adam was driven east, it was towards what would become Babel (Babylon). Therefore the expulsion from Canaan in 586 BC mirrors the expulsion from the Garden; just as the return from Babylon mirrors the return to the land by Abraham . A similar model sees Israel being sent to Abraham’s Ur (Babylon) as “a husband sends his unsatisfactory wife “back home” . Whatever the model, it was this final return that prepared the world for the coming of the Messiah.
The fate of Jerusalem in 586BC should server as a constant reminder of the holiness of God and of His sovereign, superintending chastisement. But as Jeremiah insists, God’s people must persevere through trusting His faithfulness. In Calvin’s exposition of Lamentations 3:24, he writes, “The prophet intimates in this verse that we cannot stand firm in adversities, except we be content with God alone and His favor, for as soon as we depart from him, any adversity that may happen to us will cause our faith to fail. It is then the only true foundation of patience and hope to trust in God alone.”
Even in the midst of the temporal judgment of sin, God’s good purpose of grace towards His people will stand.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment