Jeremiah 38:6

How am I distressed, think you, when I call to mind that on the festival days the multitudes assembled resemble the broad expanse of the sea, but now not even the smallest part of that multitude is gathered together here? Where are they now who oppress us with their presence on the feast days?… Now if they make the summer season their excuse: for I hear of their saying things of this kind, "the present stifling heat is excessive, the scorching sun is intolerable, we cannot bear being trampled and crushed in the crowd, and to be steaming all over with perspiration and oppressed by the heat and confined space:"… What then am I to say to those who advance these pretexts? I would remind them of the three children in the furnace and the flame, who when they saw the fire encircling them on all sides, enveloping their mouth and their eyes and even their breath, did not cease singing that sacred and mystical hymn to God, in company with the universe, but standing in the midst to the pyre sent up their song of praise to the common Lord of all with greater cheerfulness than they who abide in some flowery field: and together with these three children I should think it proper to remind them also of the lions which were in Babylon, and of Daniel and the den: and not of this one only but also of another den, and the prophet Jeremiah, and the mire in which he was smothered up to the neck.

They have Lazarus in Moses and the prophets. Moses was Lazarus; he was a poor man. He was naked. He esteemed the poverty of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Pharaoh. They also have the prophets. They have Jeremiah, who is thrown into a cistern of mud and who fed on the bread of tribulation. They have all the prophets. Let them hear them. Every day Moses and the prophets are preaching against your five brothers. Let them teach them. Let them instruct them. Let them summon the eye. What do they say to it? Do not look on the carnal, but discern the spiritual. "What we have seen with our eyes," says the apostle, "what we have heard, what our hands have handled: of the Word of God." He instructs the ear, too, the sense of smell, of taste. All the prophets and all the saints teach these brothers.

Many of God's faithful witnesses have thus been privately made away, and starved to death, in prisons, whose blood will be brought to account in the day of discovery. We are not here told what Jeremiah did in this distress, but he tells us himself ( Lam. iii.

quarantine:debris (2026-07-29) — unbalanced-parens

Then took they Jeremiah,.... Having the king's leave, or at least no prohibition from him; they went with proper attendants to the court of the prison, and took the prophet from thence: and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech, that was in the court of the prison; this was a dungeon that belonged to the prison which Malchiah had the care of, or which belonged to his house, which was contiguous to the court of the prison.

The dungeon - The cistern. Every house in Jerusalem was supplied with a subterranean cistern, so well constructed that the city never suffered in a siege from want of water. So large were they that when dry they seem to have been used for prisons Zec 9:11. Hammelech - See Jer 36:26 note. The prison - The guard. They threw Jeremiah into the nearest cistern, intending that he should die of starvation. Some have thought that Ps. 69 was composed by Jeremiah when in this cistern.