foreign hands. Jerusalem, or, more poignantly, Mount Zion, the city of the Great King (Ps. 48:2), lay in ruins whilst the temple, focal point of the nation’s worship, was first robbed of all its treasures and then destroyed. In human terms, nothing remained of a once independent nation. Something of the despair of the times may be gauged from the book of Lamentations, whilst contemporary prophets such as Ezekiel made clear that there could be no straight path back to the situation which had formerly