The siege began in the tenth month of the year, on the tenth day of the month. It was winter and very cold.
Jeremiah was fifty-eight. All his ribs stood out. They could be counted.
Then the Babylonians heard that the Egyptians were, indeed, advancing. So they lifted the siege and marched to meet them.
In those days Jeremiah attempted to travel to his hometown, Anathoth. But as he walked through the Benjamin Gate, a guard stopped him, struck him, and brought him to the officials of Judah, saying, “Here is a deserter.”
“No!” Jeremiah said, “I was only going to Anathoth.”
“Why?” the officials asked.
“To buy a piece of property.”
“Property in the time of disaster? Your own words condemn you, prophet. You are no patriot, and you do not love Jerusalem.”
Jeremiah was beaten and then thrown into prison.
The Egyptians were no enemy. As soon as Babylon massed with force before them, they broke and ran. In two weeks, then, the Babylonian armies were back at Jerusalem, and the city was again surrounded. Secretly Zedekiah sent for Jeremiah.
The prophet was brought into his private chambers, shivering from cold and scabrous from his beating.
Zedekiah said, “Is there any word from the Lord?”
Jeremiah said, “There is.”
Zedekiah bowed his head. “I didn’t want this,” he said. “This was not my choice. I was overruled.” Then softly he whispered, “What does the Lord say?”
“That you shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon. That is what the Lord says.”
“No, I never wanted this.”
“Sir,” said Jeremiah, “if you send me back to prison, I will die.”
Zedekiah gazed at the prophet a moment, and then said, “Stay in the court of the guard. I will send you a loaf of bread a day.”
XIII
IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, the ninth day of the month, the walls of Jerusalem broke and fell, and the armies of Babylon entered the city in triumph. That night Zedekiah escaped, and with a handful of soldiers rode at breakneck speeds northeast to the Jordan. Early the following morning the princes of the king of Babylon dispatched their swiftest chariots after him, while they themselves sat in the middle gate of the city with their officers and servants, waiting. In the afternoon Zedekiah was brought back to the city, bound, guarded, and walking. He was barefoot.
The princes of Babylon scarcely acknowledged the presence of Judah’s last ruler. He was a criminal and a duty. They rose up, stepped into their magnificent chariots, and in a long procession led the defeated Judean away.
Again, Zedekiah was walking. All officials of Judah were walking. So were Zedekiah’s children, every one barefoot, walking behind the grandeur of Babylon.
My eyes are spent with weeping;
my soul trembles;
my heart is poured out in grief
because of the destruction
of the daughter of my people.
This miserable cortège was led to Riblah in Syria, to Nebuchadnezzar’s western headquarters. There they ate a substantial meal. They slept in beds made of cedar. In the morning they were bathed by Babylonian servants, oiled and combed and scented, dressed in linen from Damascus, then led before the king of Babylon himself. Without passion, Nebuchadnezzar pronounced sentence upon Zedekiah of Judah. Then he tapped a table with the tip of his sword, indicating that the punishment should be carried out immediately.
Zedekiah’s hands were bound behind his back. He was placed on stone steps five feet high and forced to look down into a small yard. Soldiers brought his eldest son into the yard, handsome, groomed, appareled in purple as befits a prince. They commanded the lad to kneel and to bow his forehead to the earth. Then, with a tremendous ax, they cut off his head.
Zedekiah moaned. But guards on either side of him forced him still to watch while his second son was beheaded, his third, all his sons. It took two hours.
When the last child lay dead, Zedekiah’s guards grabbed his hair, yanked back his head, and pierced his weeping eyes with daggers. This, too, was part of the sentence, that the dying of his children should be the last sight Zedekiah ever saw.
When Jehoiachin had gone into exile ten years earlier, Babylon received him as the king of a defeated nation. He was given a royal attention as long as he lived. But now there was no nation left. Judah had ceased to exist. And on this very day, Jerusalem was in flames. Blind Zedekiah went to Babylon, then, as a criminal. He was not executed. He lived out his natural life in the small, sad communities of Jewish exiles. But for the rest of his days he wished that he had been killed with his children.
XIV
NEBUZARADAN IS IN Jerusalem. The commander of Nebuchadnezzar’s guard has come from Riblah with a horde of soldiers and with orders to put the city to the torch.
Another lesser order of the Babylonian king was that Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah should be shown special consideration. Therefore, before the destruction begins, Jeremiah is released from confinement. He is set free. But now the prophet of God is suffering a torment worse than imprisonment.
The city that he loves with all his heart, the city is in flames. Solomon’s palace is a high black fire, a bitter smoke. The ancient wooden pillars in the House of the Forest of Lebanon, hard and dry, are burning like candles. The ceiling sags; the beams crack and break; in the roaring of a thousand winds, the roof comes down. Sparks and a foul air rush over Jeremiah. He lowers his head and walks the streets of Jerusalem, weeping. The throne hall is laid naked to the sky. Babylon is cutting the great throne of Solomon into pieces, dumping the gold and the ivory into sacks. The lions that once mounted six steps to the king’s seat are carried out and stacked on carts.
