Jeremiah 52:6
And in the fourth month, in the ninth day of the month, the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land. And in the fourth month, in the ninth day of the month, the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land.
On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine grew severe inside besieged Jerusalem, so that there was no bread left for the people of the land. The siege had lasted from Zedekiah's ninth year to his eleventh year, a year and a half by this point. The verse belongs to the account of Jerusalem's ruin and the Babylonian captivity that goes with Jeremiah 44 and leads into psalms of the sorrows, desolations, longing desires and prayers for deliverance of the captives and into Lamentations mourning the ruin Jeremiah had foretold as inevitable.
The verse describes the Babylonian siege under Nebuchadnezzar at the completion of Judah's captivity, when the city was breached and taken after the famine. The siege is reckoned as a year and a half after the second investment. The starvation ended Zedekiah's revolt against Babylon: after eight years as Nebuchadnezzar's vassal, Zedekiah in his ninth year allied with the new Egyptian king Uaphris for foot soldiers and horsemen to win independence. But Nebuchadnezzar came in person with all his hosts, ravaged the open country, built forts around Jerusalem and besieged it.
When Uaphris marched from Egypt to rescue Jerusalem the Babylonians lifted the siege to meet him, the Egyptians were defeated and retreated without giving effective relief, the siege was renewed as a complete blockade, and the city fell because hunger had exhausted its food. The calamity in the fourth month, when the walls were breached and the city was taken, gave rise to the fast of the fourth month, observed by the captives as a time of mourning and fasting. The severe hunger in the besieged city marked God's destruction of Jerusalem for refusing to keep the Sabbath holy, fulfilling the warning that if the people bore no burdens on the Sabbath Jerusalem would stand forever but if they would not listen God would destroy it, which He did within a few years. The verse is part of a lesson about judgment on places that forget and defy God, offered as a warning to cities such as New York and Chicago.