And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he, and all his host, against Jerusalem, and pitched against it; and they built forts against it round about.
Nebuchadnezzar ... came ... against Jerusalem, and pitched against it. Incensed by the revolt of Zedekiah, the Assyrian despot determined to put an end to the perfidious and inconstant monarchy of Judah. This chapter narrates his third and last invasion, which he conducted in person at the head of an immense army, levied out of all the tributary nations under his sway. Having overrun the northern parts of the country, and taken almost all the fenced cities (Jeremiah 34:7), he marched direct to Jerusalem to invest it. The date of the beginning as well as of the end of the siege is here carefully marked (cf. Ezekiel 26:1; Jeremiah 39:1; Jeremiah 52:4-6); from which it appears that, with a brief interruption caused by Nebuchadnezzar's marching to oppose the Egyptians who were coming to its relief, but who retreated without fighting (see an account of the war of Nebuchadnezzar against him in revenge for his seducing Zedekiah from his allegiance to, Babylon, Wilkinson in Rawlinson's Herodotus, 2:, p. 386), the siege lasted a year and a half. So long a resistance was owing, not to the superior skill and valour of the Jewish soldiers, but to the strength of the city fortifications, on which the king too confidently relied, (cf. Jeremiah 21:1-14; Jeremiah 37:1-21; Jeremiah 38:1-28.)
Pitched against it; and ... built forts - rather, perhaps, drew lines of circumvallation, with a ditch to prevent any going out of the city. On this rampart was erected his military engines for throwing missiles into the city.