Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
The Fall of Jerusalem Recorded
Jeremiah 52:1-34
1 Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign. He reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. · WEB
An appendix in another hand reports what happened, counts the temple bronze and the deported, and ends with a Davidic king out of prison and eating at a table.
The chapter is set apart by the line before it, which ended the words of Jeremiah. It does what the prophet could not do for himself. It verifies him. A man's claim that a city will fall carries more weight when the account of the fall is written by somebody else, and this chapter runs closely parallel to the record in Kings 2 Kings 25:1–21. Its function is documentary, and its tone matches: dates, measurements, inventories, numbers.
The siege is given by the calendar. The tenth day of the tenth month in the ninth year; the ninth day of the fourth month in the eleventh. Between them stands one sentence about what filled the eighteen months: the famine was severe in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land. Then the flight through the garden gate, the capture in the plains of Jericho, the sons killed at Riblah before their father's eyes, the blinding, the fetters, and a king in a Babylonian prison until the day of his death.
What follows is an unusual kind of grief. The bronze is itemized: pillars, bases, the sea, the pots and shovels and snuffers and basins. Then the pillars are measured. Eighteen cubits high, a twelve-cubit line around, four fingers thick, hollow. A capital of five cubits, network and pomegranates, ninety-six on the sides and a hundred in all. Somebody stood and counted the pomegranates on a temple pillar, and wrote the number down, for a building that no longer existed. It is an inventory of a loss, and it is the most affecting passage in the chapter precisely because it is only a list.
The deportation figures are the other surprise, and they are strikingly small: 3,023 in one year, 832 in another, 745 in a third, all the people numbered four thousand six hundred. The oracles spoke of a full end, a desolation, no inhabitant. The appendix gives an accountant's total that would fill a large village. Both are true. The nation ended, the ending is measurable, and the chapter declines to inflate it.
And then the last four verses, which have no business being in a book about ruin. In the thirty-seventh year of his captivity, Jehoiachin is brought out of prison by a new king of Babylon. He is spoken to kindly and given a seat above the other captive kings. His prison clothes are changed. He eats bread before the king continually all the days of his life, with a daily allowance until his death. He is not restored to a throne, and no promise is attached to him. A descendant of David is simply alive, out of the dark, wearing different clothes, and eating at a table. The book began with a boy told that he was appointed before he was born. It ends with an old man being given supper. That is the smallest possible sign that the line was not extinguished, and it is offered without a word of interpretation, which is the honest way to offer it.
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