Figure 58: a list of Kings and their Battles under Pre-Exile Prophets
PREAMBLE TO EXILE BOOKS
One-hundred-years after Israel fell, Judah was still totally ignoring the warnings of Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk. All this led to a decline that was worse in Judah than it had been in the ten tribes. Even though it had taken much longer for them to get to that point, it came.
Historically, after the ten tribes of the North were carried away to Assyria, Babylon continued to grow rapidly until she eventually conquered Assyria in six-twelve-BC. Babylon then invaded Judah in waves. In the first wave she carried off all the royal family and nobility including Daniel and his three friends. Egypt saw the threat from Babylon, so she sent armies fight. This distracted Babylon from Jerusalem for a while. Once that fight was settled four years later, Babylon returned and deported a second group of people which included: Ezekiel, the son of Jehoiakim, whose name was Jehoiachin, his wife and child-Prince Shealtiel. They also took the ancestors of Mordecai, the cousins and parents of Esther and seven-thousand craftsmen and smiths.
We ought to take a bit of time out to talk about Babylon. We have referred to the rise of this tiny nation called Babylon which might have caused some confusion to the astute. Babylon was a great city back in Abraham’s day, So how is it so small now? The word Babel means “confusion”.211 The word Babylon means “the gate of the gods” and it became the capital of the land of Babylonia. Every organized system of religion in the world today has traces back to ancient Babylon.
After the flood, Nimrod wanted to build one large city and established one common religion against God’s command to replenish the earth and fill it. But there was no common concept between them of what that should look like, so God scattered them anyway. Around the twenty-third-century-BC, the Amorites migrated back to the area to build the city of Ur. Once again, it became a “Babel of gods”. The people of the “land of Shinar”212 settled around Ur and became known as the Sumerians. You will remember these were the people the Assyrians sent to replace half of the ten tribes when they conquered Israel. These mixed nations then became known as the Samaritans. Around two-thousand-BC. Hammurapi emerged as the ruler of Babylonia. This was when God left them to their babbling gods and took Abram and his father Terah, (with all the corresponding families), out from among them.
Assyria, which bordered Babylonia on the North side, gobbled them up about one-thousand-seven-hundred-BC, and for the next seven-hundred years, Babylonia no more than a small town in the South of the Assyrian empire. It was during this time that they sent the ‘get well wishes’ to king Nebuchadnezzar while he was ill. You will remember Isaiah reprimanded the king for boasting about the temple treasures saying, “They would come and confiscate them all”. Well, now is time for the fulfilment of that prophesy. Babylonian won its independence from Assyria by a leader named Nabopolassar. Under his leadership, Babylonia again became the dominant imperial power in the near East and thus entered into her “Golden age.” In six-hundred-and-five-BC, Nebuchadnezzar II, the son of Nabopolassar, became ruler and reigned for forty-four years.
‘’And Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon carried out from there all the treasures of the temple’’213
211 Genesis 11: 9.
212 Genesis 10: 10.
213 2 Kings 24: 13-14.