Rabbi Yehoshua, the son of Korcha, heard the story from an old man of Jerusalem who had lived through the Babylonian destruction. In the valley below the city, Nebuzaradan — captain of the guard for Nebuchadnezzar — slaughtered 2,110,000 souls. Inside the city, upon a single stone, he killed another 940,000. The numbers are midrashic, but the weight is not.
As the blood spread through Jerusalem, it ran until it touched another stain the people had forgotten: the blood of the prophet Zechariah, murdered in the Temple courtyard centuries earlier (2 Chronicles 24:20-22). That blood had never been covered. That blood had never stopped waiting.
The Captain Interrogates a Stain
When Nebuzaradan saw the old blood boiling and agitated, he demanded an explanation. "This is the blood of sacrifices," the priests told him. He was not fooled. He ordered sacrificial blood brought for comparison. The two looked nothing alike.
He drew his sword. "Tell me the truth, or I will comb your flesh with iron currycombs."
They broke. "He was a prophet. Because he rebuked us on matters of religion, we rose and killed him. His blood has been restless ever since."
"I Will Pacify Him"
Then Nebuzaradan, pagan general of a pagan king, said something unexpected: "I will pacify him." He brought the members of the greater and lesser Sanhedrin to the spot of the restless blood — and slaughtered them over it, thousands upon thousands, until the boiling at last subsided.
This version, preserved in Gittin 57 and paralleled in Lamentations Rabbah, reads Hosea 4:2 — "blood toucheth blood" — as a historical reckoning. A single murdered prophet, unatoned for generations, magnetized an entire city's worth of blood centuries later.
The lesson the Sages drew is unsparing. Every injustice that never gets answered is simply waiting for the moment its answer arrives.