The Fall of Jerusalem and the Destruction of the Temple
587/586 BC, estimated dateEstimated date
After a long siege the Babylonian army breaches Jerusalem, burns Solomon’s temple and the city, and deports most of the remaining people. The kingdom of Judah comes to an end.
Zedekiah, whom Nebuchadnezzar had made king, rebelled against Babylon (2 Kings 24:20). In the ninth year of his reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar II and his army encamped against Jerusalem and built siege works around it (2 Kings 25:1–2). The prophet Jeremiah, who urged the king to surrender, was arrested as a deserter and held under guard for the rest of the siege (Jeremiah 37:11–21) (Jeremiah 38:17–18, 28).
By the fourth month of Zedekiah’s eleventh year the famine was severe and the wall was breached. The king fled by night toward the Jordan valley, was overtaken near Jericho and brought to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah. His sons were killed in front of him; he was blinded and taken in chains to Babylon (2 Kings 25:2–7).
A month later Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, burned the temple, the palace and the houses of the city and tore down its walls. The bronze pillars and furnishings of the temple were broken up and carried off, leading priests and officials were executed, and most of the remaining people were deported. Some of the poorest were left to work the vineyards and fields (2 Kings 25:8–21). Jeremiah 52 tells the same story with its own figures and counts 832 people deported from Jerusalem that year (Jeremiah 52:12–30).
Babylon appointed a Judean, Gedaliah, as governor at Mizpah. He was soon assassinated, and many of the survivors fled to Egypt, taking Jeremiah with them (2 Kings 25:22–26) (Jeremiah 43:4–7).
The loss of temple, king and land is a turning point in the Old Testament story. Lamentations mourns the ruined city (Lamentations 1:1–5), Psalm 137 remembers it from exile (Psalm 137), and Chronicles reads it as the outcome of the nation’s long refusal to listen to its prophets (2 Chronicles 36:15–21). For these events the biblical books are the only narrative sources.
How this is dated
Estimated date. A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.
Kings and Jeremiah date the fall by regnal years: the eleventh year of Zedekiah, and the nineteenth (2 Kings 25:2–8) or eighteenth (Jeremiah 52:29) year of Nebuchadnezzar. The surviving Babylonian chronicle stops in 594/593 BC (Babylonian Chronicle 5 rev. 25), so no outside record fixes the year.
Turning the regnal years into a calendar year depends on whether Judah’s years began in spring or in autumn and on whether accession years were counted. The result is the summer of either 587 or 586 BC, and scholars remain divided. For 586 see Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (3rd ed., 1983); for 587 see Rodger C. Young, “When Did Jerusalem Fall?”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 47 (2004), pp. 21–38. The timeline places the event at 586 and shows both years.
The two accounts also differ on the day the temple was burned: the seventh of the fifth month (2 Kings 25:8) or the tenth (Jeremiah 52:12).
Primary sources
Scripture
In context
Grows out of
- 16 March 597 BC, firm date
- about 966 BC to 959 BC, estimated date
Leads to
- about 550 BC to 539 BC, estimated date
- 12 October 539 BC, firm date
- AD 66 to AD 70, firm date