The Scroll the Fire Could Not Finish

The fourth year of Jehoiakim is 605 BC, the year Nebuchadnezzar beat Egypt at Carchemish (46:2) and came to the throne of Babylon (25:1). The order to write everything down comes in the year the balance of the world tipped towards Babylon.

“A roll of a book” is a scroll, sheets joined and rolled. Jeremiah’s call came in Josiah’s thirteenth year (1:2), so the words to be written span about twenty three years, the figure he gives in 25:3. The scope is wide: Israel, Judah and every nation.

“It may be” is the Hebrew ulay, perhaps. God speaks of Judah’s response as genuinely open. The closing words, “forgive their iniquity and their sin”, are the same pair as the new covenant promise of 31:34, where God says he will remember their sin no more.

Baruch has already appeared as the man who held the deed of purchase (32:12). In the 1970s a clay seal impression reading “Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe” came onto the antiquities market; its authenticity has since been seriously questioned, so it proves nothing on its own.

“Shut up” cannot mean a prison cell here, since in verse 19 Jeremiah is free to go into hiding. He is barred, for a reason not given. After the stocks of 20:2 and the near lynching of 26:8, he had given the temple authorities reasons enough to keep him out.

A fast day brought people in from the country towns, the largest audience the temple could offer outside a pilgrim feast. Baruch is to read “in the ears” of the people, a phrase that runs through this chapter until the words finally reach the ears of the king.

“Present their supplication” is literally “their supplication will fall before the LORD”, prayer pictured as lying prostrate. The book uses the idiom again when Jeremiah pleads with Zedekiah (37:20) and when the survivors ask him to pray (42:2).

The verse reports Baruch’s obedience in summary before the account has told when it happened. The reading itself does not take place until the next year, as verse 9 shows. The Book of Jeremiah states the outcome first and then goes back to fill in the day.

The ninth month is Kislev, around December. In Kislev of 604 BC, the Babylonian Chronicle records, Nebuchadnezzar sacked Ashkelon on the coast. Many take the fast as Judah’s response to that alarm, an inference from the date, since the verse gives no reason.

Gemariah’s father Shaphan was the scribe who read the newly found book of the law to King Josiah (2 Kings 22:10), and his brother Ahikam protected Jeremiah in 26:24. A clay bulla bearing the name “Gemaryahu son of Shaphan” was excavated in the City of David in 1982.

Michaiah is Shaphan’s grandson, the third generation of a family that carried written words to kings. He hears “all the words”, the whole reading, not a fragment, and what he does next shows that he has taken in their seriousness.

Elnathan son of Achbor is the official who fetched the prophet Uriah back from Egypt to be killed (26:22–23). His father Achbor had gone with Shaphan to consult the prophetess Huldah for Josiah (2 Kings 22:12). This Zedekiah son of Hananiah is not the king.

The report is made in the scribe’s chamber, a government office in the palace complex below the temple. The words have come downhill from the sanctuary courts into the administration, where they will have to be dealt with as state business.

Jehudi is given three generations of ancestors, rare for a messenger. His name means “Judean”, and his great-grandfather’s name, Cushi, means “Cushite”, from the upper Nile. The line may record a family of foreign origin that had become thoroughly Judean, though the verse offers no comment.

“Sit down now” is a courtesy: the princes receive Baruch as a reader, not a suspect. The phrase “in the ears” occurs twice in this one verse. By now the words have been read to the people, reported to the officials, and read again to them in full.

“They were afraid both one and other” is literally that they turned in fear each to his neighbour, the men looking at one another. “We will surely tell” is an obligation more than a threat; officials who had heard such words could not leave the king ignorant of them.

The question checks whether the words are really the prophet’s. The same doubt resurfaces in 43:3, when Azariah and Johanan accuse Baruch of putting words into Jeremiah’s mouth. Whether the princes suspected that here is an inference; the verse gives only their question.

“Ink”, deyo, occurs only here in the Old Testament. Scribal ink was usually carbon, soot mixed with gum and water, which sits on the surface of papyrus or leather and can be washed off, while fire destroys it entirely.

The officials had reason to be quick. Some years earlier Jehoiakim had sent men to Egypt to bring back the prophet Uriah, killed him with the sword and thrown his body into the common graves (26:20–23). The princes know what this king does to prophets.

They lay the scroll up in Elishama’s chamber before going to the king, protecting the document as well as the men. They tell him the contents rather than carrying in the object, and for a moment it is possible the king will settle for a report.

The king sends for the scroll itself. Jehudi reads it with the princes “standing” beside the seated king, the posture of courtiers attending a ruler. The reading reaches the court exactly as the prophet had wanted it to reach the people: aloud and in full.

The “winterhouse” is the warm wing of the palace, the kind of luxury Amos condemned in Samaria (Amos 3:15). The “hearth” is a brazier, a portable fire pot. December in Jerusalem, about 750 metres up, can be cold and wet, so the fire was lit for warmth.

“Leaves” translates delatot, literally “doors”, columns of writing on the scroll. The “penknife” is the scribe’s knife, kept for trimming reed pens, so a scribe’s tool is used to destroy scribal work. The Hebrew does not name who cut; most read it as the king.

Jehoiakim’s father Josiah, hearing a scroll read, tore his clothes (2 Kings 22:11). Here the verb for “rent” is qara, the same verb used in verse 23 for the cutting of the scroll. The son tears the document where the father tore his robes.

Elnathan, who once brought Uriah back to his death, now pleads with the king not to burn the scroll, and Gemariah, in whose room it was read, joins him. “He would not hear them” is the chapter’s theme in five words, in a king who has just heard every word.

“Hammelech” is simply Hebrew for “the king”, so Jerahmeel may be a royal prince sent to make the arrest, a sign of how seriously the king took it. The last clause is short: the LORD hid them. Uriah, in the same reign, had not been hidden.

The verse separates two things the king burned: “the roll”, and “the words which Baruch wrote”. The next word arrives after both, as if to point out that the second had not in fact been destroyed.

“Take thee again” repeats the command of verse 2 almost exactly. There is no instruction to hide the new scroll or to soften it. The same words, all of them, including the ones that caused the offence, are to be written out again.

Jehoiakim’s only words in the chapter are quoted by God, and they are a complaint about content: why did you write that Babylon will come? The phrase “cause to cease from thence man and beast” is the formula of desolation that chapter 33 promised to reverse.

This picks up 22:19, where Jehoiakim was to have “the burial of an ass”, dragged out and cast beyond the gates. Second Kings 24:6 says only that he “slept with his fathers” and names no tomb. His son reigned three months (2 Kings 24:8) before being taken to Babylon.

“His servants” are the courtiers of verse 24 who heard it all and were not afraid. The verse widens from the king to the city and the men of Judah, and ends on the three words that sum up the chapter: “but they hearkened not.”

Many scholars think this second scroll lies behind a core of the present Book of Jeremiah. The Greek translation, about one seventh shorter and differently ordered than the Hebrew, shows that the book went on growing in more than one edition, much as this verse describes.