17 Tammuz: The Breached Walls, the Broken Tablets, and the Beginning of the Three Weeks

Five Things on One Day

The Mishnah lists five calamities that befell Israel on the seventeenth of Tammuz:

Five things befell our fathers on the seventeenth of Tammuz… The tablets were broken, the daily offering ceased, the city was breached, Apostomus burned the Torah, and he set up an idol in the Sanctuary.

The Babylonian Talmud’s explanations show that the five are of different kinds.¹ The tablets are dated by counting days from the Torah; the daily offering and the burning of the Torah are, in the Talmud’s words, received traditions; the breach must be reconciled with Jeremiah; the idol is tied to Daniel.

The tablets broken

The Torah tells that after the giving of the Ten Commandments, Moshe went up the mountain and stayed there forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18). The Talmud counts: he ascended on the seventh of Sivan, the day after the revelation, and forty days later brings us to the seventeenth of Tammuz.² On that day he came down and saw the calf:

And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moshe’s anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

The tablets were “the work of God” (Exodus 32:16). Moshe could not hand Israel a covenant while they stood in the act of unfaithfulness. The broken tablets are the first breach.

The Talmud records a tradition that the fragments of the first tablets were not thrown away but were placed in the Ark of the Covenant beside the second, whole tablets.³ The broken pieces were still holy. From this the sages taught that a scholar who has forgotten his learning through age or illness must still be honored, just as the broken tablets rested in the Holy of Holies.

The daily offering ceased

The tamid (תמיד, “continual”) was the lamb offered every morning and every afternoon in the Temple (Exodus 29:38–42; Numbers 28:3–8). Its cessation meant the heartbeat of the sanctuary had stopped. Josephus, an eyewitness of the Roman siege, records that in 70 CE the daily offering failed on the seventeenth of Panemus, the Macedonian month corresponding to Tammuz, because there were no longer men to offer it.⁴ That independent testimony anchors the tradition.

The city breached

Here the Talmud faces a difficulty. For the First Temple, the book of Jeremiah gives a different date:

And in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, the ninth day of the month, the city was broken up.

Jeremiah 52:6–7 repeats it: “in the fourth month, in the ninth day of the month, the famine was sore in the city… Then the city was broken up.” The fourth month, counting from Nisan, is Tammuz. The Babylonian Talmud resolves the difficulty simply: in the First Temple period the walls were breached on the ninth, and in the Second on the seventeenth, and the fast follows the later and greater destruction.⁵ The Jerusalem Talmud takes a different view, holding that the breach came on the seventeenth both times and that the text records the ninth because the calculations of that troubled time were confused.⁶ In the period of the return from Babylon the people kept “the fast of the fourth month” (Zechariah 8:19), almost certainly on the ninth; the rabbinic fast on the seventeenth reflects the Second Temple experience.

Apostomus and the idol

No one is certain who Apostomus was. The Talmud calls the event a tradition. Some scholars connect it with an incident Josephus reports under the Roman procurator Cumanus, around 50 CE, when a soldier seized a Torah scroll, tore it, and threw it into the fire.⁷ Others link it to the persecution of Antiochus IV, when “they rent in pieces the books of the Torah which they found, and burnt them with fire” (1 Maccabees 1:56). Both identifications are guesses.

The setting up of an idol in the Sanctuary is likewise debated. The Babylonian Talmud ties it to Daniel’s words about “the abomination that maketh desolate” (Daniel 12:11) and the “abominations” of Daniel 9:27.⁸ Medieval commentators identified the idol with the image King Manasseh placed in the Temple (2 Kings 21:7), while others thought of Antiochus’s “abomination of desolation” on the altar (1 Maccabees 1:54). There is also a textual question: some manuscripts of the Mishnah read “an idol was set up” rather than “he set up an idol,” which separates the idol from Apostomus. It is honest to say which sorrows are documented and which are inherited memory.

Between the Straits: The Three Weeks

The period from 17 Tammuz to 9 Av takes its name from Lamentations:

Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.

Bein hametzarim (בין המצרים) pictures Israel hemmed in on every side. The haftarot of the three Sabbaths in this period are all prophecies of rebuke: two from Jeremiah and the third from Isaiah, the “vision” read on Shabbat Chazon.

The customs of the Three Weeks express a gradual lowering of joy:⁹

• No weddings. Ashkenazim do not hold weddings from 17 Tammuz until after Tisha B’Av. The Shulchan Aruch forbids them from the first of Av, and many Sephardi communities also refrain from 17 Tammuz.
• No haircuts or shaving. Ashkenazi custom refrains through the whole Three Weeks; Sephardi custom generally only in the week in which Tisha B’Av falls.
• No music for enjoyment or large celebrations.
• No shehecheyanu. Many avoid new fruits and new clothes that would call for the blessing “who has kept us alive,” except on Shabbat.

From the first of Av the restrictions deepen into the Nine Days, described in the article on Tisha B’Av.

Keeping the Fast

The seventeenth of Tammuz is one of the four “minor” public fasts, together with Tzom Gedaliah, Asara B’Tevet, and Ta’anit Esther. Its laws are:¹⁰

• The fast begins at dawn (alot hashachar), not the evening before, and ends at nightfall. One may eat before dawn, provided one did not go to sleep intending to begin the fast.
• Only eating and drinking are forbidden. Washing, leather shoes and work are permitted.
• Those who are ill, and pregnant or nursing women, are generally exempt or should consult a rabbi.
• When the date falls on Shabbat, the fast is postponed to Sunday.

