Biblion Bible Commentary
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Murder at Mizpah
Jeremiah 41:1-18
1 Now in the seventh month, Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, the son of Elishama, of the royal offspring and one of the chief officers of the king, and ten men with him, came to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam to Mizpah; and there they ate bread together in Mizpah. · WEB
The governor is murdered at his own table by a man of royal blood, and the survivors' fear of the consequences drives them toward Egypt.
The details of the killing are chosen to make it as bad as it can be. Ishmael comes with ten men; he is of the royal offspring, so this is a claimant of David's line acting for a foreign king; and they eat bread together at Mizpah before he draws the sword. Hospitality in that culture was a bond, and the meal is mentioned because it makes the act a betrayal rather than a battle. He kills the governor, the men with him, and the Babylonian soldiers stationed there, which guarantees a reprisal.
What happens on the second day is worse and is harder to read. Eighty men come down from Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria — northerners, from the territory of the kingdom destroyed a century before — with beards shaved and clothes torn, carrying grain offerings and frankincense to the house of Yahweh. They are pilgrims coming to a temple that no longer exists, bringing offerings to a burned site because nobody had told them. Ishmael goes out to meet them weeping all along as he went, invites them in, and kills seventy of them in the middle of the city. The ten who survive buy their lives with hidden stores of wheat, barley, oil and honey.
The pit he throws them into is identified, and the identification carries the chapter's bleakest irony: it was the cistern King Asa had dug when he fortified Mizpah against an earlier Israelite king. A defensive work built three centuries before against a threat from the north is filled with the bodies of northerners who had come south to worship. Then Ishmael takes the whole remaining population captive, the king's daughters among them, and sets off for Ammon.
Johanan catches him at the great waters of Gibeon and the captives simply change sides — when all the people who were with Ishmael saw Johanan... then they were glad — and walk back. Ishmael escapes with eight men. But the rescue solves nothing, because the survivors now have a Babylonian garrison's murder on their record. They stop at a place near Bethlehem, and the reason the text gives for their next move is fear rather than policy: they were afraid of them, because Ishmael... had killed Gedaliah. Everything that follows in the book comes out of that fear.
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