The Fall of Jerusalem: Who Was to Blame?

In ancient literary accounts detailing the falls of great cities, the question of where to assign blame typically emerges. Different authors offered different reasons why the gods would allow their city to be conquered. A brief review of this millennia-long historiographic tradition—from ancient Mesopotamia to Homeric Greece—highlights the unique approach of the biblical authors in explaining the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Indeed, as we’ll see, the version of Jerusalem’s fall preserved in the Hebrew Bible was likely one of several competing narratives available to its original audience to explain the destruction.1 One Bronze Age tradition […]