Chapters 39 to 41 record what Jeremiah had warned about for forty years. The walls of Jerusalem are broken, the king flees by night and is caught, and the city is burned. Then the story takes two surprising turns. A Babylonian general frees Jeremiah and preaches him a short sermon about why Jerusalem fell. And a small, hopeful new beginning under the governor Gedaliah at Mizpah, with grapes and summer fruit gathered “very much,” is wrecked within months by a murder at a dinner table. The chapters show that God’s word came true to the letter, and that the hearts which caused the disaster had still not changed.
A study in Jeremiah 39-41 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 14 min read
The City Was Broken Up
“In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, came Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon and all his army against Jerusalem, and they besieged it. And in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, the ninth day of the month, the city was broken up.”
Jeremiah 39:1, 2
The siege lasted about a year and a half. Then, on a single day, the wall was breached. After decades of warnings, the event itself takes just two verses. When God’s patience finally ends, judgment does not need much description.
Babylon’s officers walked in and “sat in the middle gate” (39:3), the place where the city’s leaders used to sit to judge cases. Strangers now sat in Judah’s seat of government. Jeremiah’s very first vision had warned of exactly this: the northern kingdoms “shall come, and they shall set every one his throne at the entering of the gates of Jerusalem” (1:15).
The people of Judah never forgot these dates. Years later, the prophet Zechariah was asked about the fasts the exiles had kept in mourning, and he named four of them: “The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth” (Zechariah 8:19). Each one remembered a day in these chapters: the siege beginning in the tenth month, the wall broken in the fourth, the temple burned in the fifth (52:12, 13), and Gedaliah’s murder in the seventh. And God promised that one day those fasts would become “joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts.”
By The Way Of The King’s Garden
“And it came to pass, that when Zedekiah the king of Judah saw them, and all the men of war, then they fled, and went forth out of the city by night, by the way of the king’s garden, by the gate betwixt the two walls: and he went out the way of the plain. But the Chaldeans’ army pursued after them, and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho: and when they had taken him, they brought him up to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon to Riblah in the land of Hamath, where he gave judgment upon him.”
Jeremiah 39:4, 5
The king who had been too afraid to surrender now ran. He slipped out at night through a back gate near the royal garden and headed east toward the Jordan. He got as far as the plains of Jericho before he was caught. He was taken north to Nebuchadnezzar’s headquarters at Riblah in Syria.
What happened there is told briefly, and we will not dwell on it. Zedekiah saw his sons put to death, then he was blinded and taken to Babylon in chains (39:6, 7). In chapter 38 Jeremiah had pleaded with him: “Obey, I beseech thee, the voice of the LORD, which I speak unto thee: so it shall be well unto thee, and thy soul shall live” (38:20). He would not, and this was the result. The prophet Ezekiel, in Babylon, had even predicted the strange detail of his end: “I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there” (Ezekiel 12:13). He reached Babylon, but he never saw it.
Then the Chaldeans burned the palace and the houses and broke down the walls (39:8). The captain of the guard, Nebuzar-adan, took the rest of the people to Babylon. Only the very poor were left, and to them he gave “vineyards and fields at the same time” (39:10). The land the rich had taken from the poor ended up in the hands of the poor.
Look Well To Him
“Now Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon gave charge concerning Jeremiah to Nebuzar-adan the captain of the guard, saying, Take him, and look well to him, and do him no harm; but do unto him even as he shall say unto thee.”
Jeremiah 39:11, 12
Here is a remarkable turn. The man Judah’s princes called a traitor was protected by the king of Babylon himself. Nebuchadnezzar had evidently heard of the prophet who told Judah to submit. Jeremiah’s own king had thrown him in a pit. The enemy king ordered him treated well.
Jeremiah was taken out of the guard’s courtyard and handed to “Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan” (39:14). There is that family again. Ahikam had saved Jeremiah’s life in chapter 26, and now Ahikam’s son took him home. And in the middle of the fall, God remembered Ebed-melech, with the promise studied in The Dungeon And The Ethiopian: “I will surely deliver thee,” “because thou hast put thy trust in me” (39:18).
A Sermon From A Babylonian
“And the captain of the guard took Jeremiah, and said unto him, The LORD thy God hath pronounced this evil upon this place. Now the LORD hath brought it, and done according as he hath said: because ye have sinned against the LORD, and have not obeyed his voice, therefore this thing is come upon you. And now, behold, I loose thee this day from the chains which were upon thine hand.”