Jeremiah wanders to the north side of the city and climbs the ancient stone steps in the Tower of the Hundred. He looks down on Jerusalem without surprise. This is what he said would be.
The temple of the Lord is burning. Its cedars are in flames. Panels and beams and the beautiful roof are all on fire. The sacred furniture has been heaped together in front of the porch. It is burning with a holy fury. Enormous flames go up like sheets in the wind, higher than the prophet in his tower, twisting and reaching like hands into heaven. Jeremiah can feel the heat on his face.
My eyes are spent with weeping;
my soul trembles;
my heart is poured out in grief
because of the destruction
of the daughter of my people.
Everywhere in Jerusalem Babylonian troops accomplish their business without expression. There is no vengeance here, neither anger nor pleasure. It is only duties. What is valuable, take. What cannot be taken, burn. What cannot be burned, destroy: tear it up or tear it down.
Jeremiah looks at the road that leads north from the Sheep Gate. As far as he can see, it is lined with carts filled and waiting to go. He knows what they carry: Jachin and Boaz, the bronze pillars that stood for three hundred and sixty-five years on either side of the temple door. This morning he watched the soldiers cut them to pieces—together with the candle stands and the great bronze laver of the courtyard. Metal of the highest quality is the cargo in Babylonian carts. Also pots and shovels and snuffers and dishes for incense, the firepans and the bowls, every treasure of the temple, every holy thing, every dear and godly thing, it is all packed in the long caravan bound for Babylon. And the temple itself is pouring forth a vomit of smoke and flame, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.
“Hey, you! You want to die? Get down from there!”
Look: the rich houses on Zion are burning. A lazy wind is taking the cloud of the city’s destruction eastward. Hot stones explode. Listen: here and there, with a dull cracking and the horrible thump of grounded thunder, a building collapses.
“You! Climb down now, or you’ll fall with the stones!”
Jeremiah slowly becomes conscious of himself, a sudden pain on his skullbone, heat in his face, his
arms wrapped under his stomach. Old man, old man, he should be dying with the city.
There’s a soldier in the road below, throwing pebbles at the prophet. One has struck his skull. Jeremiah looks down, now, and the soldier points west toward the Fish Gate. “Can’t you see what’s coming?” he yells.
Both posts of the Fish Gate have snapped like sticks. They have pitched forward into a dusty rubble. With battering rams and ropes the Babylonians are tearing down the walls of Jerusalem. Yes. Jeremiah feels the concussions in the Tower of the Hundred, yes. He nods to the soldier below. Yes, he’s coming down now. Yes.
So the prophet descends and wanders out of Jerusalem. He walks to the Mount of Olives, east of the city. He sits down in a midday darkness, for a billowing smoke blackens the sky above him. There is no sun. There is no City of David.
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Behold and see
if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow,
wherewith the Lord has afflicted me
in the day of his fierce anger.
XV
ALTHOUGH EVERY SIGNIFICANT citizen of Judah had been deported to villages south of Babylon, Jeremiah wanted to stay in Judah, even in the dead land of his people. He was sixty years old. He was sick unto death. But it seemed to him that his word would serve the poor farmers left behind.
Nevertheless, a group of willful Judeans demanded the prophet’s prayers for themselves. They forced Jeremiah to go with them into Egypt. His scribe, Baruch, was also carried away. The prophet’s hair was as white as snow. His eyes still were huge, haunted by all they had seen. Under the skin his body seemed all tendon, bone, and gristle. The Egyptians did not understand how one so desiccated could still keep life within his breast.
But yet once more the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, and he called Baruch to his side.
“I have heard a new thing,” he whispered. “Mix your ink. Find a clean scroll. Cut a strong reed pen, Baruch, and write this—for the Lord has commanded that it should be written.”
Baruch prepared his instruments and sat once more at his master’s side.
Then, in Egypt, Jeremiah dictated words for the sake of the remnant in Babylon:
The days are coming when I will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah. I will bring them back to the land which I gave their fathers.
Behold, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant with my people, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them from Egypt—my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband.
This covenant I will put within them. I will write its law upon their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall each one teach another, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
So said the Lord to Jeremiah. Jeremiah dictated it to Baruch, who wrote it on a scroll, and the scroll was preserved.
Jeremiah died in Egypt.
But the promise of the Lord survived.
PART SIX
Letters from Exile
TWENTY-THREE
Ahikam Utters a Curse
FROM AHIKAM SON OF SHAPHAN to the prophet of God, Jeremiah son of Hilkiah: All peace! My father, it is said that you are in Egypt. Tomorrow a trade caravan will set out for that country; tonight, therefore, I write with the great hope that my letter will find you, and that you are well. Jeremiah, after so many years of misery, be well!
I am directing my letter to Tahpanhes. I have heard that a small colony of Judeans lives there. Perhaps you are among them.
LET ME TELL YOU how angry and how sad I am.
