A Ruined City and a Place at the Table

Hamutal’s father is a different Jeremiah, from Libnah, a Levitical town in the lowlands, not the prophet of Anathoth. Hamutal was also mother of Jehoahaz (2 Kings 23:31), so Zedekiah, born Mattaniah, was that exiled king’s full brother and only a half brother of Jehoiakim.

The comparison reaches past Jehoiachin, who reigned three months, to his father Jehoiakim, the king who cut Jeremiah’s scroll with a penknife and fed it to the brazier (36:23). Zedekiah never burned the book; he consulted its author in secret and did not act on what he heard.

The Hebrew sets the LORD’s anger at the front and folds the king’s decision inside it. Zedekiah had been placed on the throne by Nebuchadrezzar and had sworn loyalty to him by God (2 Chronicles 36:13), so the rebellion was also a broken oath, as Ezekiel 17:15–19 charges.

The tenth day of the tenth month fell in the winter of 588 BC. Its memory outlived the city: Zechariah 8:19 names a fast of the tenth month, still kept in Judaism as the Tenth of Tevet. “Forts” are siege works, ramps or towers raised against the wall.

One short verse covers roughly eighteen months. Jeremiah 37:5–11 fills the gap it leaves: an Egyptian army marched up, the Chaldeans briefly lifted the siege, the city exhaled, and Jeremiah told them the besiegers would come back and burn it. They did.

The ninth day of the fourth month became the second fast named in Zechariah 8:19. “The people of the land” is a fixed Hebrew phrase, am ha’aretz, for the landed citizenry of Judah. Lamentations 4:4–10 gives this famine in terms the record here leaves out.

The gate between the two walls lay at the city’s southeastern corner, near the king’s garden where the Kidron and central valleys meet. “The plain” is the Arabah, the Jordan rift, so the escape ran down toward the river and whatever refuge lay across it, perhaps Ammon.

The plains of Jericho sit about fifteen miles east of Jerusalem and three thousand feet lower. Israel had crossed the Jordan and first camped there under Joshua (Joshua 4:19; 5:10). The last king of David’s line is caught on the ground where the conquest began.

Riblah stood on the Orontes in Syria, Nebuchadrezzar’s field headquarters. Twenty years earlier Pharaoh Necho had put Zedekiah’s full brother Jehoahaz in bands at the same Riblah (2 Kings 23:33). “Gave judgment upon him” is literally “spoke judgments with him”, the language of a formal hearing against a vassal.

The execution of the princes at Riblah is recorded here and in 39:6 but not in 2 Kings 25:7, which mentions only the sons. The order is calculated: the last thing Zedekiah’s eyes are allowed to see is the end of his dynasty in his own household.

Only this account follows Zedekiah into prison until his death; 2 Kings 25 stops at the chains. The Hebrew for “prison” here can be read “house of punishments”. Ezekiel 12:13 had said he would be brought to Babylon, “yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there.”

2 Kings 25:8 puts Nebuzar-adan’s arrival on the seventh day, not the tenth. Rabbinic tradition (Talmud, Taanit 29a) harmonised the two by having the fire set on the seventh and burn through the tenth, and fixed the fast on the ninth of Av. His title means chief of the bodyguard, literally of the slaughterers, the office the King James also gives Potiphar in Genesis 39:1.

Solomon’s temple had stood for nearly four centuries. Jeremiah had stood in its gate and said it would become like Shiloh, and had nearly been killed for it (7:12–14; 26:6–9). The record states the fulfilment without a word of comment, and without naming him.

Breaking down the walls finished Jerusalem as a defensible city; a city without walls in the ancient world was barely a city at all. They lay in rubble for about a hundred and forty years, until Nehemiah rode round them by night surveying the damage (Nehemiah 2:13–15).

“Those that fell away” are the deserters Jeremiah had urged the city to become (21:9) and Zedekiah had been afraid of (38:19). The word rendered “multitude” can also be read “craftsmen”, and some translators take it so, since skilled workers were exactly whom Babylon wanted.

Jeremiah 39:10 adds that the same officer gave these poor vineyards and fields that day. Men who had owned nothing now worked the estates of the deported. Unlike 2 Kings 25, this chapter never mentions Gedaliah, the governor set over them; the land’s remnant is left without a name.

Jeremiah had named these very items years earlier: the pillars, the sea, the bases, “the residue of the vessels”, and said they too would go to Babylon (27:19–22), when prophets were promising the first plunder would soon come back. The bases were the wheeled bronze stands of 1 Kings 7:27–37.

