Judah fell to Babylon because of persistent covenant disobedience, and God's judgment was just and in keeping with the blessings and curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. Ezekiel 16 ranks Judah's sins as worse than Israel's and Sodom's, and brings them near the seared conscience of the world before the Flood. II Chronicles 36 places the blame on the king, priests, leaders, and people, who mocked, despised, and scoffed at God's messengers despite repeated warnings, until there was no remedy. II Kings 24 adds the sins of Manasseh, including innocent blood, as a cause. Nebuchadnezzar served as God's instrument. Through four deportations (604, 597, 586, and about 582 BC), Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, many were killed, and the survivors were carried to Babylon as servants, while a few fled to Egypt. The land lay desolate seventy years to make up the Sabbath rests the people had denied it. Like other empires' resettlement policy, the exile was harsh. The exiles were forcibly removed, put to labor, and barred from returning, which Psalm 137 laments. Yet God's punishment was lighter than their iniquities deserved (Ezra 9). The returnees soon repeated their fathers' sins, as Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Malachi show, including neglect of the Temple, intermarriage, Sabbath-breaking, and robbing God of tithes. Jesus declared that the generation of the Pharisees would fill up the measure of their fathers' guilt. Jerusalem fell again in AD 70, and Judah was sent into exile once more.

God brought the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC on Judah as punishment for the multitude of her transgressions, as Lamentations 1 and 2 stress that God Himself did it, using the Chaldeans as His instrument. Jeremiah 5 lays out the case: dishonesty, idolatry, sexual sin, treachery, defiance, oppression of the poor, injustice, feel-good religion, and arrogant, self-styled ministers, ending with the rhetorical question of what they will do in the end. Having broken every term of the covenant, they incurred the curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, after roughly eight hundred years of mercy. God did His due diligence, sending prophets daily (Jeremiah 25) who called for repentance, but the people never listened. No eclipse or other portent warned them, and none would have changed them. Only total war, famine, pestilence, and exile got their attention, and then only that of a small remnant. Second Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52 record the siege, the flight and blinding of Zedekiah, the burning of the temple and city, and only about 4,600 captives taken from what had been a great nation. Jeremiah 24's good and bad figs show God judging the people: the exiles are preserved for restoration, while the rest are consumed. Lamentations thus pairs deep grief with a small hope in God's forgiveness and renewal. Jesus' lament over Jerusalem in Luke 13 shows God's desire to gather rather than scatter, but they were unwilling.

God Himself afflicted Judah and Jerusalem because her multitude of transgressions piled so high that He could no longer ignore them, and He delivered judgment in great fury, the Day of the Lord the prophets had long foretold (Amos 5, Ezekiel 7). Babylon physically lit the fires, but God sent fire from above into her very bones, as He did to Sodom, to burn out the uncleanness within. He netted her in the siege, so that famine, disease, and sword left her faint and ashamed. He wove her sins into a yoke thrust upon her neck, so that sin bound and weakened her and led her into captivity. He trampled her mighty men as in a winepress and called the Chaldeans to an assembly like a feast day, in which His own people were the sacrifice. His presence in her midst, usually a blessing, became a curse. He also commanded that all around her become adversaries and regard her as unclean, so that she sat without a comforter and was forced to reason out why she was punished. The Lord is righteous, for she rebelled against His commandment as Israel had since the wilderness. Yet Jerusalem grieved over the outcome of her sins rather than the sins themselves, kept blaming her enemies and lovers, and asked for vengeance on them. She was far from repentance. Obedience was all God asked, and He would have blessed her. Judah's fate warns God's people to examine themselves, root out sin, and repent through godly sorrow.

God sent the Chaldeans, a ruthless, impetuous, predatory nation, as the rod of His anger against Judah, as Habakkuk, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel foretold. The Chaldeans were kin to Israel through Chesed, son of Nahor, so the blow came from family. They conquered quickly, and in 586 BC they destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, killed many, and carried most of the survivors into captivity. The punishment was fully deserved. Judah's "multitudes of transgressions" (pesha') were breaches of the covenant: unfaithfulness, idolatry, and misusing God's blessings. She trusted foreign alliances, the lovers of her harlotry, who proved useless or turned on her, as Egypt and Edom did. She never considered the consequences of her choices. The curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 came true exactly as warned, including famine and cannibalism during the siege. Her sins opened the door for foreigners to defile the sanctuary. Nothing could stop the Babylonians, and even sincere repentance came too late. God told Jeremiah not to pray for the people and said He was weary of relenting, citing Manasseh's sins and the people's readiness to follow them. God is merciful and longsuffering, but His justice must eventually be satisfied, and His wrath finally breaks forth like a burst dam. Judah received everything she deserved, and the same sins now threaten this nation.