A.
Once you have a city crowded with makeshift shelters of unwashed malnourished people, you have a recipe for the rapid spread of disease. Smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, etc. could erupt with nothing to stop the spread. In this lies a most difficult crisis.
1.
Corpses.
2.
People began to die – some of natural causes, but eventually unnatural diseases took their toll.
3.
What is to be done with the dead? I have no information about what they really did, but I can imagine some options.
a.
I do not think that they would attempt storage.
b.
Perhaps they threw them over the city wall like Jeremiah wrote in Jeremiah 9:22, “Speak, “Thus says the Lord, The corpses of men will fall like dung on the open field, And like the sheaf after the reaper, but no one will gather them”.
B.
Jerusalem Fell.
1.
Now it came about in the ninth year of his reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, camped against it and built a siege wall all around it.
2.
So the city was under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah.
a.
On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.
b.
Then the city was broken into, and all the men of war fled and went forth from the city at night by way of the gate between the two walls which was by the king’s garden, though the Chaldeans were all around the city.
c.
And they went by way of the Arabah (Jeremiah 52:4-7).
1)
Judah’s army went awol.
2)
Those men of war left Jerusalem as prey for King Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction.
3)
This may well be what Israel’s great army will do now.