2 Kings 25:1

JUDAH'S LAST KING AND THE END OF THE JEWISH KINGDOM

This chapter records the tragic eleven-year reign of Zedekiah, his rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and another deportation of the people. There are also a couple of paragraphs dealing with the governorship of Gedaliah and amazing favors conferred upon Jeconiah by the king of Babylon.

ZEDEKIAH'S FOOLISH REBELLION AND THE SIEGE OF JERUSALEM

"And Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon. And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and encamped against it; and they built forts against it round about. So the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king Zedekiah. On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land."

"Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon" (2 Kings 25:1). This rebellion was against the prophecies and warnings of God's great prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah, who had specifically warned Zedekiah that God had delivered apostate Israel into the hands of Babylon and that the people would serve the king of Babylon for seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11-12). Furthermore, Zedekiah had sworn with a solemn oath invoking the name of Jehovah that he would be faithful to his overlord the king of Babylon.

Why then, did he rebel? (1) He did NOT believe what the prophets of God had prophesied. (2) He was influenced by a conceited group of personal advisers who followed the false prophet Hananiah who prophesied that, "Within two years God would break the yoke of the king of Babylon, that Jeconiah would be restored to the throne of David, and that all the stolen vessels of the temple would be returned, signifying the complete independence of Judah from Babylon" (Jeremiah 28:1-4). "We can only imagine the wild enthusiasm with which the foolish people greeted such bold predictions."[1]

(3) Zedekiah was also, in all probability, seduced by the rampant paganism supported and advocated by the priesthood itself, a paganism which had thoroughly replaced the worship of Jehovah in the Temple of Solomon. Farrar, commenting on Ezekiel 8 and its description of all those abominations, pointed out that the priesthood themselves: (1) were burning incense to beasts; (2) worshipping the sun with their backs turned to the altar of Jehovah; and (3) offering incense and sacrifices to the pagan gods of Assyria, Egypt, Syria and Babylon; and also that the daughters of Zion were weeping for Tammuz or Adonis as devotees of Ishtar the evil goddess of Assyria, and that all of this was going on in Solomon's temple itself. "The king and the priests alike permitted, ignored and even connived at all this, participating in it themselves."[2]

Most of the commentaries we have consulted have ameliorated to some extent the guilt of Zedekiah, but we do not agree with this. They speak of his weakness and the power of the Egyptian party who seduced him, and describe him as timid, undecided and confused. Very well, but he was also an unbeliever, wicked, untruthful, a false swearer and a thankless rebel against the ruler who had made him a king. It was the will of God that Jerusalem and Judah should have been destroyed, a fact well known to Zedekiah, but his ambition led him to thoughts of independence and rebellion. However, at that point in the apostasy of Israel, "It was no longer a question of their independence, but only of the choice of servitudes. Judah was like a silly and trembling sheep between two huge beasts of prey."[3]

It seems to this writer that Josephus properly understood the evil nature of Zedekiah. He wrote that, "His friends perverted him,"[4] not that they deceived him.

Perhaps the crucial mistake of Zedekiah was his foolish conclusion that God's two great prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah had contradicted each other. Jeremiah (Jeremiah 34:8) declared that Zedekiah would see the king of Babylon and be carried there as a captive, but Ezekiel prophesied in God's name saying that, "God would take Zedekiah to Babylon in the land of the Chaldeans, but that he should never see the place, even though he would die there" (Ezekiel 12:13). Despite the unbelief of Zedekiah, "These predictions were exactly fulfilled. Zedekiah saw the king of Babylon, not in Babylon, but at Riblah. There, at the king's command, his sons were slain before his eyes. Then Zedekiah was blinded, bound in fetters and carried to Babylon where he died."[5]

The nearly incredible factor in this disaster was the trust that Zedekiah and his court were willing to place in Egypt! "It seems that Isaiah's doom of blindness upon Israel (Isaiah 6:9-10) had a political as well as a religious fulfillment."[6]

"In the ninth year ... tenth month ... tenth day" (2 Kings 25:1). "This was the Jewish month Tebet (December/January) of 588 B.C."[7] "The exact day was January 15th."[8]

The siege described here brought unspeakable sorrow and sufferings to God's people. "These are best understood from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, written probably immediately after the capture and looting of the city."[9] Unger spoke of the "pitiless rage" of the Babylonian army and of the pestilence, famine, and even cannibalism that followed."[10]

"The ninth day ... the fourth month" (2 Kings 25:3). "This was the Jewish month of June/July (Tammuz)."[11] "This was July 19,586 B.C." This first breach of the city walls led to the flight of Zedekiah and his army, but the Chaldeans overtook them and captured them on the plains of Jericho.