The 10th of Tevet: When the Siege Began

The Day the Noose Tightened

Every siege begins with a single moment: the army arrives, the gates close, and the people inside realize that the world outside has become unreachable. On the 10th of Tevet, roughly 2,600 years ago, that moment arrived for Jerusalem.

The year was approximately 588 BCE. King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon — the most powerful ruler in the ancient Near East — deployed his armies around the walls of Jerusalem. The siege had begun. It would last two and a half agonizing years, ending in the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, the razing of the city, and the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon.

The Fast of the 10th of Tevet (Asara B’Tevet) commemorates that day — not the destruction itself (that is Tisha B’Av), but the beginning of the destruction. The moment when the end became inevitable.

The Biblical Record

The siege is documented in multiple biblical sources. II Kings 25:1 states plainly: “In the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and encamped against it.”

The prophet Ezekiel, already in exile in Babylon, received a divine message on that very day (Ezekiel 24:1-2): “Son of man, write down the name of this day, this very day. The king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem this very day.” The phrase “this very day” (b’etzem hayom hazeh) gives the date a biblical weight that would have legal consequences centuries later.

God commanded Ezekiel to use a grim metaphor: Jerusalem is a cooking pot, and its inhabitants are the meat being boiled within it. The city’s corruption — the bloodshed, the injustice, the idolatry that prophets had warned about for generations — had finally brought judgment. The siege was not an accident of geopolitics. It was, in the prophetic view, the consequence of moral failure.

What a Siege Meant

For a modern reader, it is easy to gloss over the word “siege” without grasping what it meant for the people trapped inside. A siege was slow starvation. It was watching food supplies dwindle week by week, month by month. It was disease spreading through overcrowded streets. It was the knowledge that no help was coming — that the armies outside were patient and had time on their side.

The Book of Lamentations, read on Tisha B’Av, describes the end result in horrifying detail: mothers eating their own children, nobles unrecognizable from famine, corpses in the streets. All of that began on the 10th of Tevet, when the Babylonian army took its position and waited.

The siege lasted roughly 30 months. Jerusalem held out far longer than anyone might have expected, sustained by desperation and perhaps by the faint hope that Egypt might intervene (it did not, or not effectively). When the walls were finally breached in the summer of 586 BCE, the destruction was total.

Observance

The 10th of Tevet is a minor fast, following the standard pattern:

• Fasting from dawn to nightfall
• No additional restrictions beyond abstaining from food and drink
• Special prayers: Aneinu is added to the Amidah, and the Torah portion from Exodus 32 (Moses’ intercession after the Golden Calf) is read at morning and afternoon services
• Exemptions for those who are pregnant, nursing, ill, or otherwise unable to fast safely

There is one unique halakhic feature of the 10th of Tevet: it is the only minor fast that can fall on a Friday. Other minor fasts are postponed if they would occur on Friday (to avoid the difficulty of entering Shabbat while fasting), but the 10th of Tevet is not moved. Some authorities trace this to the emphatic biblical language — “this very day” — which suggests the date itself carries an obligation that overrides convenience. When it falls on Friday, the fast ends at sunset with the arrival of Shabbat, and the transition from mourning to rest happens in a single breath.

A Day of General Kaddish

In 1949, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate gave the 10th of Tevet an additional layer of meaning. They designated it as Yom HaKaddish HaKlali — a “Day of General Kaddish” — a day to recite the mourner’s Kaddish for the victims of the Holocaust whose date of death is unknown.

This decision addressed a painful practical problem. Jewish tradition prescribes that the Kaddish be recited on the anniversary of a loved one’s death (yahrzeit). But millions of Holocaust victims — men, women, and children murdered in camps, ghettos, forests, and ditches across Europe — perished without records. No one knows the exact date they died. For their families, if any survived, the impossibility of observing a yahrzeit was yet another loss.

The 10th of Tevet became the answer. On this day, anyone who lost family members in the Holocaust and does not know their date of death can recite Kaddish. The fast that remembers the beginning of Jerusalem’s destruction now also remembers the destruction of European Jewry.

This dual function gives the day an unusual emotional density. You are mourning events separated by 2,500 years — and recognizing, with a chill, how much they have in common. Siege. Starvation. Destruction. Exile. The details change; the pattern persists.

Why Mourn the Beginning?

One might ask: if Tisha B’Av already commemorates the destruction of the Temple, why do we need a separate fast for the start of the siege? The answer reveals something important about how Jewish tradition understands tragedy.

Catastrophes do not happen in an instant. They build. There is a moment — sometimes clear only in retrospect — when the path toward destruction became irreversible. The 10th of Tevet marks that moment. The walls had not yet been breached. The Temple had not yet burned. Theoretically, things could still have turned out differently. But the siege had begun, and with it, the long slide toward ruin.

The tradition insists on mourning the beginning separately from the end because beginnings matter. By the time the Temple was burning, it was too late for choices. On the 10th of Tevet, it was not too late — but the choices made (or not made) in the years and decades before had led inexorably to this point. The fast asks us to pay attention to beginnings. To notice when walls are being surrounded. To act before the siege becomes unbreakable.

Connecting the Fasts

The 10th of Tevet is one of four fasts connected to the destruction of the Temples, as listed by the prophet Zechariah (8:19):

• 10th of Tevet — the siege begins
• 17th of Tammuz — the walls are breached
• 9th of Av (Tisha B’Av) — the Temple is destroyed
• 3rd of Tishrei (Fast of Gedaliah) — the last Jewish governor is assassinated

Together, these fasts tell a story in four acts. They are not isolated memorial days but chapters in a narrative of loss that the Jewish people relive each year. Zechariah promised that someday these fasts would become “days of joy and gladness.” Until then, they serve as markers on a map of grief — reminders of what was lost, and of how it was lost.

The 10th of Tevet is the first chapter. The army has arrived. The gates are closing. And the long, terrible story is about to begin.