Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Book Sunk in the Euphrates
Jeremiah 51:59-64
59 The word which Jeremiah the prophet commanded Seraiah the son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah, when he went with Zedekiah the king of Judah to Babylon in the fourth year of his reign. Now Seraiah was chief quartermaster. · WEB
The oracles against Babylon are read aloud in Babylon and then thrown into the river with a stone tied to them, and the words of Jeremiah end there.
The errand is given to Seraiah, Baruch's brother, who is traveling to Babylon in Zedekiah's fourth year as the king's quartermaster. That is an official journey in the service of a vassal king going to reassure his overlord, and the courier is carrying, in his baggage, a written account of that overlord's destruction. The instruction is to read it there — all of it, aloud, in the city itself — before anything else is done with it.
What he is to say after the reading is a prayer rather than a taunt, and it is quoted: Yahweh, you have spoken concerning this place, to cut it off, that no one will dwell in it. The words are given to him so that the sentence is not merely delivered but agreed to, on site, by a man from the nation Babylon had crushed.
Then the sign, and it is the simplest in the book. Tie a stone to the scroll and throw it into the middle of the river; Thus will Babylon sink, and will not rise again because of the evil that I will bring on her. The document is destroyed by the act that publishes it. Jehoiakim had burned a scroll to make its contents untrue and the contents came back longer Jeremiah 36:32; here a scroll is deliberately sunk, and the sinking is the message. Nothing depends on the paper surviving.
And then five words close the whole collection: Thus far are the words of Jeremiah. The prophet's last recorded act is a text going under water in the enemy's capital, weighted so that it cannot come back up. What follows in the next chapter is somebody else's writing, and the line marking that boundary is left in the book rather than smoothed away.
settled What this mark means