Jeremiah37chapter 37

The event driving this chapter is a real military manoeuvre. Pharaoh Hophra brought an army out of Egypt, and the Babylonians lifted the siege of Jerusalem to deal with it. Inside the walls it looked like deliverance. Jeremiah says the Egyptians will go home and the Babylonians will come back and burn the city — and adds that even if the whole attacking army were reduced to wounded men in their tents, they would rise and do it.

In the lull he goes out through the Benjamin Gate to attend to property in his home territory. This is probably the Anathoth land business, which is why the chapter mentions it at all. At the gate a sentry officer named Irijah arrests him on a charge that made perfect sense in context: you are deserting to the Chaldeans. He had, after all, been publicly advising people to do exactly that.

He is beaten and imprisoned in the house of Jonathan the secretary, which had been converted into a prison, in the cells of a vaulted cellar. Private houses pressed into use as jails, with underground storage rooms as holding cells, are exactly what a besieged city improvises.

The king then sends for him secretly. Zedekiah's question — is there any word from the LORD — gets a one-line answer: there is, you shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon. Jeremiah then negotiates his own transfer out of the cellar, and is given a loaf of bread a day from the bakers' street until all the bread in the city was gone.