The Last of the Hebrews

(With gratitude for my charming editor)

The high-priest Hilkiah had two sons, Jeremiah (643 – 560 BC.) and Gemariah. We don’t know much about their childhood, except that they grew up in Anathoth, a little town in the territory of Benjamin, a brisk hour’s walk to the northeast of Jerusalem. Jeremiah was barely seven when he and his brother witnessed from the roof of their barricaded house the horrible scenes of 637 BC. Inundated with generation-old debts, the poor in Judah neither had an “inheritance to turn it to the strangers,” nor held a title to the house from which they “suffered eviction.” Many lived in bondage, not under the yoke of aliens but enslaved by their own people. They were like “orphans and fatherless” and “to find bread for their hunger, laboring without rest for the foreigner.” The coming and going of the stork signaled the days of tilling and harvesting, and in between, the empty gaze lost itself in the oppressive heat of noon.

So when his own courtiers assassinated King Amon in open daylight, every pauper in the land rose to settle old scores. They dragged the wives and daughters of the landowners from their mounts and raped them in the streets. In retaliation the landowners hired mercenaries to round up the have-nots and burn them alive on the spot. Jeremiah later said: “Death had risen on our windows, and had entered into our palaces, and had cut off the children and the young men in the streets.” What had begun as a coup by disgruntled courtiers turned into a social revolution.

After weeks of anarchy the grandees and their hired thugs regained their grip, although behind the façade of unassailable arrogance, the great landowners began looking at their human cattle with a measure of apprehension.

The state of Judah maintained a token independence by paying an annual tribute to the empire of Assyria. The landed gentry routinely married their daughters into the royal harem in Jerusalem. The offspring filled with “seed royal” the various positions at court, in the guards and in the temple. This network of kinsman created a united front against any opposition to the House of David. However, one group of potential opposition could muster popular support. Itinerant “prophets” were known to keep vials of oil in their bundles, and not just for frying an omelet. A pretender’s career usually began with a prophet anointing him and promising divine sanction for his move against the ruling dynasty. In a deliberate affront against King Solomon, the prophet Ahijah anointed Jeroboam as king over ten of the twelve Hebrew tribes, and this established the prosperous House of Omri in Israel and Samaria while it reduced Judah to the state of a petty principality. In 842 BC., another prophet, Elisha, anointed the leader of the opposition to the House of Omri. Assured of divine sanction, the men of Elisha’s protégée massacred the ruling house to the last man.

The sitting kings didn’t hesitate to retaliate. In this age of tyrannies, the only voice heard was the voice of authority. A commoner was reduced to the squeak of a mouse expected to grovel before the throne as “your slave,” “your servant,” “your handmaiden.” The freelance prophet who had the temerity to announce that “the word of the Lord came also unto me,” had better some tangible protection or at least a safe place to hide before giving unasked-for opinions. Nevertheless, at any given time, hundreds of “prophets” raised the volume in a shouting match with the strutting bull of royal blood. It was not easy to stand out against this level of noise and prophesying became something of a freak show. Even the aristocratic Isaiah drew attention on himself with indecent exposure in public. Ezekiel made it a habit of baking his bread over a fire from his own dung and walked through walls when he could have taken the open door. Jeremiah, however, didn’t need the shenanigans. His father was the high-priest and he began his career as the speaker of the regime.

In his youth Jeremiah read everything known about the prophets. His favorite story was the prophet Elijah’s personal encounter with God, when a "great and strong wind” had “rent the mountains, and broke to pieces the rocks,” but “He” was not in the wind, or in the earthquake after the wind, not even in the fire after the earthquake. In the sudden silence Elijah pulled a veil over his face and heard a “still small voice." Jeremiah strained his inner ear to hear this voice as well.

