The Freedom That Jerusalem Took Back

“All the kingdoms of the earth of his dominion” means the vassal levies: subject peoples were obliged to send troops on the emperor’s campaigns, as Judah itself had once done. The heading sets this word earlier than chapters 32 and 33, while Jeremiah could still walk to the palace.

“Go and speak” tells us Jeremiah is not yet a prisoner; he will be arrested in 37:15. The oracle is delivered to the king in person, a braver act than the plain command makes it sound, and the verdict on the city comes first, before anything is said about the man.

The same promise was quoted in 32:4. Its fulfilment at Riblah is bleak: Zedekiah did look into the eyes of the king of Babylon, then watched his sons killed, and then his own eyes were put out (39:6–7). The last face he saw was the one this verse names.

“Yet hear” opens a turn. Some commentators read the gentler word that follows as conditional, like the offer of 38:17 that surrender would save his life and the city; the verse itself does not state a condition, and the book leaves the tension standing.

The “burnings” are not cremation. Spices were burned in honour of a dead king, as for Asa (2 Chronicles 16:14), and withheld from Jehoram (2 Chronicles 21:19). “Ah lord!” is the very lament Jeremiah said Jehoiakim would never receive (22:18). Zedekiah is promised what his brother was refused.

A short verse, but it records that the word was actually carried. The title “Jeremiah the prophet” appears at moments of public delivery, and this message, telling a king that his capital would burn, was the kind that led to the dungeon of chapter 38.

Lachish and Azekah lay south-west of Jerusalem guarding the lowland roads. Ostraca found at Lachish in 1935 include a letter from an officer saying he is watching for the fire signals of Lachish, “for we cannot see Azekah”, very likely from these same weeks.

“Liberty” is deror, the word of the jubilee, “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” (Leviticus 25:10), later taken up in Isaiah 61:1. Here the king makes the covenant with the people, one of the few times Zedekiah initiates anything right in this book.

“Hebrewess” renders ivriyyah, the only place the feminine form of the word occurs in the Bible. Women are explicitly included, as Deuteronomy 15:12 had included them. “A Jew his brother” sets ethnic identity and kinship side by side in one phrase.

“Heard” and “obeyed” are the same Hebrew verb, shama. In a book that complains again and again that the people “would not hear”, here for once hearing and doing coincide, and the release actually happens.

“Afterward” is not dated, but verses 21 and 22 speak of the Babylonian army having “gone up”, and 37:5 explains that it lifted the siege when Pharaoh’s army approached. Many take the recapture as a response to that lull, an inference from the chapter’s own setting.

The heading says the word came to Jeremiah “from the LORD” and then says it again at the end of the same line, an unusual doubling. The weight falls on where the verdict against the masters comes from, since the masters had sworn their oath in God’s own house.

The first civil law given after the Ten Commandments is the release of the Hebrew servant (Exodus 21:2). The covenant with the fathers is cited at its point of origin, the day of leaving Egypt, so the rule on servants is traced back to Israel’s own release.

“At the end of seven years” borrows the wording of Deuteronomy 15:1, then “served six years” that of 15:12. The two phrases describe one release, since the six years of service end as the seventh begins. “Inclined their ear” is Jeremiah’s stock image of refusal, used in 7:24 and 11:8.

“Now” is literally “today”, hayyom: the good act was recent and brief. “Turned” is shuv, the book’s word for repentance. The covenant was cut in the temple, “the house which is called by my name”, the phrase of Jeremiah’s temple sermon (7:10).

“At their pleasure” is lenafsham, to go wherever they wished, the phrase used in Deuteronomy 21:14 of a released captive woman who may go “whither she will”. Their freedom had been given the widest possible terms, which makes the recapture a taking back of each of those choices.

“Removed into all the kingdoms” is literally that they will become a horror, zaavah, to every kingdom, the curse of Deuteronomy 28:25 that Jeremiah has used in 15:4, 24:9 and 29:18. The masters who refused to let people go will be scattered into every direction at once.

The rite is the one in Genesis 15:10–17: an animal halved and the parties walking between the pieces, calling its fate on themselves if they break faith. The Hebrew is compressed enough that some translate “I will make the men… like the calf”, the covenant-breakers becoming the carcass.

Five groups are named. The “eunuchs” are court officials, the title saris, which did not always mean a castrated man. “The people of the land” is am haarets, the landowning citizens with political weight, the very class likely to own servants.

Exposure to birds and beasts is the curse of Deuteronomy 28:26, already threatened in 7:33 and 16:4. In Genesis 15:11 Abram drove the birds of prey away from the divided carcasses; here nobody drives them off.

The king and his officials are named last and separately, after the general sentence has fallen on everyone. “Which are gone up from you” admits the siege has lifted for now, speaking of the army’s departure in the same breath as its return.

“Cause them to return” is the same causative verb used in verses 11 and 16 when the masters caused the freed servants to return. They brought back what they had released; God will bring back the army that had left.