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The Levites Were Mid-Song When the Enemy Broke In

The Levites are singing a psalm when the enemy enters the Temple. In Babylon they bite off their own fingers rather than perform for captors.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Psalm That Was Never Finished
  2. Sixty Myriads Standing With Harps
  3. By the Rivers of Babylon
  4. The Eight Exiles Behind the Silence

The Psalm That Was Never Finished

They are standing on the Levite platform, harps in hand, on the eve of the ninth of Av, at the outgoing of Shabbat, in a Sabbatical year. The psalm they have begun speaks of God bringing down the wicked by their own iniquity. The words are in their mouths. The strings are sounding.

The enemy breaks through the sanctuary gates before the verse ends.

That interruption is the first wound the Chronicles of Jerahmeel records. The last sound of the Temple is not completion. It is a broken line of praise, cut off mid-verse by soldiers who do not know or care what the Levites were singing. The service did not conclude. It was simply stopped.

The chronicle notes that this same pattern had occurred at the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar's forces. Again the ninth of Av. Again the outgoing of Shabbat. Again the Levites singing the same psalm. Again the interruption before the final words could leave their mouths. The symmetry is not coincidence in Jerahmeel's telling. It is a sign written in the calendar that the two destructions share a single root.

Sixty Myriads Standing With Harps

When Nebuchadnezzar's soldiers arrive at the platform, they find an enormous number of Levites, all described as descendants of Moses, all holding harps. The number the chronicle gives is sixty myriads. The Babylonian soldiers order them to play. Their harps, their voices, their sacred music belong to the conquerors now, or so the soldiers imagine.

The Levites look at their hands. They lift their instruments and do something the Babylonians do not expect. They bite off their own thumbs.

It is a brutal and permanent refusal. Without thumbs, they cannot play harps. Without their thumbs, the soldiers cannot compel them to perform. The violence they do to themselves is smaller than the violence of turning Temple music into entertainment for the people who burned the Temple.

By the Rivers of Babylon

The book of Psalms preserves the grief of that refusal in a verse that the Levites in exile speak to their captors: How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? The question is rhetorical. The answer is: we cannot. Not because the music is impossible. Because these songs belong to a specific place, a specific service, a specific relationship between Israel and God that exile has interrupted but not erased.

Their harps hang on the willows. This is not a poetic metaphor for sadness in the Jerahmeel tradition. It is a deliberate act. The instruments are put away, hung where they will not be touched, because using them for Babylonian entertainment would be a desecration of what they were built for.

The Eight Exiles Behind the Silence

The Jerahmeel chronicle places the Levite refusal inside a wider count. From the Exodus until the destruction of the First Temple, Israel was exiled eight times. Four exiles under Sennacherib of Assyria. Four under Nebuchadnezzar. Each wave stripped away more of the land's population. The Levites at the rivers of Babylon are not an isolated group. They are the survivors of a sustained campaign to empty the land of its people.

Knowing that history, their silence becomes louder. They are not simply declining to play music for captors. They are holding a line that connects them to every generation before them that had maintained Jewish practice under pressure. The silence by the rivers is the continuation, in exile, of the service that was interrupted mid-verse at the Temple gates.

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Chronicles of Jerahmeel LXIChronicles of Jerahmeel (Gaster, 1899)

The destruction of the Temple happened on the eve of the ninth of Av, on the outgoing of the Sabbath, in a Sabbatical year. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, the Levites were standing on their platform with harps in hand, singing the psalm that begins, "He has brought upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own evil." They never finished the verse. The enemy burst in before the last words left their mouths.

The same horrifying symmetry occurred with Nebuchadnezzar's earlier destruction. Again it was the ninth of Av, again the outgoing of the Sabbath, again the Levites were mid-song. Sixty myriads of Levites, all descendants of Moses, stood with harps. The verse was the same. The interruption was the same. The exile to Babylon followed.

