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Biblion Bible Commentary

Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary

Obey the Voice, and It Will Be Well With You

Jeremiah 38:14-28

14 Then Zedekiah the king sent and took Jeremiah the prophet to himself into the third entry that is in Yahweh’s house. Then the king said to Jeremiah, “I will ask you something. Hide nothing from me.” · WEB

The offer of surrender is still open at the last possible moment, and the king refuses it because he is afraid of being laughed at.

The interview is arranged in secret and begins with a demand and a refusal. I will ask you something. Hide nothing from me, says the king; and Jeremiah answers with the two obstacles between them — if I tell you, you will kill me, and if I advise you, you will not listen. The oath Zedekiah then swears is private, sworn by the God who made their souls, and it concedes the point: he promises not to kill him and not to hand him to the men who want to.

The terms offered are astonishing this late. Go out to the officers of the king of Babylon, and your soul will live, and this city will not be burned with fire. You will live, along with your house. The city is still salvageable in the eleventh year, with the walls about to be breached. Everything the book has said about a judgment already fixed has to be read against this. The door is held open until the last week, and what closes it is a decision made in a private room.

The reason for the refusal is the most human sentence in the chapter, and it has nothing to do with theology or with courage. I am afraid of the Jews who have defected to the Chaldeans, lest they deliver me into their hand, and they mock me. He is not afraid of Babylon. He is afraid of the men who left before him, and of what they will say. A king loses a city, a temple, his sons and his eyes because he cannot face being laughed at by deserters, and the text sets it down without a word of comment.

Jeremiah's reply takes the fear at face value and answers it — they won't deliver you — and then shows him the alternative version of the mockery he is trying to avoid. The women of the palace will be brought out to the Babylonian officers, and they will chant a taunt at him. Your familiar friends have prevailed over you; your feet are sunk in the mire, they have turned away from you. Jeremiah had been pulled out of literal mire that same week. He is telling a king afraid of ridicule that the ridicule is coming either way, and that only one of the two roads also costs him the city.

The chapter ends with a cover story. Zedekiah tells him what to say if the princes ask, and Jeremiah says it: that he had petitioned not to be sent back to Jonathan's house to die there. It is a partial account and a true one — he had made exactly that request, and it is on record Jeremiah 37:20. The princes stop asking. And the last line places him where the next chapter will find him: in the court of the guard, until the day Jerusalem was taken.

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