1
Sedecias was twenty-one years old when he came to the throne,✻ and his reign at Jerusalem lasted eleven years; his mother’s name was Amital, daughter of Jeremias of Lobna.
2
He disobeyed the Lord’s will, as Joachim had;
3
for now the Lord’s anger hung over Juda and Jerusalem, ready to banish them from his presence. And Sedecias in his turn revolted from the king of Babylon.
4
And now, in the ninth year of Sedecias’ reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nabuchodonosor reached Jerusalem at the head of his army. They surrounded it and threw up siege works about it,
5
and so the city continued beleaguered until king Sedecias’ eleventh year.
6
Then, on the ninth day of the fourth month, when famine had broken out in the city and the poorer folk had nothing left to eat,
7
a breach was made in the walls; and that night all the fighting men made their escape by way of the gate between the two walls, by the royal garden, leaving the Chaldaeans to continue the siege of the city. They chose for their flight the road which leads to the desert,
8
and in the desert by Jericho Sedecias was overtaken by the Chaldaeans, who had set out in pursuit. All his retinue deserted him;
9
and so, a prisoner, the king was borne away to Reblatha, in the Emath country, where Nabuchodonosor passed sentence on him.
10
Slain by the king of Babylon were all his sons, there in their father’s sight; slain by the king of Babylon, at Reblatha, were all the nobles of Juda;
11
and as for Sedecias himself, his eyes were put out, and he was carried off, loaded with chains, to Babylon, where he remained a prisoner till the day of his death.
12
On the tenth day of the fifth month in the nineteenth year of Nabuchodonosor’s reign, the commander of his bodyguard, Nabuzardan, came on his master’s errand to Jerusalem,
13
where he burned down temple and palace and private dwellings too; no house of note but he set it on fire.
14
The troops he brought with him were employed in dismantling the walls on every side of it.
15
Then Nabuzardan carried off the remnants of the people that were left in the city, the deserters who had gone over to Nabuchodonosor, and the common folk generally;
16
leaving only such of the poorer sort as were vine-dressers and farm labourers.
17
Brazen pillars and brazen stands and the great basin of bronze that stood in the Lord’s temple the Chaldaeans broke up, and took away all the bronze to Babylon;
18
for bronze, too, they carried away pot and fork, ladle and cup and saucer, all the appurtenances of worship that were of bronze;
19
for gold, too, and for silver, bowl and censer and urn and basin and lamp-stand and spoon and goblet; nothing did Nabuzardan leave behind him.
20
There was no reckoning the weight of bronze, when the two pillars, the great basin, and the twelve brazen calves supporting it, all set up by Solomon in the temple, are included;
21
each pillar was eighteen cubits high, twelve cubits round, and four fingers thick, and they were hollow within.
22
On each rested a brazen capital, five cubits in height, with network and pomegranate mouldings on the rim; the pattern of each was the same.
23
There were ninety-six pomegranates besides, making a hundred in all, and all had network around them.
24
Prisoners, too, Nabuzardan carried away with him, the two chief priests, Saraias and Sophonias, the three door-keepers from the temple,
25
and among the citizens, the chamberlain who commanded the army, seven other courtiers who were left in the city, the secretary who was charged with the army and had the levying of recruits, and sixty surviving citizens of the common sort.
26
All these were carried away by Nabuzardan to Reblatha, into Nabuchodonosor’s presence;
27
and there at Reblatha, in the Emath country, Nabuchodonosor put them to death. So the men of Juda were exiled from their country.
28
Three thousand and twenty-three Jewish citizens Nabuchodonosor banished in the seventh year of his reign,
29
and another eight hundred and thirty-two, from Jerusalem, in the eighteenth year of it;
30
then, in his twenty-third year, seven hundred and forty-five were banished by Nabuzardan, the captain of the bodyguard; four thousand six hundred in all.
31
On the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month, in the thirty-seventh year after king Joachim of Juda had been carried into exile, the new king of Babylon, Evil-Merodach, in this first year of his reign, gave redress to his captive and released him from prison.
32
Graciously did Evil-Merodach receive him, gave him a seat of honour above the other captive kings, and relieved him of his prisoner’s garb.
33
All the rest of his life he was entertained at the royal table;
34
all the rest of his life he received, day and day, a perpetual allowance granted to him, as long as he should live, by the king’s bounty.
