Jeremiah 34
Judah re-enslaves its own people
Jerusalem will die, king will live
1The LORD sent a message to Jeremiah while King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and all his allied nations were attacking Jerusalem and its outlying towns and communities. 2The LORD told Jeremiah to go see King Zedekiah of Judah and deliver this message:I am the LORD. And I'm taking this city away from you and giving it to the king of Babylon. He will burn it. 3You are not going to escape. The Babylonians will capture you and hand you over to their king. You will stand eye to eye with him and the two of you will talk face to face. He will take you with him to Babylon.
4But I want you to listen closely to what I'm going to tell you, King Zedekiah of Judah. You won’t die by the sword. 5You’ll die in peace time. You'll get the same respectful burial that your ancestors got. Mourners will burn fragrant spices. [1] And they’ll cry, “Oh, master!” This is what I'm telling you will happen.
6So Jeremiah delivered this message to King Zedekiah in Jerusalem 7while the king of Babylon and his armies attacked the only remaining walled cities of Judah: Jerusalem, Lachish, [2] and Azekah. [3]
Slaves freed then unfreed
8The Lord sent a message to Jeremiah after King Zedekiah and all the people in Jerusalem made a promise to free their slaves. [4]9They freed all Hebrew slaves, men and women. So no Judean enslaved another fellow Hebrew. 10Officials and citizens of Jerusalem entered into a formal covenant, vowing to free all their slaves. And they did free the slaves. 11For a while. A short time later they decided they needed their slaves and so they forced them back into slavery. [5]
God condemns the re-enslavement
12That's when the Lord gave Jeremiah this message to deliver to the people:13I am the LORD, the God of Israel. I know what it means to make a covenant because I made one with your ancestors when I brought them out of slavery in Egypt. 14I ordered them to free any Hebrew slaves they have who are about to begin their seventh year of slavery. You can keep them for only six years. After that you need to set them free. But do you know what, they didn't do that. They kept them.
15You finally did the right thing when you freed your slaves the other day. You did that with a formal covenant ratified at my house, the Jerusalem Temple. 16Then you broke that sacred contract and slandered my name in the process. You took back every one of those slaves you had promised to free.
17People, you did not obey me. You were supposed to release your neighbors and your friends from their enslavement. You don't seem to understand what it means to release something. So I'm going to show you. I'm going to release you to the sword, to disease, and to starvation. When I'm finished with you, kingdoms of the world will be horrified at what they hear I've done to you. 18You made the sacred covenant and fulfilled the traditional ritual. The community split a calf, and everyone walked between the two parts of the calf as a way of signing onto the contract. [6] 19All the officials in Jerusalem did that. So did their servants, along with the priests and other citizens of Jerusalem.
Corpses in store for Jerusalem
20Well I'm telling you that every one of you who took that walk between the body parts of that dead calf is going to end up just as dead. Your corpses are going to feed the birds and the wild animals. 21King Zedekiah and his officials are going to get captured and sent back to Babylon where they will live the rest of their lives.22As for the Babylonian army that is currently fighting other cities, I am going to call them here to fight you and to take Jerusalem and burn it. I’m going to see to it that they turn the cities of Judah into nothing but decimated ghost towns.
Footnotes
It was a common custom at funerals in ancient times to burn incense, spices, or resins like frankincense and myrrh to mask the smell of a dead body.
Lachish was about 30 miles (48 km) southwest of Jerusalem, a walk of about a day and a half. Assyrians, a century before Babylon’s invasion, chiseled pictures of their attack on Lachish and their impaling of the people there. It has been on display in the British Museum.
Azekah, linked today to a ruin called Tel Azekah, is roughly 20 miles (30 km) southwest of Jerusalem and about 10 miles (16 km) north of Lachish.
There are several possible reasons for freeing the slaves. The Babylonian army may have been attacking, and they needed everyone helping defend the city. Or maybe they wanted to appease God by finally obeying his law to free fellow Hebrew slaves after six years (Exodus 21:2, 6; Deuteronomy 15:12-18). Or maybe the masters couldn’t afford to feed them anymore.
Given God’s threat to recall the Babylonian army, which had temporarily retreated to fight another city, the slave masters seemed to want to get back to a normal life. The battle was over, they may have thought, and the house was a mess. So they de-freed their freedmen and freedwomen.
What an odd and fascinating way to sign on the dotted line. The most common explanation for this unusual ritual is that the horrifying image of the carcass on the ground is what the people are wishing upon themselves if they break the contract. And that’s the horror and death God seems to be referring to in 34:17, 20. The wish they made is the wish God promised to grant.
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