Anonymous · 500 BCE · exile

2 Kings, Jeremiah and Ezra. Jerusalem falls in 587 BC, the temple is burned and the population is marched a thousand miles east. Seventy years later a Persian king lets them go home, and a much smaller number make the walk back to a ruin.

1. 1
   Jerusalem

   Eighteen months of siege, the wall breached, the temple burned and the vessels carried off - and the king flees by night and is caught in the plains of Jericho with his army scattering around him.

2. 2
   Riblah

   Zedekiah is brought north to Nebuchadnezzar's headquarters, watches his sons killed, and is then blinded and taken to Babylon in chains - the last verse of the kingdom of Judah, delivered in that order deliberately.

3. 3
   Babylon

   By the rivers of Babylon they sat down and wept. Two generations in a city of walls and processions, keeping a religion with no temple - which is where much of the Hebrew Bible was gathered into the form we have.

4. 4
   Jerusalem

   Cyrus takes Babylon and issues a decree, and about fifty thousand go back to a city with no walls. The old men who remembered the first temple wept when they saw the foundation of the second one.