Jeremiah38chapter 38

Jeremiah 38:1-6

Four princes report Jeremiah's public message, he that remaineth in this city shall die by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence: but he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live, and demand his execution on the ground that he weakeneth the hands of the men of war, treating the prophecy of doom as itself the cause of the coming doom rather than its accurate forecast. Zedekiah's answer, behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you, is the king's own confession of powerlessness before his court, the same weak man who had privately asked for a word from the Lord now surrendering the messenger to men who want him dead. Jeremiah is let down by cords into Malchiah's dungeon where there was no water, but mire, so that Jeremiah sunk in the mire, a slower death than the sword the princes did not formally order but plainly intended, as the bench reads their choice of method.

Jeremiah 38:7-13

Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, a eunuch in the king's house and so a foreigner and an outsider by two counts, hears of the dungeon and goes straight to Zedekiah sitting in the gate: these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet. His plainness moves the king to immediate action, thirty men and old cast clouts and rotten rags to pad the cords against the prophet's armholes, a practical kindness the text records in its own careful detail. The bench notes the reversal: the princes born of Judah sought Jeremiah's death, and a Cushite servant with no standing in the covenant people saved his life, a man later given his own oracle of deliverance for the trust he showed here (39:15-18).

Jeremiah 38:14-18

Zedekiah summons Jeremiah a third time, now to the third entry of the temple, and demands the whole truth, I will ask thee a thing; hide nothing from me, while Jeremiah first tests the king's own honesty, if I declare it unto thee, wilt thou not surely put me to death?, having already been imprisoned twice for words the king privately wanted to hear. The king's oath, as the Lord liveth, that made us this soul, secures Jeremiah's answer: submission to Babylon means the city spared and the king's own house spared, thou shalt live, and thine house, while resistance means the city burned and Zedekiah himself unable to escape. The choice is put to him in the plainest terms the book offers, obedience preserving what defiance will lose, as the commentators frame the interview's whole weight.

Jeremiah 38:19-28

Zedekiah's real fear surfaces at last, I am afraid of the Jews that are fallen to the Chaldeans, lest they deliver me into their hand, and they mock me, terror of his own defectors outweighing terror of Babylon or of God, and Jeremiah's answer, they shall not deliver thee, cannot move him past it. The vision of the king's own women taunting him, thy friends have set thee on, and have prevailed against thee: thy feet are sunk in the mire, and they are turned away back, echoes Jeremiah's own dungeon in mire back at the king who put him there, a detail the bench reads as deliberate. Zedekiah extracts a promise of silence about the conversation, and Jeremiah keeps it exactly when the princes come asking, so that he remains in the court of the prison until the day Jerusalem falls, obedient to the letter of a secrecy the king demanded but not to the counsel the king refused.