Jeremiah;- Exile for seventy years (ch25)

This message was given to Jeremiah in the fourth year of the reign of Jehoiakim, who had been appointed by the Pharoah of Egypt. Several more years would pass before the Babylonians made him give up this allegiance. Once again, I will include a summary of the final kings of Judah in the second post.

Jeremiah reminded the people (ch25 v3) that he had been speaking to them since the thirteenth year of Josiah’s reign, a period of twenty-three years. Like all the prophets of the Lord, he had been telling them to turn from their evil ways and stop going after other gods to worship them, provoking God with the work of their hands (that is, their idols). If they obeyed, then God would do them no harm, and would allow them to continue dwelling in the land he promised to their fathers.

But they refused to listen to him.

Therefore God would send for “the tribes of the north”, meaning anyone who would bring their armies into Israel by the northern route. In particular, he would send for Nebuchadnezzar, who had just begun his reign in Babylon. He would bring them against the land of Judah and the surrounding nations and destroy them, in order to make them “a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting reproach”.

“Moreover, I will banish from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones and the light of the lamp” (v10).
In short, he will put an end to daily life.

This passage is echoed very directly in Revelation’s song of triumph about the destruction of “Babylon the great city”;
“The sound of harpers and minstrels, of flute players and trumpeters shall be heard in thee no more…
And the sound of millstones shall be heard in thee no more, and the light of the lamp shall shine in thee no more, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall be heard in thee no more” (Revelation ch18 vv22-23).

“These nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.”
By most historians, the fall of Jerusalem is calculated as taking place in 586 B.C., and the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C.. Nobody with an old-fashioned education needs a calculator for that subtraction - the interval is forty-seven years.

The explanation of the apparent discrepancy is that the number “seventy” was never meant to be taken as a literal number. It is a combination of two symbolic numbers. “7”, all the way through the Bible, is a number indicating “belonging to God”, a value which goes back to the days of Creation. The number “10” is used in Revelation, especially, to indicate “completeness” or “the whole world”. If you put them together, the symbolic meaning is “God’s completeness” or “God’s work for the whole world”. The second meaning explains the seventy translators of the Septuagint and the mission of the seventy disciples. In this case, “seventy years” means “the complete period that God has appointed”.

If the “numbers of years” mentioned in the prophets, including Revelation, are not meant to be taken as literal numbers, that is one of the reasons why people should not be using them to make “end-times” date calculations.

The explanation which the Jehovah’s Witnesses adopt, or used to adopt, is that the history books are wrong and the interval really was a literal seventy years. However, this may be another doctrine which has been changed in the hope that nobody would have a memory long enough to notice the difference.

At the end of the “seventy years”, Babylon and that whole nation of Chaldeans will be punished for their iniquity, Their land will be made an everlasting waste, just as they treated the people of Judah. Other nations will make slaves of them, as they treated the people of Judah. The treatment they receive will be the equivalent of the way they treated other people.

Since this message is about judgement, beginning with the judgement of Judah, the promise that the Jews will return from exile at the end of the “seventy years” is reserved for a later chapter.

If the Lord has sent for Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, so that their treatment of Jerusalem comes at his command, why are they being punished for their actions later? That is a good question. Ezekiel, in fact, does not include Babylon in his list of enemies of Israel awaiting God’s revenge. The answer is implied in Isaiah’s treatment of a related question;
“Assyria, rod of my anger…. Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him… But he does not so intend, and his mind does not so think, but it is in his mind to destroy, and to cut off nations not a few” (Isaiah ch10 vv5-7).

The Lord’s commands to the leaders of other nations, like Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus and Gog of the land of Magog, are delivered at the unconscious level of their minds. Their motivations at the conscious level are completely different. Assyria was punished and Babylon will be punished, despite their function as instruments of God, for two reasons. Their conscious motivation was malicious, and the performance of their task was therefore over-enthusiastic, going way beyond the judgemental commission that he gave them.