The prayers of the day add Aneinu (“Answer us”) to the Amidah, Selichot (penitential prayers) in the morning, and, in Ashkenazi communities, Avinu Malkeinu. The Torah reading at Shacharit and Mincha is Exodus 32:11–14 and 34:1–10: Moshe’s plea for Israel after the golden calf, and Hashem’s revelation of His thirteen attributes of mercy as the second tablets are prepared. At Mincha, Ashkenazim add the haftarah Isaiah 55:6–56:8, “Seek ye Hashem while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near.” See the readings for the fast days. It is fitting that the reading for the day of the broken tablets is the story of their restoration.

Tablets of Stone and Tablets of the Heart

The Brit Hadashah (the New Testament) speaks of tablets in a way that echoes this day. Paul writes to the believers in Corinth:

Ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Messiah ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.

Paul is drawing on the prophets. Jeremiah promised a new covenant in which Hashem would say, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel added, “A new heart also will I give you… And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them” (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

This passage is often read as if Paul were setting the Torah aside. That is not what the prophets promised. Jeremiah does not say Hashem will write a different law on the heart; He says He will write my Torah there. Ezekiel’s new heart results in keeping Hashem’s statutes. The problem at Sinai was never the tablets but the heart of a people who could dance around a calf forty days after hearing the voice from the fire. Paul himself insists that “the Torah is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (Romans 7:12), and Yeshua taught that he had not come to destroy the Torah (Matthew 5:17).

Read in that light, the seventeenth of Tammuz and 2 Corinthians 3 belong together. The day remembers stone tablets broken because the covenant had not yet reached the heart. The prophets and the apostles look toward a day when the same Torah, given by the same God, will be written where it cannot be shattered.

The Intercessor on the Mountain

After the tablets were broken, Moshe did something remarkable. He went back up the mountain to plead for the people:

And Moshe returned unto Hashem, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin… Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.

Hashem did not accept Moshe’s offer of himself, but He heard the prayer and renewed the covenant (Exodus 34:1).

The Brit Hadashah presents Yeshua as the prophet like Moshe whom Hashem promised to raise up (Deuteronomy 18:15; Acts 3:22), and his work has the same shape. He intercedes for transgressors (Isaiah 53:12); from the cross he prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34); and now, exalted at the right hand of God, “he ever liveth to make intercession” (Hebrews 7:25). All of this is directed to the Father. Like Moshe, Yeshua stands between Hashem and the people and pleads for mercy, and like Moshe’s plea, his intercession rests on the thirteen attributes that the fast-day reading proclaims: “Hashem, Hashem God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6). The comparison is a classic Messianic reading that grows naturally from the text, though Exodus 32 itself concerns Moshe alone.

The Daily Offering Taken Away

The cessation of the tamid on the seventeenth of Tammuz connects with a theme in the book of Daniel, the same verses the Talmud cites for the idol in the Sanctuary. Daniel speaks of a time when “he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease” (Daniel 9:27), and gives a number:

And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.

Jewish readers have long seen a first fulfillment in the desecration under Antiochus IV in 167 BCE (1 Maccabees 1:54). Yet Yeshua, two centuries later, spoke of “the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet” as still to come (Matthew 24:15), and the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE followed within a generation. Prophecy in Scripture often has more than one horizon. What it never invites is calculation. Daniel himself was told that the words were “closed up and sealed till the time of the end” (Daniel 12:9), and Yeshua said that no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Benei Avraham does not set dates or name modern figures in these prophecies.

The deeper hope is not the cessation of worship but its restoration. Malachi promised that “the offering of Judah and Jerusalem” would again “be pleasant unto Hashem, as in the days of old” (Malachi 3:4), and Ezekiel’s closing vision describes a restored sanctuary with Hashem dwelling among His people (Ezekiel 43:7).

From Fast to Joy

The prophet Zechariah named this very fast in his promise of restoration:

Thus saith Hashem 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.

“The fast of the fourth month” is the fast of Tammuz. The day that remembers breached walls will become a feast when Jerusalem’s walls are “salvation” and her gates “praise” (Isaiah 60:18). The Rambam rules that in the days of Mashiach all these fasts will be annulled and become days of joy.¹¹ Zechariah adds: “therefore love the truth and peace.” Those who wait for the restored city are called to live now as its citizens.

Remembering the Day

Some general ways to keep the seventeenth of Tammuz:

• Fast from dawn to nightfall, if your health allows, and use the hunger as a reminder to pray for Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6).
• Read Exodus 32–34, from the broken tablets to the renewed covenant, and Jeremiah 39 on the breach of the city.
• Examine where the walls have been breached in your own life and household: what has been let in that does not belong, and what holy thing has ceased?
• Begin the Three Weeks deliberately. Postpone celebrations, reduce entertainment, and read the prophets of rebuke and comfort through to Tisha B’Av and Shabbat Nachamu.
• See our calendar for the dates of the fast and the Three Weeks in any given year.

The broken tablets were carried in the Ark beside the whole ones. Israel never threw away the memory of its failure; it carried it into the Holy of Holies, next to the renewed covenant. That is what the seventeenth of Tammuz asks of us: to remember honestly, and to hope for the day when the Torah is written on hearts that will not break it again.