ACADEMIA Letters

The Destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple

Richard Elliott Friedman

Every so often in scholarship, we have a convergence where two stymieing problems turn out
to have a single solution that explains both. Here is a particularly revealing case:
I. The Babylonian/Chaldean destruction in Jerusalem in 587 BCE appears in four places
in the Hebrew Bible. 2 Kings 25:9f reports:

He burned the house of Yahweh and the house of the king and all the houses of
Jerusalem; and he burned every big house. And they broke up all the walls of
Jerusalem…

The last chapter of Jeremiah repeats this. The prose narrator 52:13f reports:

He burned the house of Yahweh and the house of the king and all the houses
of Jerusalem; and he burned every big house. And they broke up the wall of
Jerusalem…

The identical wording is no surprise since this chapter appears to be an addendum which
an editor made by taking that passage from 2 Kings 15 and attaching it to the end of the book
of Jeremiah.
In both texts the Temple, the palace, the buildings, the walls — all are demolished. A
partly different version in 2 Chronicles 36:19 reads:

He burned the house of God and broke up the wall of Jerusalem, and they burned
all its treasuries in fire…

There is no reference to the palace (understandable perhaps in an edition that was produced
after the end of the monarchy), but still the destruction of the Temple, buildings, and wall are
recorded.

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard Elliott Friedman, [email protected]

Citation: Friedman, R.E. (2021). The Destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple. Academia Letters, Article
148. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL148.

1
 The fourth version, however, has a far more dramatic and inexplicable missing piece.
Jeremiah 39:8 reports:

the house of the king and the house of the people the Chaldeans burnt in fire and
broke up the walls of Jerusalem.

This version leaves out the destruction of the Temple. The omission is all the more strange
because this account in Jeremiah is the longest, fullest account of the final events in Judah that
year. The other three are abbreviated summary reports.
The natural inclination of anyone with experience in textual criticism would be to see a
haplography, the most common scribal error, here: a scribe’s eye, in the act of copying a
manuscript, jumps from one occurrence of a word to its next occurrence, omitting the words
that came between. So the original reading would have been:

the house of Yahweh and the house of the king

But the scribe’s eye accidentally skips the words between the two occurrences of “house,”
and comes out with:

the house [ ] of the king

That is certainly possible, especially since the verse appears with the missing words in
Kings and Jeremiah 52. Still, haplography is one thing. But there are haplographies, and
there are haplographies. This is nothing less than the destruction of the Temple! Even if the
scribe missed it, we might have hoped that the scribe would catch it on re-reading. Or the next
scribe would catch it. Or the next one. Moreover, this lengthy account of the events of those
days is more probably the very source that the historian in 2 Kings was abbreviating, so from
where would it have picked up a haplography prior to that reduction?
The scribal haplography explanation remains possible, but more evidence one way or the
other would be welcome.
II. That brings us to the second enigma. It concerns the assassination of Gedaliah, narrated
two chapters later in Jeremiah 41. It is dated there at two or three months after the events
we just read. The Babylonian king has left Gedaliah in authority over Judah. A relative of
the royal family, with ten accomplices, murders Gedaliah and his retinue. Two days later,
when the assassination is still unknown, the assassins encounter “people from Shechem, from
Shiloh, and from Samaria, eighty people, shaved of beards and torn of clothes and cutting
themselves, and offering incense in their hand to bring to the House of Yahweh” (41:5). The
assassins slaughter them too.

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard Elliott Friedman, [email protected]

Citation: Friedman, R.E. (2021). The Destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple. Academia Letters, Article
148. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL148.

2
 In the wake of these disastrous events, the sources report, “all the remnant of Judah,” leave
and go to Egypt, “the entire people, from youngest to oldest,” (Jeremiah 42:15; 43:5; 2 Kings
25:26).
The obvious problem that scholars since the medieval commentators have addressed is
why these people are bringing offerings to the Temple months after it has been destroyed.
Some said that the Jews still continued to offer sacrifice on the site of the destroyed Temple
(Abarbanel; Talmud Meg 10a). There is no evidence for this claim, however. If anything, it is
based on this very verse in Jeremiah. It is a case of using the problem itself as its own solution.
The common element of these two problematic reports in Jeremiah is the Temple. It isn’t
there in the first passage, where we would expect it. And it is there in the second passage,
where we would not. A solution that responds to both of these is that the Temple was not
yet destroyed. Then we don’t have to make textual emendations to solve the first problem, or
imagine an unknown religious practice that lasted a year or seventy years to solve the second.
The only reason we assumed that the Temple was destroyed at that time was that the other
three (really two) versions said so. But those one-verse versions were just doing what brief
summary versions commonly do: they collapsed events that were separate into a single sum-
mary report. That is far more common and likely than the opposite. If some future historian
writes a one-sentence summary of America in 2020, it could include a pandemic, an election,
racial cataclysm, a gender breakthrough in the vice-presidency, and a couple more items that
the particular historian will judge to qualify. But no one will care if those items are listed in
any particular order — or that the vice-presidency breakthrough actually finalized in 2021.
As a matter of method, we should understand the brief summary in the light of the full
version, not the other way around. Some would reply “lectio brevior praeferenda est.” But, as
our esteemed colleague Noel Freedman used to say, we don’t determine the truth of a biblical
passage on the basis of a Latin proverb.
III. The two enigmas point to a mutual explanation. But there is a third enigmatic passage
about the Temple’s destruction: the famous Psalm 137 on the Jews’ life in exile in Babylon.
Near its end comes the curious reference:

Remember, Yahweh, the Edomites with the day of Jerusalem

Who said “Raze it, raze it, to its foundation!”
(Psalm 137:7)

If it was the Babylonians who destroyed the Temple, what do the Edomites have to do with
it? If it was the Babylonians who destroyed the Temple, why does 1 Esdras picture Zerubbabel
saying:

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard Elliott Friedman, [email protected]

Citation: Friedman, R.E. (2021). The Destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple. Academia Letters, Article
148. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL148.

3
 You also have vowed to build up the temple, which the Edomites burned when
Judea was made desolate by the Chaldees.
(1 Esdras 4:45)

Why does Obadiah include in a tirade against Edom the charge:

For violence at your brother Jacob shame will cover you

And you’ll be cut off forever.
(Obadiah 10)

And Obadiah includes the judgment:

As you did will be done to you

Your recompense will come back on your head.
For as you drank on my holy mountain
All the nations will drink continually…
(Obadiah 15b-16)

The Babylonians had reason to destroy the palace of a Judean king who had rebelled
against them. They had reason to demolish Jerusalem’s protecting walls. But they didn’t
necessarily have a reason to destroy the Temple. Edom, however, had a long history of enmity
with Judah.
Still, scholars deny Edomite culpability. Some say, without evidence, that Jews of later
periods falsely claimed this due to their hostility to Edom. One wrote that Kings and Chron-
icles say it was the Chaldeans, “and their witness must surely be followed.” Why? On the
contrary, their texts are not witnesses at all. As I indicated above, they are more probably col-
lapsing summaries of a much larger historical picture. Some say that we lack archaeological
evidence, e.g. Edomite arrowheads. But even if we had any model of Edomite arrowheads,
our texts don’t claim that but Edomites were in the battle, not if they destroyed the Temple
later, after “Judea was made desolate by the Chaldees.”
Three enigmas with a host of proposed solutions, or a single explanation for all three. We
should favor the most parsimonious solution.

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard Elliott Friedman, [email protected]

Citation: Friedman, R.E. (2021). The Destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple. Academia Letters, Article
148. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL148.

4
References
Becking, Bob, “The betrayal of Edom: Remarks on a claimed tradition,” HTS 72 (Pretoria
2016)

Bartlett, J.R., 1982, ’Edom and the fall of Jerusalem’, PEQ 114, 13-24.

Bartlett, J.R., Edom and the Edomites, JSOT Sup 77 (1989)

Bodner, Keith, “After the Invasion: A Reading of Jeremiah 40-44,” Oxford Scholarship On-
line: August 2015

Bright, John, Jeremiah (Anchor Bible, 1965) pp. 240-241

Freedman, H., Jeremiah (London: Soncino, 1985)

Tebes, J.M., 2011, ’The Edomite involvement in the destruction of the first temple: A case
of stab-in-the-back tradition?’, JSOT 36, pp. 219-255

Nevins, Arthur J., “When was Solomon’s Temple Burned Down? Reassessing the Evidence,”
JSOT 31 (2006)

Lapp, Nancy, “Who Is This That Comes from Edom?” in M. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L.
Stager, eds., Scripture and Other Artifacts, Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor
of Philip J. King (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994)

McCarter, P.K., 1976, ’Obadiah 7 and the fall of Edom’, BASOR 221, pp. 87-91

Julian Morgenstern, “Jerusalem—485 B.C.” HUCA 27 (1956) pp. 101-79; HUCA 28 (1957)
pp. 15-47; HUCA 31 (1960) pp. 1-29; and “Further Light from the Book of Isaiah upon
the Catastrophe of 485 B.C.,” HUCA 37 (1966) pp. 1-28

Rudolph, Wilhelm, Jeremiah, (Mohr Siebeck, 1968; original edition 1947)

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard Elliott Friedman, [email protected]

Citation: Friedman, R.E. (2021). The Destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple. Academia Letters, Article
148. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL148.