V13; “I will bring upon that land all the words which I have uttered against it, everything written in this book, which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations.”
Here is a third-person naming of Jeremiah, which implies that this verse was penned by somebody else in some “editing” stage.
What is meant by “this book”? One fairly obvious candidate is the part of Jeremiah beginning with chapter 46., which is headed “The word of the Lord which came to Jeremiah the prophet concerning the nations”. The six chapters which follow that verse are a collection of prophesies about the enemies of Israel, culminating in two chapters of prophecy about Babylon. At the end of ch51, Jeremiah writes in a book “all these words that are prophesied concerning Babylon” and instructs his assistant to bind it to a stone and cast the stone into the Euphrates.

I think it is a reasonable inference that “Jeremiah’s prophecies against the nations” was a published book, and that v13 was written to be included in that book,. Perhaps this whole passage (ch25 vv1-14) was incorporated as an “introduction”, written at the top of the scroll.

Jeremiah was evidently “publishing” many short collections of his prophecies in his own lifetime, to supplement his “live” teaching and to get round the restrictions which the authorities tried to place on his work. Whoever put together the final version of the book of Jeremiah, as we know it now, must have been working with a chaotic assortment of manuscripts. That would explain why the book is less well-organised than it could have been, and the chapters which are dated do not appear in their true chronological sequence.

We need to be able to follow the sequence of kings between the battle of Megiddo and the fall of Jerusalem, as part of the background of this prophet’s work, so I’ll be re-describing the sequence from time to time whenever it’s relevant to the setting of the chapter.

The history is complicated by the habit of adopting a new “throne-name” at the beginning of the reign, which is probably how David’s precious child Jedidiah became the ruler Solomon. This practice remains the norm for the Popes, but it used to be more common among the kings of Europe generally. .

When Josiah died, the people in Jerusalem chose his son Shallum, son of Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. He took the name Jehoahaz.

Pharaoh Neco took Jehoahaz captive, and replaced him with his elder brother Eliakim, son of Zebidah the daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah. Eliakim was made to take the name Jehoiakim. Why was he not not chosen in the first place? My theory is that he was a captive in Pharaoh’s hands.

Jehoiakim rebelled against Babylon, died before Nebuchadnezzar got there, and was followed by his own son, confusingly called Jehoiachin. Certainly the similarity is enough to confuse the writers of 2 Chronicles and Daniel ch1, let alone any modern reader. This young man is the one who gets taken off into the first stage of the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah calls him “Coniah”.

Nebuchadnezzar then replaced him with Mattaniah, the last of the sons of Josiah, son of Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. Mattaniah was made to take the name Zedekiah. Obviously he was Coniah’s uncle, as identified correctly in 2 Kings. The Chronicler calls him Coniah’s brother, but that’s part of the confusion caused by the similarity of names. This is the king involved in the final Fall of Jerusalem.

the whole thing is dreary and tragic.
I wonder who led this thing. did kings like Ahab lead the people astray? did masses of people worship idols and the rulers decided to follow them? was it a groupthink among all classes?

it's painful to see the alternation between good and bad kings, eventually going to bad kings only. presumably they mirrored the people and God gave Israel the king(s) it deserved.

a reply to: ElGoobero

The kingdom of Judah got seven good kings.

The kingdom of Israel got none...all evil.

a reply to: ElGoobero
I'm sure there was a lot more popular idolatry than the histories talk about even in the aristocracy and civil service,, especially since most people had not bought into the idea that it was wrong to sacrifice to the God of Israel and celebrate other gods at the same time.

As an old student of history, I see also a political dimension. Apart from the fact that kings did not want to alienate half their subjects, there was the problem that the temple priesthood were the original models for the Vatican priesthood, edging kings away from control of the temple and conspiring against those they did not like. So the kings had a choice between submitting, and forming an implicit alliance with the idolaters. Manasseh seemed to be forming a coalition of all the idolatrous groups that he could find.

The particular situation in Jeremiah's time was that the battle of Megiddo obviously destroyed the political prestige of the temple. Josiah had been their king from childhood, supporting their reform campaign after "the finding of the book". They may have prompted him to go out and challenge the Egyptians. After Megiddo, the reform party in the temple was discredited, the opponents of reform took charge of temple affairs, and they followed Jehoiakim's lead in trusting to Egypt against Babylon.

All this is explained in the relevant chapters of my not-yet-found-a-publisher "Prophets, priests and politics".