Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Yoke on the Prophet's Neck
Jeremiah 27:1-22
1 In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying, · WEB
Jeremiah walks into a summit of rebel kings wearing an ox yoke and tells them all to surrender, on the ground that the earth belongs to the one who made it.
The occasion is a diplomatic gathering. Envoys from Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Sidon have come to Jerusalem to see Zedekiah, and the only reason five small kingdoms send delegations at once is a coalition. Into that meeting Jeremiah comes wearing bonds and bars on his own neck. He sends a set to each king by the hand of his own ambassador. The message is delivered in the form of the thing being recommended. The heading names an earlier king, while the events belong to Zedekiah's reign, and the oldest copies divide over the name. Nothing in the passage depends on it.
The argument put to these foreign courts does not appeal to Israel's covenant, which would have meant nothing to them. It appeals to creation: I have made the earth, the men, and the animals... by my great power and by my outstretched arm. I give it to whom it seems right to me. Territory is described as belonging to its maker and lent at his discretion. That is the only premise on which a prophet of one small nation could tell five others what to do. From it follows the grant to Nebuchadnezzar, and with it a limit. The arrangement lasts for him, his son and his son's son, until the time of his own land comes.
The counsel is then given to each audience in turn and it is always the same: put your neck under the yoke and live. What makes it hard is that the prophets, diviners, dreamers and sorcerers of every one of these nations are saying the opposite, and so are the prophets of Judah. The united religious opinion of the entire region is on one side, and Jeremiah is on the other. His account of that is not that they are foreign but that they are lying. The consequence he names is precise: their message will get their hearers driven out of the land they are promising to save.
The dispute then narrows to an object. The false prophets are saying the temple vessels already taken will shortly come back, and Jeremiah says the rest of them are going too. The test he proposes is the sharpest thing in the chapter: if they are prophets, and if Yahweh's word is with them, let them now make intercession that the remaining vessels not go to Babylon. Men who claim access are invited to use it, on a matter they themselves have raised, with a verifiable result. And his own prediction ends with a promise attached. The vessels will be carried away. They will stay there until the day God visits them, and then they will be brought back. He is more willing than his opponents to say what will happen and when.
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