Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Down to Egypt Against the Word
Jeremiah 43:1-13
1 When Jeremiah had finished speaking to all the people all the words of Yahweh their God, with which Yahweh their God had sent him to them, even all these words, · WEB
The remnant calls the prophet a liar, takes him to Egypt by force, and he buries paving stones in front of Pharaoh's palace for a throne that is coming.
The rejection is not a wavering but a flat contradiction: You speak falsely. Yahweh our God has not sent you. And the explanation offered for how a true prophet came to say such a thing is the oldest one there is — Baruch has turned you against us. A secretary is blamed for the message, which allows them to reject the word without quite calling Jeremiah a fraud. It also tells how much they had understood: the man who wrote the scroll is imagined as its author.
The departure is total. Johanan takes the men, the women, the children, the king's daughters and everyone Nebuzaradan had left with Gedaliah — and Jeremiah the prophet, and Baruch the son of Neriah. They take the prophet with them into the country he told them not to enter. He is a prisoner of the last people in Judah, on a road he warned against, and the book's account of his life ends the way it began, with him going where he did not choose to go.
They settle at Tahpanhes , an Egyptian frontier town, and the first thing he is told to do there is a sign. Take great stones and hide them in the mortar of the brick pavement at the entry to Pharaoh's house, in the sight of the men of Judah. It is done in a foreign capital, at a royal doorstep, with Judean witnesses. The stones are not a monument; they are a footing, laid in advance.
What they are a footing for is stated plainly: I will send and take Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will set his throne on these stones. The title returns for the last time, and it now covers Egypt as well. The people who fled the reach of Babylon are shown the paving where its king will pitch his tent, and are told that Egypt will be worn by its conqueror the way a herdsman wraps himself in his own cloak. There was no place on the map that solved their problem, and the sign is a piece of civil engineering that says so.
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