Governor Gedaliah (jan 1, 586 BC – jan 1, 582 BC)

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After Jerusalem fell, Nebuchadnezzar did not annex Judah outright. He appointed Gedaliah ben Ahikam as governor over the poor and the farmers who had been left behind — a Judahite, not a Babylonian official, and a member of the Shaphan family that had served Josiah and protected Jeremiah. Gedaliah set up his seat at Mizpah, since Jerusalem was rubble, and told the remnant to accept Babylonian rule, plant, and gather the summer harvest. Refugees who had fled to Moab, Ammon, and Edom began returning. For a few months it looked as though something could survive in the land.

Ishmael ben Netaniah, a member of the Davidic royal line backed by Baalis king of Ammon, saw a collaborator sitting where a king should be. Johanan ben Kareah warned Gedaliah of the plot and offered to kill Ishmael first; Gedaliah refused to believe the report and forbade it. Ishmael came to Mizpah with ten men, ate at Gedaliah's table, and murdered him there, along with the Judeans present and the Babylonian garrison — then killed seventy pilgrims traveling to the ruined Temple site and fled to Ammon.

The consequences outweighed the act. The surviving community, certain that Babylon would take reprisal, fled to Egypt and forced the prophet Jeremiah to go with them, against his explicit counsel that they stay. Whatever Jewish self-government remained in Judah ended; the center of Jewish life shifted entirely to Babylonia and Egypt until the return under Cyrus fifty years later. Jewish tradition marks the killing with the Fast of Gedaliah on 3 Tishrei, the day after Rosh Hashanah — the only fast commemorating the death of an individual, on the reasoning that the loss of the last remnant of Jewish autonomy was equivalent to the burning of the Temple.

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