Biblion Bible Commentary
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Buying a Field in a Besieged City
Jeremiah 32:1-25
1 This is the word that came to Jeremiah from Yahweh in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. · WEB
From a prison cell in a city under siege, Jeremiah buys farmland in enemy-held territory and files the deed for a future he will not see.
The setting is stated with unusual care because everything depends on it. The tenth year of Zedekiah, the eighteenth of Nebuchadnezzar, the army encamped around the city, and Jeremiah shut up in the court of the guard by his own king for saying the city would fall. The land he is about to purchase lies at Anathoth, north of the walls, in country the invaders had already crossed — and the village whose men had once plotted to kill him Jeremiah 11:21. It would be difficult to design a worse investment.
He is told in advance that his cousin will come and offer it, and the confirmation is worth noticing: when Hanamel actually arrives, Jeremiah says Then I knew that this was Yahweh's word. A prophet who has been right for forty years still tests a word against the event. What his cousin asks for is not charity but the discharge of a family duty — the right of redemption belonged to the nearest kinsman, so that land stayed in the family rather than passing out of it Leviticus 25:25. Jeremiah is being asked to keep the law in a country where the law's whole framework is about to be destroyed.
He pays seventeen shekels and the transaction is recorded in exhaustive detail: the deed signed, sealed, weighed out in the balances, witnesses called, both copies taken — the sealed one containing the terms and the open one for inspection — and the whole thing handed to Baruch in front of the men sitting in the guard court. Nobody records conveyancing at this length by accident. The point of the paragraph is that the purchase was legally perfect, done in public, by the book, at the exact moment when property law in Judah was worth nothing at all.
The deeds then go into an earthen jar, that they may last many days — a filing instruction with a horizon of decades, since a buried document is only stored for someone who will dig it up later. And the meaning is given in one sentence: Houses and fields and vineyards will yet again be bought in this land. The sign is not that the siege will lift. It is that ordinary life, with its title deeds and its family plots, will resume here — which is a stranger and steadier hope than a rescue.
And then Jeremiah prays, and the prayer is more honest than the sign. He rehearses everything he knows: creation by the outstretched arm, the exodus with signs and wonders, the land given as sworn, the disobedience, the evil brought on them justly. He describes what he can see from the window — siege ramps have been built against the city to take it — and adds, flatly, What you have spoken has happened. Behold, you see it. Then he stops on the thing he cannot fit in: you told me to buy the field and call witnesses, and the city is being handed over. He has already obeyed. The question comes afterward, and it is left as a question.
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