Jeremiah29chapter 29

The letter travels by diplomatic pouch. It is carried by Elasah son of Shaphan and Gemariah son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah was sending to Nebuchadnezzar — official envoys with an escort, which is how private mail moved safely over a thousand miles of imperial road.

The instructions are startlingly practical: build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce, marry, have children, arrange marriages for those children, and seek the welfare of the city where you have been sent, praying for it. Cuneiform tablets from Babylonia record Judean exiles doing exactly this — settled in villages, farming allotted land, paying taxes, doing business, keeping Hebrew names alongside Babylonian ones for generations.

The seventy years is repeated here with a promise attached — plans for welfare and not for evil, a future and a hope — and it is worth seeing who it was written to. This was mail to people who had lost a war, addressed to a generation most of whom would die in Babylonia.

The last part of the chapter is a fight conducted by post. Shemaiah writes from Babylon to the temple officer in Jerusalem, demanding that Jeremiah be put in the stocks and neck-irons as a madman. His letter is read to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah answers with a letter of his own.