Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Prophets in Babylon
Jeremiah 29:15-32
15 Because you have said, “Yahweh has raised us up prophets in Babylon,” · WEB
The lie followed the exiles into Babylon, and one of its preachers writes home asking why nobody has locked Jeremiah up yet.
The exiles had said, in effect, that they had their own prophets now — Yahweh has raised us up prophets in Babylon — and the reply first deals with what those prophets were telling them about home. The people still in Jerusalem, whom the deportees envied, are the rotten figs of the earlier vision, and the sword, famine and pestilence are named as pursuing them. The comfortable message in Babylon depended on the belief that the real story was continuing back in the city, and the letter closes that off.
Two of these men are named and sentenced, and the charges against them are joined in one sentence: they have prophesied falsely in God's name, and they have committed adultery with their neighbors' wives. The book keeps making that connection rather than treating false teaching as an intellectual failure. And the closing clause is a statement about evidence — I am he who knows, and am witness — addressed to men whose conduct was private and whose message was public.
The third case is the most revealing, because it is a piece of correspondence. Shemaiah writes from Babylon to the priest in charge of order in the temple, reminding him that his office exists to put every man who is crazy and makes himself a prophet in the stocks, and asking why Jeremiah has not been dealt with. He quotes the offending sentence accurately: the captivity is long, build houses and plant gardens. That is what he found intolerable — not a doctrine but a horticultural instruction, because a planted garden concedes the seventy years.
Then a detail that is easy to pass over and worth stopping at. Zephaniah the priest read this letter in the hearing of Jeremiah the prophet. The officer who was being urged to arrest him simply showed him the complaint. The book does not explain the man or praise him, and he appears later still functioning in the same post Jeremiah 37:3. The sentence on Shemaiah follows — no descendant among the people, and he won't see the good that I will do to my people — which is a punishment defined by exclusion from a restoration he had refused to believe in.
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