When they arrived in Babylon, their captors demanded entertainment. "Sing us a song of Zion," they said. The Levites answered: "How can we sing a song of Zion on foreign soil?" The captors threatened to force them. So the Levites bit off their own fingers with their teeth and threw the severed digits before their tormentors. "How can fingers that struck the strings of God's harps in the Holy Temple now play for idols?"

That night a cloud descended and covered the Levites and their families, and a pillar of fire led them through the darkness. By morning they had reached the shore, where God extended the river Sabbatyon around them as a barrier. This miraculous river rolls stones and sand with the noise of an earthquake six days a week, making it impossible to cross. On the Sabbath it rests, but then a wall of fire erupts on the western side, burning everything within thirty-four miles. Behind that river, the sons of Moses live in purity to this day, with no thieves, no unclean animals, and no one dying before the age of 120.

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Chronicles of Jerahmeel LXChronicles of Jerahmeel (Gaster, 1899)

From the Exodus to the destruction of the First Temple, Israel was exiled eight times. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, four of those exiles were carried out by Sennacherib, king of Assyria, and four by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Together they stripped the land bare.

Sennacherib's first campaign seized the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh. He also captured the golden calf that Jeroboam had placed in Dan, which these tribes had turned into a private sanctuary. For this idolatry they were exiled to Lahlah, Habor, the river Gozan, and the cities of Media. The second exile took the tribes of Asher, Zebulun, Naphtali, and Issachar, who had refused to accept Hosea ben Elah as king. The third swept away the remaining people of Samaria, ending the northern kingdom forever.

Sennacherib then turned toward Jerusalem itself. He sent his general Rabshakeh with 180,000 soldiers. But Hezekiah prayed, and Isaiah prophesied deliverance. That night, the angel of the Lord struck down the entire Assyrian camp. Only Sennacherib survived, and he fled home in disgrace, where his own sons murdered him.

Nebuchadnezzar's four exiles finished what Sennacherib started. He deported Jehoiakim, then Jehoiachin along with 10,000 of Judah's elite, then laid siege to Jerusalem under Zedekiah and burned the Temple to the ground. His final campaign swept through Egypt, killing every Jew found in Ammon, Moab, and the surrounding regions. When Jeremiah saw that scarcely any Israelites remained, he begged God to take his life. A voice answered: "Wait. Behold the downfall of Babylon. Afterward I shall preserve you until I build the everlasting building." Then God hid the prophet away.

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Antiquities X.5-7Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

The kingdom that Josiah rebuilt fell apart the moment he died. Josephus records that when Pharaoh Neco marched through Judah on his way to fight the Babylonians at the Euphrates, Josiah refused to let him pass. Neco sent messengers pleading with him, this was not his war. Josiah ignored the warning. In the battle, an Egyptian arrow struck him down. He died at age thirty-nine, and the prophet Jeremiah composed an elegy for him.

What followed was a cascade of puppet kings and catastrophe. Josiah's son Jehoahaz reigned only three months before Neco hauled him to Egypt in chains and installed his brother Jehoiakim on the throne instead. Jehoiakim was, in Josephus's words, "of a wicked disposition, and ready to do mischief." He paid tribute to Babylon for three years, then foolishly rebelled.

Nebuchadnezzar came personally. He killed Jehoiakim and threw his body outside the city walls unburied, exactly as Jeremiah had prophesied (Jeremiah 22:19). Nebuchadnezzar installed young Jehoiachin, who lasted just three months before the Babylonian king changed his mind, dragged him to Babylon along with ten thousand captives, and placed Zedekiah on the throne instead.

Zedekiah was warned repeatedly. Jeremiah told him directly: surrender to Babylon and the city survives; resist and everything burns. Zedekiah secretly believed the prophet but feared his own officials who had defected to Babylon. He chose pride over survival. After an eighteen-month siege, the Babylonians breached Jerusalem on the ninth day of the fourth month. Zedekiah fled by night through the desert. They caught him near Jericho. Nebuchadnezzar forced him to watch his sons executed, then put out his eyes, fulfilling both Jeremiah's prophecy that he would see the king face to face, and Ezekiel's that he would be brought to Babylon but never see it. The Temple of Solomon was burned to the ground.

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