Jeremiah 40:2-4
In the confusion, Jeremiah had been chained and marched with the captives as far as Ramah (40:1). There Nebuzar-adan found him and set him free. And then this pagan general said what Judah’s kings, priests and prophets had refused to say for forty years: “The LORD thy God hath pronounced this evil upon this place,” and, “because ye have sinned against the LORD, and have not obeyed his voice, therefore this thing is come upon you.”
It is a humbling moment. A foreign soldier understood what had happened better than God’s own people did. He gave Jeremiah a free choice: come to Babylon and be well cared for, or stay in the land. He even gave him food and a gift (40:4, 5). Jeremiah chose to stay with the poor people left behind, and went to Gedaliah at Mizpah (40:6).
“Released from prison by the Babylonian officers, the prophet chose to cast in his lot with the feeble remnant, certain ‘poor of the land’ left by the Chaldeans to be ‘vinedressers and husbandmen.’ Over these the Babylonians set Gedaliah as governor.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 460
Jeremiah could have had comfort in Babylon. He chose the poor. That is the heart of a true shepherd. He stayed with the people who needed him most, even though they had never listened to him.
Gedaliah At Mizpah
“And Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan sware unto them and to their men, saying, Fear not to serve the Chaldeans: dwell in the land, and serve the king of Babylon, and it shall be well with you. As for me, behold, I will dwell at Mizpah to serve the Chaldeans, which will come unto us: but ye, gather ye wine, and summer fruits, and oil, and put them in your vessels, and dwell in your cities that ye have taken.”
Jeremiah 40:9, 10
For a few months, there was hope. Gedaliah, the new governor, made his base at Mizpah, a few miles north of the ruined capital. He gave the scattered soldiers the same counsel Jeremiah had always given: serve Babylon, “and it shall be well with you.” Jews who had fled to Moab, Ammon and Edom began coming home. And the harvest was good: they “gathered wine and summer fruits very much” (40:12). It was a small, fragile picture of what life could be when people finally accepted God’s word.
“Then Johanan the son of Kareah spake to Gedaliah in Mizpah secretly, saying, Let me go, I pray thee, and I will slay Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and no man shall know it: wherefore should he slay thee, that all the Jews which are gathered unto thee should be scattered, and the remnant in Judah perish? But Gedaliah the son of Ahikam said unto Johanan the son of Kareah, Thou shalt not do this thing: for thou speakest falsely of Ishmael.”
Jeremiah 40:15, 16
Gedaliah was warned. Johanan told him the king of Ammon had sent a man named Ishmael to kill him, and offered to kill Ishmael first. Gedaliah refused to believe it. He was right to refuse a secret murder. But he was wrong to ignore the warning altogether. He was a good man, generous and trusting, and he could not imagine that a fellow Jew would betray him. Jesus told His disciples to be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Gedaliah was harmless as a dove, but not wise as a serpent.
The Pit Ishmael Filled
“Now it came to pass in the seventh month, that Ishmael the son of Nethaniah the son of Elishama, of the seed royal, and the princes of the king, even ten men with him, came unto Gedaliah the son of Ahikam to Mizpah; and there they did eat bread together in Mizpah. Then arose Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and the ten men that were with him, and smote Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan with the sword, and slew him, whom the king of Babylon had made governor over the land.”
Jeremiah 41:1, 2
Ishmael was “of the seed royal,” a member of David’s family. He may have resented a governor appointed by Babylon who was not of the royal line. He came to Mizpah as a guest, and “they did eat bread together.” In that culture, sharing a meal was a pledge of friendship and safety. Ishmael rose from the table and killed his host. It is the same betrayal the psalmist mourned and Jesus experienced: “he that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me” (John 13:18).
Ishmael went on to kill the men with Gedaliah, and two days later, a group of eighty pilgrims from the north who were on their way to mourn at the ruins of the temple. He hid the bodies in a great cistern that King Asa had dug centuries before when he fortified Mizpah (41:9). Then he took the rest of the people at Mizpah captive, including “the king’s daughters,” and headed for Ammon (41:10).
Johanan and the captains caught up with him “by the great waters that are in Gibeon” (41:12). The captives were overjoyed to see them and ran to their rescuers. Ishmael escaped with eight men. But Johanan and the remnant were now terrified. A Babylonian governor had been murdered on their watch, and Babylon would want revenge. So they gathered near Bethlehem, “to go to enter into Egypt” (41:17).
The sad thing about these chapters is not only the violence. It is that nothing had been learned. The city had fallen exactly as God said. A Babylonian had explained why. And still the people around Mizpah were scheming, killing, and planning to run to Egypt, the very place God had warned them against. The next chapters show what happened when they finally asked Jeremiah for God’s word, and then did not like the answer. Jeremiah’s grief over the fallen city is poured out in the book that follows his, Lamentations: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!” (Lamentations 1:1).
