What Happened on 9 Av?
What Happened on 9 Av?
Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the month of Av (July 17-18, 2021), is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, on which pious or Orthodox Jews, deprive themselves and pray. It is the culmination of the Three Weeks, a period of time during which they mark the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
“Thus saith the LORD of hosts: ‘The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness and cheerful feasts. Therefore love the truth and peace.’ Zechariah 8:19
So what happened on the 9th of Av?
1313 BCE: The spies returned from the Promised Land with frightening reports, and the Israelites balked at the prospect of entering the land. God decreed that they would therefore wander in the desert for 40 years.
The Israelites are in the desert, recently having experienced the miraculous Exodus, and are now poised to enter the Promised Land. But first they dispatch a reconnaissance mission to assist in formulating a prudent battle strategy. The spies return on the eighth day of Av and report that the land is unconquerable.
That night, the 9th of Av, the people cry. They insist that they’d rather go back to Egypt than be slaughtered by the Canaanites. God is highly displeased by this public demonstration of distrust in His power, and consequently that generation of Israelites never enters the Holy Land. Only their children have that privilege, after wandering in the desert for another 38 years.
Both Holy Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed on this date – the 9th day of Av. The First Temple was burned by the Babylonians in 423 BCE.
And in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month [which is Av], which is the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, came Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, unto Jerusalem.
And [two days later] he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man’s house burned he with fire. II King 25:8-9
— Western records designate the year as 586 BCE when this First Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, which is 163 years earlier than Jewish reckoning. But why such differences? The Jews have a continuous record, but English has no written records until around 400 CE. And even if the Roman Empire had a continuous record, it could bring us back another 500 years at most, but nothing to bring us to 586 BCE. Hence Western narratives and its dating system are, unfortunately, full of suspects.
In 66 CE the Jewish population rebelled against the Roman Empire. Four years later, on 4 August 70 CE (the 9th Day of Av), the Second Temple fell to the Romans unleashing a period of suffering from which the Jewish nation has never fully recovered.
According to an inscription on the Colosseum, Emperor Vespasian built the Colosseum with Jewish slaves and war spoils – many from the spoils of the Second Temple.
Surely deemed not worthy of survival, the apostate Sadducees, the Boethusians and the Essenes all vanished without coming through the Consuming Fires.
The Sadducees and Boethusians, following the heretic Samaritan way of observing Passover, kept it on the night of the fourteenth. The Essenes, after they had repudiated the calendar that was sanctioned by the Sanhedrin, then went about presumptuously making one of their own. They all perished by either the flaming Sword or the consuming Fire.
These unpleasant endings should give those in the Church serious thoughts to a coincidence that all serious believer would find troubling. But, alas, His ten endtime virgins are all naked, wretched and far asleep, as if they had all been tranquilized by Satan.
Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it? Amos 3:6
The Pharisees and the Nazarenes escaped; the former to Yavneh, the later to Pella.
Joel Huan
The Mystery of Ephraim 