Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
The Slaves Freed and Taken Back
Jeremiah 34:1-22
1 The word which came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, when Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, with all his army, all the kingdoms of the earth that were under his dominion, and all the peoples, were fighting against Jerusalem and against all its cities, saying: · WEB
A city under siege frees its Hebrew slaves in a solemn covenant, and takes them back the moment the army withdraws.
The chapter opens with the siege at its height — only two fortified towns left besides the capital, Lachish and Azekah — and with a personal word to Zedekiah that mixes sentence and mercy. He will not escape, he will see the king of Babylon eye to eye, he will go to Babylon; and yet he will not die by the sword, but in peace, with the burning of spices his fathers had and with people lamenting him. The terms are narrower than they sound. The record of his end has him blinded and kept in a Babylonian prison until the day of his death Jeremiah 52:11, which is not death by the sword, and the promise claimed no more than that.
Then the incident. Zedekiah makes a covenant with the whole city to free every Hebrew slave, and the princes and all the people obey and let them go. It is done properly, in the temple, with the ancient ceremony behind it — a calf cut in two and the parties walking between the halves, the rite by which men called down on themselves the fate of the animal if they broke their word Genesis 15:17. For a moment Judah keeps a law it had ignored for centuries, the release of a Hebrew slave in the seventh year Exodus 21:2.
And then the Babylonians withdraw to deal with an Egyptian army in the field Jeremiah 37:5, and the freed men and women are taken back into service. That sequence is the whole point of the chapter. The obedience lasted exactly as long as the danger, which means it was never obedience at all; it was a negotiation, and when the pressure lifted the position was reversed. Nothing else in the book exposes so cleanly what Judah's religion had become.
The sentence is delivered as a play on the one word that mattered. You have not listened to me, to proclaim liberty, every man to his brother... Behold, I proclaim to you a liberty — to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine. Since they will not release each other, God releases the three things they most feared to go where they please. And the men who walked between the halves of the calf are named — princes, officials, priests and the people of the land — and given the calf's own fate: their bodies left for the birds and the animals. A self-curse taken lightly is being taken literally. The chapter ends by turning the relief into a delay: God will command the army back, and this time they will take the city and burn it.
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