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The wind whistled and howled through gaps in the ruined walls, where once courses of

stone thick slabs laid one atop the next to guard the city from its enemies.

Now it was hard to find more than one block atop the next.

At best the walls resembled a gap toothed smile, the teeth long since lost to blows and

poor nutrition, bad decisions and worse luck.

That wasn't a bad way to think about what had happened to this city, thought the old

man, setting himself down gingerly on a pile of fallen stone.

It had taken its shots one after the next, surviving right up until the point when it

could no longer endure.

In his youth, when he had been born and raised here, Jerusalem had been a great city.

Well, perhaps not great, thought the old man, comparing it to other places he'd been

in the decade since he'd left like Uruk or Tyre or even Great Babylon itself.

But it had been their city, home to their ancestors, to their kings of the house of David

and to the temple, the house where Yahweh had dwelt, higher, no longer.

All of that was in the past, long in the past, and now there could have been few still

alive who even remembered what Jerusalem had been like.

Fifty years thought the old man, scratching it an itch on his shiny bald paint, 50 years

of struggling to survive, 50 years under the Babylonian thumb.

He had made the best of it, just like all of his compatriots from Judah.

Some had conned the Egypt he'd heard, others to side an entire and biblious on the coast,

...