The Great Destroyer: Cyrus, Babylon, and Jerusalem

How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave.

So begins the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Lamentations, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians at the beginning of the sixth century BC. In Near Eastern theology, if a god abandoned a city, that city would be destroyed. This was Jerusalem’s fate; it was also how the Babylonians understood the destruction of their own city by the Assyrians at the end of the seventh century.