Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Gedaliah at Mizpah
Jeremiah 40:1-16
1 The word which came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, after Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had let him go from Ramah, when he had taken him being bound in chains among all the captives of Jerusalem and Judah who were carried away captive to Babylon. · WEB
A Babylonian officer preaches Jeremiah's own message back to him and sets him free, and a decent governor is warned of an assassination he refuses to believe in.
The release happens at Ramah, the assembly point where the chained captives were being sorted for the march. Jeremiah is standing among them in irons. The man who had said the exile would come is being deported with everyone else. What the captain of the guard then says is one of the strangest speeches in the book, because it is Jeremiah's own theology in a foreign officer's mouth: Yahweh your God pronounced this evil on this place; and Yahweh has brought it, and done according as he spoke. Because you have sinned against Yahweh... therefore this thing has come on you. Judah would not accept that from a prophet for forty years. The general who took the city states it as the obvious explanation of events.
The offer that follows is generous and completely open. Come to Babylon and be looked after, or do not, and all the land is before you. After a lifetime of being told where he could not go and what he could not say, Jeremiah is handed the whole country and food for the road. He chooses to stay. It is the only real freedom he exercises in the book, and he uses it to go to Mizpah and live among the people who were left.
What forms there for a few months is the nearest thing to a restoration the book records. The scattered guerrilla captains come in. Gedaliah swears to them that serving Babylon will go well. Refugees who had fled to Moab , Ammon and Edom hear that a remnant has been left, and they come home. And they gather wine and summer fruits very much. The harvest is abundant, in a country that had just been stripped. The promise that houses and fields would be bought again in this land is beginning quietly, with a fruit crop.
The warning arrives into that. Johanan tells the governor that an Ammonite king has sent Ishmael to kill him, and offers to deal with it quietly. Gedaliah refuses, and the text gives his reason in five words: you speak falsely of Ishmael. He is not naive about Babylon or about the risks of his position. He simply will not believe an accusation of murder against a man on the word of another. That decency is what destroys the settlement. The book records it without either praising or condemning him, and the question of what he should have done instead is left open.
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