Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Seventy Years
Jeremiah 25:1-14
1 The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah (this was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon), · WEB
The exile is given a number, and the empire that carries it out is called God's servant and sentenced in the same breath.
The chapter is dated twice over — the fourth year of Jehoiakim, which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar — and Jeremiah counts his own service: twenty-three years of speaking, rising up early and speaking, with nobody listening. The phrase recurs throughout the book, and it always describes God's persistence rather than Judah's. What was on offer during those years is summarized in one sentence. Return from your evil way, and dwell in the land. The alternative was never presented as a mystery.
Then the sentence, and it contains a title that would have been intolerable to hear. I will send to Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant. That term belongs in Scripture to Moses, to David, to the prophets. It is given here to a pagan conqueror who does not know the God using him. The claim is not that the man is godly. It is that God's purposes are carried out by people who have no idea they are carrying them. Judah is being told that the army at its border is on an errand.
The number attached is the other half of the sentence, and it changes the character of the whole thing: these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years. A judgment with a term is a judgment with an end written into it before it starts. Later readers used the figure as a fixed date and reckoned from it Daniel 9:2. The record of the fall explains what the years were for: the land was keeping the sabbaths it had been denied 2 Chronicles 36:21. Even the duration is described as a debt being repaid rather than as an anger being exhausted.
And the servant is sentenced too. When the seventy years are accomplished, God will punish the king of Babylon and that nation for their iniquity, and make the land of the Chaldeans desolate forever. Being used does not make an empire innocent. Babylon will do what it wants to do. It will be held to account for wanting it. And it will nonetheless have accomplished what it was sent to accomplish. That is the book's settled way of holding sovereignty and responsibility together without softening either.
What is taken away in the meantime is worth reading slowly, because it is not political. The voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the lamp. A wedding, a hand mill grinding at dawn, a lamp burning in a window at night. These are the sounds and lights by which anyone within earshot knows that ordinary life is continuing. The catastrophe is measured by the silence where they used to be.
settled What this mark means