Destruction and Exile

In 586 BC, the armies of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon burned Jerusalem and its Temple. The king of Judah was blinded and taken away in chains, and thousands of people were deported to Babylon, eight hundred miles from home.

It is hard to overstate the crisis. The Temple, the city, the king, and the land were all gone. What remained were the people and their Scriptures. In exile, without a Temple, they gathered around the written word.

One story shows how determined the faithful were to keep God's word. Before the fall, King Jehoiakim had Jeremiah's scroll read to him, and as each section was read he cut it off with a knife and threw it in the fire. God told Jeremiah to write it all again. Jeremiah dictated, and Baruch wrote a new scroll, "and there were added besides unto them many like words" (Jeremiah 36:32).

During the exile, prophets like Ezekiel spoke to the deported community, and the history of Israel's kings was gathered and told as a lesson in faithfulness and judgment. Many scholars believe the exile was a time of intense writing, collecting, and editing of Scripture.

Voices from the last days of Judah

In the 1930s, excavators at Lachish, a fortress city southwest of Jerusalem, found letters written in ink on pottery pieces (ostraca) by Judean officers as Babylon's army closed in. One reports watching for signal fires and no longer seeing those of Azekah, the same two cities Jeremiah 34:7 names as the last fortified towns still standing.

In Babylon itself, tablets listing rations of oil for royal prisoners name "Jehoiachin, king of Judah" and his sons, matching 2 Kings 25:27–30, which says the exiled king ate at the Babylonian king's table.