and the grey-headed; he gave everything into his hand.” Prophetic utterances form the basis of this description of the fearful judgment, e.g., Jer 15:1-9; Jer 32:3., Eze 9:6; and these, again, rest upon Deu 32:25. The subject in the first and last clause of the verse is Jahve. Bertheau therefore assumes that He is also the subject of the intermediate sentence: “and God slew their young men in the sanctuary;” but this can hardly be correct. As in the expansion of the last clause, “he gave everything into his hand,” which follows in 2Ch 36:18, not Jahve but the king of Babylon is the subject; so also in the expansion of the first clause, which וגו ויּהרג introduces, the king of the Chaldeans is the subject, as most commentators have rightly recognised. By מקדּשׁם בּבית the judgment is brought into definite relationship to the crime: because they had profaned the sanctuary by idolatry (2Ch 36:14), they themselves were slain in the sanctuary. On נתן ב הכּל, cf. Jer 27:6; Jer 32:3-4. הכּל includes things and persons, and is specialized in 2Ch 36:18-20.
Verse 18
All the vessels of the house of God, the treasures of the temple, and of the palace of the king and of the princes, all he brought to Babylon.
Verse 19
They burnt the house of God; they pulled down the walls of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces of the city with fire, and all the costly vessels were devoted to destruction. On להשׁחית, cf. 2Ch 12:12.
Verses 20-21
He who remained from the sword, i.e., who had not been slain by the sword, had not fallen and died in war, Nebuchadnezzar carried away to Babylon into captivity; so that they became servants to him and to his sons, as Jeremiah (Jer 27:7) prophesied, until the rise of the kingdom of the Persians. These last words also are an historical interpretation of the prophecy, Jer 27:7. All this was done (2Ch 36:21) to fulfil (מלּאת instead of מלּא, as in 1Ch 29:5), that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, he having prophesied (Jer 25:11., 2Ch 29:10) the seventy years' duration of Judah's desolation and the Babylonian captivity, while the king and people had not regarded his words (2Ch 36:12). This period, which according to 2Ch 36:20 came to an end with the rise of the kingdom of the Persians, is characterized by the clause וגו רצתה עד as a time of expiation of the wrong which had been done the land by the non-observance of the sabbath-years, upon the basis of the threatening (Lev 26:34), in which the wasting of the land during the dispersion of the unrepentant
