History of Jerusalem

Jerusalem was the capital of the Kingdom of Judah for some 400 years. It had survived an Assyrian siege in 701 BCE by Sennacherib, unlike Samaria, the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel, that had fallen some twenty years previously. According to the Bible, this was a miraculous event in which an angel killed 185,000 men in Sennacherib’s army. According to Sennacherib’s own account preserved in the Taylor prism, an inscription contemporary with the event, the king of Judah, Hezekiah, was “shut up in the city like a caged bird” and eventually persuaded Sennacherib to leave by sending him “30 talents of gold and 800 talents of silver, and diverse treasures, a rich and immense booty”.

The siege of Jerusalem in 597 BCE led to the city being overcome by the Babylonians, who then took the young King Jehoiachin into Babylonian captivity, together with most of the aristocracy. Zedekiah, who had been placed on the throne by Nebuchadnezzar (the Babylonian king), rebelled, and Nebuchadnezzar, who at the time