The list is the kitchen of a sanctuary. Caldrons and shovels cleared the altar of ash; snuffers trimmed lamp wicks; the bowls were sprinkling basins for blood; the “spoons” are literally palms, small hand-shaped pans for incense. “Brass” in 1611 meant bronze, any copper alloy.

“That which was of gold in gold” means each piece was taken for its metal. Some vessels survived the melting: Belshazzar drinks from them in Daniel 5:2, and Cyrus hands 5,400 of them back to Sheshbazzar in Ezra 1:7–11. The candlesticks were the ten lampstands of 1 Kings 7:49.

1 Kings 7:25 sets the twelve bulls under the sea, three facing each point of the compass, and King Ahaz had once taken the sea down off them (2 Kings 16:17). Whether they were restored or the list describes Solomon’s original design, the inventory remembers them as Solomon made them.

Eighteen cubits is about twenty-seven feet. A circumference of twelve cubits gives a diameter of roughly four, close to six feet, and walls four fingers thick, about three inches, cast hollow in bronze. 1 Kings 7:21 gives the pillars’ names, Jachin and Boaz, which this chapter omits.

Five cubits agrees with 1 Kings 7:16, while the parallel in 2 Kings 25:17 gives the capital three. Many explain the difference as the band of lily-work counted or not counted; it may also be a copyist’s slip in one text. Pomegranates were stitched on the high priest’s hem too (Exodus 28:33).

“On a side” is literally “toward the wind”, meaning on the outward faces. The usual explanation is that ninety-six hung in open view and four more sat at the points where the network was joined, making the hundred. 1 Kings 7:20 counts two hundred per capital in two rows.

Seraiah was the high priest, and Ezra traces his descent from him (Ezra 7:1). Zephaniah is the priest Zedekiah twice sent to Jeremiah (21:1; 37:3) and who read a hostile letter aloud to him (29:29). The three “keepers of the door” were senior temple officers, not porters.

“Them that were near the king’s person” is literally those “who saw the king’s face”, his privy council; 2 Kings 25:19 counts five, this list seven. The eunuch may simply be a court officer, as the Hebrew saris often means. The scribe of the host kept the muster rolls of conscripts.

Riblah was over two hundred miles north of Jerusalem, a march of weeks. The prisoners were delivered to the same field court that had sentenced their king, so the leadership of the temple, the palace and the army are all dealt with in one place, by one man.

Riblah lay “in the land of Hamath”, and “the entering in of Hamath” was the northern limit of the land promised to Israel (Numbers 34:8) and of Solomon’s kingdom (1 Kings 8:65). The leaders of Judah die at the far edge of the inheritance. The closing sentence is word for word in 2 Kings 25:21.

Verses 28–30 appear nowhere else in Scripture and are absent from the Greek Old Testament. The seventh year is 597 BC, the deportation with Jehoiachin, which 2 Kings 24:12 dates to the eighth year, most likely by counting from Nebuchadrezzar’s accession rather than his first full year.

The eighteenth year is the fall of Jerusalem, which verse 12 calls the nineteenth, the same one-year difference in reckoning as the verse before. The 832 are taken “from Jerusalem” specifically, a small number beside the thousands of 597, perhaps because siege and famine had already emptied the city.

The twenty-third year is about 582 BC, five years after the fall, and no deportation that year is recorded anywhere else. A reprisal for the murder of Gedaliah and the Babylonian garrison (41:1–3) is a common and reasonable inference. The three figures add exactly: 3,023, 832 and 745 make 4,600.

Jehoiachin had gone into exile at eighteen in 597 BC, so he was now about fifty-five. Evil-merodach is the Babylonian Amel-Marduk, Nebuchadrezzar’s son, who reigned only two years. “Lifted up the head” is the idiom Joseph used for the butler’s release in Genesis 40:13. The parallel in 2 Kings 25:27 dates it two days later.

Jeremiah 22:30 had said of this same king, under the name Coniah, that no man of his seed would prosper “sitting upon the throne of David”. He is given a throne here, but a courtesy seat among captives in Babylon. Ration tablets from Babylon, dated years earlier, already list oil for “Ya’ukin, king of Judah” and his sons.

Eating bread continually before a king is the phrase David used when he took Mephibosheth, Saul’s lame grandson, to his own table (2 Samuel 9:7, 13). The Hebrew of the first clause could also mean that Jehoiachin himself changed out of his prison clothes.

“Until the day of his death” is the phrase that closed Zedekiah’s life in verse 11, where it ended in a cell. The parallel in 2 Kings 25:30 has only “all the days of his life”. The Book of Jeremiah ends here, and the prophet himself is not mentioned in the whole chapter.