In the Second Kings, chapter twenty-five, verse twenty-one, when Judah was in captivity, the earthly political kingdom of David ended. Despite the destruction, the promise concerning David’s descendants remained. God continued preparing for the coming of David’s son, Christ, whose kingdom would have no end. as in Luke one, verse thirty-three. Through David’s Messianic descendants, God would eventually form “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, as in First Peter two, verse nine.
Jeremiah adds an estimate of the number carried off. In Jeremiah fifty-two, verses twenty-eight through thirty-two, in the captivity of the seventh year, three thousand and twenty-three. In the confinement of the eighteenth year, eight hundred and thirty-two, and in that of the twenty-third, five years later, seven hundred and forty-five, making a total of forty-six hundred. If we suppose these persons to be men and multiply by four for the women and children, the entire number will still be no more than eighteen thousand and four hundred in this theme verse.
The second part of the scripture depicts the extreme punishment some had to encounter. Severities of this kind characterized all ancient warfare. The Assyrian sculptures show us prisoners of war impaled on crosses, beheaded, beaten on the head with maces, and sometimes extended on the ground and flayed. The inscriptions speak of hundreds executed and mention others as burnt in furnaces, thrown to wild beasts, or cruelly mutilated. Some scholars claim Darius Hystaspis crucified three thousand prisoners around Babylon after one of its revolts. That monarch himself, in the Behistun inscription, speaks of many cases where, after capturing rebel chiefs in the field or behind walls, he executed them and their principal adherents. Nebuchadnezzar killed seventy to eighty of the rebel inhabitants at the time.