Jeremiahchapter 39
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Speaks with:Jeremiah 52×62 Kings 25×4Jeremiah 21×4Jeremiah 38×4Jeremiah 40×3Jeremiah 39×3
Summary
Chapter summary
The eleventh year, the fourth month, the ninth day: the city is broken up, and Babylon's princes sit in the middle gate. Zedekiah flees by night through the king's garden toward the Arabah and is overtaken in the plains of Jericho. At Riblah his sons and the nobles of Judah are slain before him, then his eyes are put out and he is bound in fetters for Babylon. The palace and the houses are burned and the walls broken down; the poorest of the people are left vineyards and fields. Nebuzaradan is charged to look well to Jeremiah, who is committed to Gedaliah. And Ebed-melech receives his reward: 'thy life shall be for a prey unto thee, because thou hast put thy trust in me.'
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–10 The Wall Broken Up and Zedekiah's Eyes Put Out
- B. 11–18 Jeremiah Set Free; a Word of Life for Ebed-melech
The outline
A.The Wall Broken Up and Zedekiah's Eyes Put Outvv. 1 to 10
Read vv. 1 to 10 →B.Jeremiah Set Free; a Word of Life for Ebed-melechvv. 11 to 18
Read vv. 11 to 18 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 39The history
The siege ran about eighteen months, broken by the Egyptian interruption. The wall was breached on the ninth day of the fourth month in the eleventh year, in high summer, and the officers of the king of Babylon came and sat in the Middle Gate. Sitting in the gate was the formal act of taking possession — the gate was the seat of a city's government, and occupying it announced who now ruled.
The Babylonian officers are listed by name and title, and one of them can be matched to a cuneiform tablet. A small administrative tablet in the British Museum, dated to Nebuchadnezzar's tenth year, records a gold donation by Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the chief officer — the same name and office as the Nebo-Sarsekim listed among the officers here.
Zedekiah runs at night through the king's garden and the gate between the two walls and is caught on the plains of Jericho. He is taken to Nebuchadnezzar's field headquarters at Riblah in Syria, where his sons are executed in front of him and then his eyes are put out — a standard Babylonian punishment for a vassal who broke an oath of loyalty, and the last thing he saw was the reason.
The chapter also notes who stayed. The captain of the guard left some of the poorest people in the land of Judah and gave them vineyards and fields on that day. Empires deported the useful and left the destitute to keep the land producing.
What it meant to them
For the first hearers this chapter closes an argument that had run forty years. Everything the prophet had said would happen, happened, and the record names the officers, the gates and the dates so that it cannot be softened later.
Two people are singled out for kindness in the wreckage: the prophet, freed from the court of the guard by the enemy's own commander, and Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, who had pulled him out of the mud. God remembers a rope and some old rags.
Sources cited
- The Babylonian Chronicle, in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament
- Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 39. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.