NOTES for Ki2 25:1-12
1 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 host, against Jerusalem, and pitched against it; and they built forts against it round about. |
2 And the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king Zedekiah. |
3 And on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine prevailed in the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land. |
4 And the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled by night by the way of the gate between two walls, which is by the king's garden: (now the Chaldees were against the city round about:) and the king went the way toward the plain. |
5 And the army of the Chaldees pursued after the king, and overtook him in the plains of Jericho: and all his army were scattered from him. |
6 So they took the king, and brought him up to the king of Babylon to Riblah; and they gave judgment upon him. |
7 And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass, and carried him to Babylon. |
8 And in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, which is the nineteenth year of king Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, came Nebuzar-adan, captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, unto Jerusalem: |
9 And he burnt the house of the LORD, and the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man's house burnt he with fire. |
10 And all the army of the Chaldees, that were with the captain of the guard, brake down the walls of Jerusalem round about. |
11 Now the rest of the people that were left in the city, and the fugitives that fell away to the king of Babylon, with the remnant of the multitude, did Nebuzar-adan the captain of the guard carry away. |
12 But the captain of the guard left of the poor of the land to be vinedressers and husbandmen. |
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How often we hear this opinion: the Old Testament, Jewish God is a punishing and cruel God, while ours, the New Testament, Christian God, is kind and merciful. For some reason Christians often make no attempt to understand the “Old Testament God”; they simply pretend that the harsh and even cruel pages of the Old Testament are absent from “our” Bible. Our Bible is all sweetness and light, and its bloody horrors are neither for us nor about us. Yet for some reason the Church does not exclude passages such as today's from the cycle of readings. Why? Because people must know, and have the right to know, what happens when God is excluded from human life. Without God there is no peace, only hunger, ruin, and desolation. Is this God's punishment? No, it is simply the normal state of a world without God.
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