Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Did Not Your Father Do Justice
Jeremiah 22:1-19
1 Yahweh said, “Go down to the house of the king of Judah, and speak this word there: · WEB
The dynasty is measured against a king they all remembered, and knowing God is defined in one clause as judging the cause of the poor.
The message is carried to the palace itself and the terms are laid out before any king is named. Execute justice and righteousness. Rescue the robbed from the oppressor. Do no violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow. Shed no innocent blood. If they do it, kings keep riding in through these gates. If they will not, God swears by himself that the house becomes a desolation. The offer is unconditional in neither direction, and it is addressed to the throne rather than to the temple, because the throne is where these things are decided.
The first king named is Shallum, who reigned three months after Josiah and was taken away, and the instruction attached to him is startling: do not weep for the dead, but weep bitterly for the one who goes away. Josiah, killed in battle, is treated as the fortunate one. His son was carried off to Egypt and died there 2 Kings 23:34. The verdict on that is simply he will see this land no more. Exile is ranked as worse than death. That is a judgment about what a homeland was, rather than a piece of despair.
The second king is described before he is named, and the description is a building project. He builds his house by unrighteousness and his rooms by injustice, using his neighbor's labor without wages. Wide rooms, cut windows, a cedar ceiling, painted red. The charge is not extravagance in the abstract. It is that the cedar was paid for by withholding a laborer's wage, which the law had forbidden in terms that assume a man's supper depends on it Deuteronomy 24:14–15.
Then the comparison, and it is the sharpest question a prophet ever put to a king: should you reign because you strive to excel in cedar? His father ate and drank — nobody is asking for asceticism — and did justice and righteousness, and it was well with him. And then the clause that decides the passage: He judged the cause of the poor and needy; so then it was well. Wasn't this to know me? Knowing God is defined, in a question, as the practice of judging the poor man's case. Not as an experience, not as correct doctrine, and not as devotion. This book has said all along that the nation does not know God Jeremiah 9:3. Here it says what the knowledge would have looked like if they had it, and the answer is a court that hears the weak.
Against that stands the verdict on Jehoiakim, and it is delivered in the vocabulary of a funeral that does not take place. Nobody will say Ah my brother! or Ah lord! over him. He will have the burial of a donkey, dragged out and thrown beyond the gates. For a king in that world that was the complete negation of a reign. A man who spent his life on a house is denied a grave, and the two facts are set beside each other without a word of comment.
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