Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Cistern and the Thirty Rags
Jeremiah 38:1-13
1 Shephatiah the son of Mattan, Gedaliah the son of Pashhur, Jucal the son of Shelemiah, and Pashhur the son of Malchijah heard the words that Jeremiah spoke to all the people, saying, · WEB
The officials drop Jeremiah into the mud of an empty cistern to die quietly, and the man who gets him out is a foreign slave in the palace.
The charge brought against him is the most modern-sounding in the book. He weakens the hands of the men of war and of all the people by speaking such words; this man doesn't seek the welfare of this people, but harm. It is not a claim that he is lying. It is a claim that the truth, said out loud during a siege, is itself an act of harm. On that reasoning any accurate report of a hopeless position becomes treason. What he had actually said is quoted just above, and it includes a way to live.
The king's answer to the request for a death sentence is the abdication of a monarchy in nine words: Behold, he is in your hand; for the king can't do anything to oppose you. Zedekiah does not agree with them and does not stop them. He states his own powerlessness and steps aside, and that sentence explains everything else he does in the next chapters.
The method chosen is worth attention, because it is designed to avoid an execution. They lower him by ropes into a cistern belonging to a royal prince, and the text notes what was in it. No water, but mire, and he sank in the mud. Nobody strikes him. He is put somewhere and left, in a city where the bread has run out, so that starvation rather than any named person will finish it. The princes who tore their clothes over a scroll are not these men, but the office is the same.
What breaks the arrangement is a man with no standing at all: Ebedmelech, an Ethiopian and a court eunuch, a foreigner and a servant in the household of the king he is about to correct. He goes out to the gate where Zedekiah is sitting in public. He says plainly that these men have done evil, and that the prophet will die of hunger where he is. The king, who could not oppose the princes, gives him thirty men on the spot. And then the detail that no invented story would carry. Ebedmelech goes to a storeroom under the treasury for old rags and worn-out clothes, lowers them first, and tells Jeremiah to put them under his armpits beneath the ropes. A man being hauled out of mud by cords would have been cut to the bone. Somebody thought about that before pulling.
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