Then, in 587 BC, it had been the turn of Judah, the kingdom that took its name from the fourth son of Israel, and of its capital, Jerusalem. The king of Babylon had taken the city by storm. ‘And he burnt the house of the Lord and the house of the king and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great house he burnt in fire.’13 Nothing of the Temple built by Solomon, not its fittings of cypress wood, nor its gilded gates, nor its bronze pillars ornamented with pomegranates, had been spared.
