Biblion Bible Commentary
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The King Who Cut Up the Scroll
Jeremiah 36:20-32
20 They went in to the king into the court, but they had laid up the scroll in the room of Elishama the scribe. Then they told all the words in the hearing of the king. · WEB
Jehoiakim shreds the scroll column by column as it is read to him, and the reply is a second scroll containing everything in the first and more.
The scene is domestic and unhurried, which is what makes it terrible. It is the ninth month, the king is in his winter apartment, and a brazier is burning in front of him. Jehudi reads three or four columns. The king cuts them off with a scribe's knife and drops them in the fire. The reading continues, and the process repeats until the whole scroll is consumed. Nobody snatches it and burns it in a rage. It is destroyed methodically, at the reading pace, as an act of policy.
The verdict is delivered in a single sentence about what did not happen: The king and his servants who heard all these words were not afraid, and didn't tear their garments. Both halves point at his father. When a book of the law was found in the temple in Josiah's day, that king tore his clothes on hearing it 2 Kings 22:11, and a national reformation followed. The princes in the previous scene had been afraid. The son of Josiah, hearing more than his father heard, feels nothing. Three men — Elnathan, Delaiah and Gemariah — beg him not to burn it, and he will not listen.
The words the king objects to are quoted, and they are entirely factual: why have you written that the king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land? What he burns is a prediction. The burning is an attempt to deal with the future by destroying the paper it is written on. The sentence that answers it is exact and personal. He will have no one to sit on David's throne, and his body will be thrown out to the day's heat and the night's frost. A man who was warm by his fire while he did it is left in the open at both ends of the day.
And the reply to the fire is more writing. Another scroll, the same scribe, the same dictation, all the former words restored — and then the clause that closes the chapter: many similar words were added to them. The destruction cost the nation the shorter version. This is also the book's own explanation of its shape, and the reason the material is not in chronological order. What exists is a second edition, assembled from memory and expanded, by two men in hiding.
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