Jeremiah43chapter 43

Jeremiah 43:1-3

Jeremiah had just delivered the Lord's answer to Johanan's own inquiry, safety in the land against ruin in Egypt, and the ink is barely dry before Azariah and Johanan brand it a lie: Thou speakest falsely, the Lord our God hath not sent thee. The charge does not stop at Jeremiah but lands on Baruch, that Baruch the son of Neriah setteth thee on against us, the world's usual explanation for an unwelcome word, that someone else must be pulling the prophet's strings. The bench notes the irony: forty years earlier Jeremiah stood trial for a sermon at the temple gate, and here at the close of his public ministry the same accusation is renewed in exile's antechamber.

Jeremiah 43:4-7

The verdict is stated twice for weight, obeyed not the voice of the Lord, and the flight south sweeps up everyone within reach, the king's daughters left in Gedaliah's own care now carried along with the rest. Jeremiah and Baruch themselves are taken, prophet and scribe led captive by the very company that claimed to be asking the Lord's will only a few verses before. The bench reads verse 7's closing clause, for they obeyed not the voice of the Lord, as the narrator's own judgment stamped on the whole company's arrival at Tahpanhes, the border town, so the company's last miles stand condemned before Egypt is even reached.

Jeremiah 43:8-11

The word does not stop pursuing Jeremiah for having been dragged where he refused to go, and the sign commanded here stands with the marred girdle and the broken bottle as enacted rather than only spoken prophecy: great stones hidden in the clay of the pavement at Pharaoh's own house, in the sight of the men of Judah, a buried claim driven into Egyptian soil. Nebuchadnezzar is named the Lord's servant, the same title carried at 25:9 and 27:6, and is set to spread his royal pavilion over the very stones the refugees watched Jeremiah bury, so the empire's throne is planted on the doorstep of the refuge they fled toward. The threefold sentence of verse 11, death to death, captivity to captivity, sword to sword, reads to the bench as the same formula already used of Judah's own fall, Egypt now standing where Jerusalem stood.

Jeremiah 43:12-13

The judgment reaches past Egypt's army to its temples, the gods' own houses burned and their images carried captive, and Nebuchadnezzar is pictured wrapping himself in the conquered land as a shepherd puts on his garment, dominion given the plainest possible image of ownership. Beth-shemesh, house of the sun, is Heliopolis, On, the great sun-temple city named in Genesis 41:45 as Joseph's father-in-law's home, and its obelisks and images are marked for breaking by name, the same contempt Chemosh meets at Jeremiah 48:7. The bench reads the two verses as the sign-act's fulfilment stated in advance, the buried stones of verse 9 becoming, in the word given, an actual throne on actual ground.