Every day I walk from tiny Tel-abib into the flat green countryside. It is ten years since I have been home, yet every day my eyes rise up to see the hills of Judah! I cannot convince them that they will not see the hills at all. They look for the hard brown high and rocky land. My ears listen for the roaring gorges of the rainy season—but all I see are the airy blue spaces and too much green on flat ground.
Yesterday as I walked out alone, I heard a sad sound in the distance: men’s deep voices singing slowly, Ahh! Ahhhhh! Oh, what a weary melody! They were Jews. They were my brothers. I walked toward the sound until I saw them gathered in a grove of willow trees, and then I was singing too—and by the time I drew near to them, I was weeping.
So then were ten men standing on the bank of the little Chebar canal, all with our heads down, singing a low song, Ahh! Ahhh. One man played lightly on a lyre. We were all weeping.
O God, remember Zion! Remember the mountain that has been your dwelling place—
But there is only ruin in Jerusalem! I thought of the temple and I wept. I thought of my great distance from the holy hill of the Lord, and I wept.
Then through the trees behind us came a group of Babylonian guards, all armed.
“Sing a happy song!” they shouted in their own tongue.
Immediately, the man who had been playing his lyre stopped and, without once looking at the foreign soldiers, hung it on a branch of a willow tree. Silently, he sat down. We all sat down.
“Get up!” cried our captors, boisterous, enjoying themselves. “Get up and sing a cheerful song, something your mother sang when she was happy!”
One fellow put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You, Ahikam—you have a good voice. Sing to your God.”
In his language I said, “How can I sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
Without removing his hand from my shoulder, he produced a small dagger, as narrow as an adder, and laid it across my nose.
So I sang. I sang in the priest’s Hebrew so that only my brothers understood. I chose a tender melody, letting the Babylonians think that mindless slaves need only sing a little song to be happy again.
I sang:
Daughter of Babylon, you destroyer!
Blessed be the man
who takes your children one by one,
smiling infants, lads and lasses,
and dashes their skulls against the stones!
When I sang that song I didn’t weep anymore.
O MY FATHER, Jeremiah, if you receive this letter, please send me a word regarding your health. I long to hear from you. Send your letter where you sent the last one: Tel-abib near the Chebar.
Surely God is with you, prophet!
TWENTY-FOUR
Ahikam Must Make a Decision
FROM AHIKAM SON OF SHAPHAN to Jeremiah son of Hilkiah: Man of God, forgive me: I need your wisdom now. I am unable to choose between two ways of life—and who else can I write to, if not to you?
You are old, eighty-five, by my calculation, and likely you are very tired. Your voice has been silent ever since Baruch sent many of us your prophecy from Egypt, the little book of comfort, the promise of a new covenant. That was fifteen years ago.
But no one has told us that you are dead yet.
And one reason for my bewilderment is that a new prophet has arisen here, in this country, whose word is very hopeful. He says that our warfare is ended, that we are pardoned. “Comfort!” he cries. “Comfort my people, says your God!”
This prophet declares that God is coming to save us and to take us home again: “Prepare the way of the Lord,” he says. “Make a straight highway in the desert for our God.”
What do you think of such prophecy? Should I trust it? Should I give over my way of life here, and prepare to go home again? But right now my son has been offered an excellent position, a livelihood infinitely better than our past poverty. Either we commit our lives to this place completely, or we believe the prophet and turn our faces west. It can’t be both. But if the prophet is wrong, it will destroy my family.
Let me explain.
When we first arrived in Tel-abib, I farmed a small plot next to that of a man named Murashu. For fifteen years our families shared the labor, tilling, planting, harvesting.
Then Murashu mov
ed to a city named Nippur on the Euphrates River—about fifty miles south of Babylon. There a Babylonian officer happened to notice his daughter while she was standing alone in a field. Murashu’s daughter is very beautiful. The officer longed to have her.
So he went to Murashu and said, “Sell me your daughter as a slave for me.”
Murashu himself is a shrewd man. I would have shown wrath at such a request, but he rubbed his chin and said, “She is a delicate child, sir. Slavery would kill her.”
The officer, sick with love, said, “Then let me take her as my wife!”
Murashu began to weep. “I wish I could honor your desire, but I love my daughter too much to part with her.”
The officer rushed away and came back leading a camel. “Will you take this as a dowry?” he asked.
Murashu only wept louder and louder.
The Babylonian officer rushed away and brought three camels, four camels.
Murashu let out a wail of anguish. “Sir,” he cried, “my daughter means more than life to me.”
But when the Babylonian led a full caravan of twenty-five camels to Murashu’s little house, the father dried his eyes and became a father-in-law. He also went into business for himself, and now my old friend is very rich.
He owns seven caravans, five storehouses, three barns, and a house of twelve rooms, with two open courtyards and a fountain in each court.
Murashu no longer prays to the Lord, the God of Israel. He worships Marduk. He says that the Lord seemed glorious on earth only because we had never seen the whole earth—but one day while he was in the city of Babylon, a priest offered to show him the temple where Marduk dwells: Esagila. They passed through court after court, each one grander than the last, until they came to the most interior room.
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 45