Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
The Scroll Read in the Temple
Jeremiah 36:1-19
1 In the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying, · WEB
Twenty-three years of preaching are put into writing so that a banned prophet can still be heard, and the officials who hear it are frightened in exactly the right way.
The purpose of the writing is stated before anything is written, and it is not archival: It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I intend to do to them, that they may each return from his evil way; that I may forgive their iniquity. The scroll exists to be made unnecessary. And what goes on it is everything spoken since the days of Josiah. Two decades of oracles are assembled at once, which is the book's own account of how it came to exist.
The reason a scroll is needed at all is given in one word from Jeremiah: I am restricted. I can't go into Yahweh's house. He is barred from the temple. The response is not to defy the ban but to route around it. The words go where the man cannot, carried by a scribe, and the whole chapter turns on that substitution. A prophet can be excluded from a building. A document can be read in it by somebody else.
The reading is timed for a fast day, when people have come in from all the towns of Judah. It happens from a room belonging to the family that had already protected Jeremiah once Jeremiah 26:24. From there the news travels the way news travels in a small administration. A young man hears it, goes down to the palace, and reports to a room full of officials. They send for Baruch and ask him to sit and read it again.
Their reaction is the standard by which everyone else in the chapter is measured. When they had heard all the words, they turned in fear one toward another, and said they would have to tell the king. Then they ask a careful question — how did you write all these words at his mouth? — and get a careful answer: he dictated, and I wrote them with ink. The officials establish the provenance of a document before acting on it. Having established it, they do the only sensible thing left. They tell Baruch to take Jeremiah and hide, and not to let anyone know where they are. These are the same princes who will later leave him in a cistern, and here they behave better than the king does. The book does not tidy any of that up.
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