Jeremiah34chapter 34

The chapter contains a line that can be checked against a stack of broken pottery. It says the Babylonian army was fighting Jerusalem and the cities that were left — Lachish and Azekah, for these were the only fortified cities that remained. Among the letters written in ink on potsherds found in the burnt guardroom at Lachish, one officer reports that he is watching for the fire signals of Lachish because he can no longer see Azekah. Two independent sources, the same collapsing front line.

The crisis is a broken emancipation. The Law said a Hebrew slave served six years and went free in the seventh. Zedekiah had made a covenant in the temple to release everyone, and it was done — and then, when the Egyptian army approached and the Babylonians pulled back from the walls, the owners rounded up the freed men and women and enslaved them again.

The reason is not hard to guess. With the siege apparently lifting, fields needed working, and a freed household was labour walking away. The chapter treats it as profaning God's own name, because the release had been sworn in his house.

The covenant they broke had been cut in the old manner: a calf killed, cut in two, and the parties walking between the halves. The meaning was a self-curse — do to me as was done to this animal if I break my word. God takes them at it: the men who passed between the parts will be given to their enemies, and their dead bodies will be food for the birds.