In the prophet Hosea’s phrasing and uninhibited use of metaphor one can detect an other influence on the young Jeremiah. Hosea’s uncouth fulminations against his own wife must have struck a chord with the inexperienced teenager. The woman had a colorful past and Hosea made a promise that “for the whoredom of her boobs I shall strip her naked and kick her into the wilderness as in the day she was born.” The young reader resolved never to “take a wife, neither shall have sons or daughters,” but possibly for all the wrong reasons. Jeremiah never realized that this heady mix of metaphor belonged to a man well acquainted with jealousy and frequent bouts of frustrated libido, while his own decision could have branded him as an outcast; there was no place for fulfilled male relationships in Hebrew society.

As his father took it upon himself to instruct Jeremiah in the history of his country, he was not always sure what to make of the boy’s questions. Where was the justice in the confrontation between Judah’s good king Amaziah, “who did right in the eyes of the Lord,” and the baddie, Israel’s king Jehoash (801 – 786 BC.) “who did evil in the eyes of God,” when in the end wickedness prevailed and King Amaziah was taken captive, his daughters carried away, and the treasures pilfered from the temple? The high-priest shrugged off the query. Did the Lord not avenge his servant? Did the Assyrians not conquer Samaria? Were the defenders not impaled alive, with their limbs torn off? Eventually? Too late for Amaziah and his daughters, Jeremiah thought, what kind of justice was this anyway to wipe-out innocent life from a different generation? In any case, the Lord God was the God of the Hebrews, how could he have been so callous and promoted a foreigner, the Assyrian king Sargon, to be his “rod of indignation,” against his own family?

What Jeremiah hadn’t been told yet was, that this very incident had set Judah’s policy makers on a course to voluntarily approach Assyria and offer tributes in return for protection against their Hebrew neighbor in the North. Since the days of King Solomon the regime in Jerusalem had sought security in an alliance with Egypt. And should Jerusalem forget, Egypt would send a reminder. But when In 738 BC. the Assyrians invaded Israel and imposed heavy tributes, Judah’s king Ahaz anticipated that the sister-nation from the North might try recovering her losses from Judah, as the Israelite had done before. In 732 BC. Ahaz sent envoys to the King of Assyria, saying, “I am your servant and your son, come up, and save me out of the hand of the king of Syria, and out of the hand of the king of Israel, which rise up against me. And Ahaz took the silver and gold that was found in the temple and in the treasures of the king's house, and sent it for a present to the king of Assyria. And the king of Assyria listened to him and went up against Damascus, and took it. And king Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglathpileser king of Assyria.” It was an admission of Judah’s dependency and added another stone to the mounting difficulties of Israel. In 725 BC. the king of Israel, took a big gamble. He suspended paying tribute to Assyria and allied himself with Egypt. Three years later Israel’s capital Samaria fell and the Assyrians carried more than 27,000 Israelites into exile. At this juncture, too late for Israel, a new player entered the scene: in 721 BC. the Chaldaeans seceded from the Assyrian empire. Sargon broke up operations in Palestine to attend to the new theatre of war. In the meantime Judah was flooded with refugees who had a hard time forgetting that their brothers in the South had aided the enemy. Many of them were better educated and felt culturally superior to the red-necks in Judah. It was an infusion of fresh blood and new ideas, and King Hezekiah (715 – 687 BC.) urgently needed new ideas to create wealth and prosperity. For the first time Chaldaea, still not fully consolidated, stretched out her feelers and her envoys expressed an interest in King Hezekiah’s finances and his military capabilities. Hezekiah’s communications with Babylon and Egypt didn’t pass unnoticed in the Assyrian capital. Despite of appeasing advances on the tribute in 689, King Sennacherib of Assyria (704 – 681 BC.) laid siege to Jerusalem. Surprisingly the siege was lifted within days, Isaiah says, because the Assyrian king heard “a rumor, and returned to his own land.” Back home, his own sons assassinated King Sennacherib.

Nevertheless King Hezekiah, “whose militia and elite troops had deserted him,” could only watch “his daughters, concubines, male and female musicians,” been carried into Assyrian captivity. He continued paying an enormous tribute “to be delivered annually: thirty talents of gold, eight hundred talents of silver, precious stones, antimony, couches inlaid with ivory, elephant hides, ebony- and boxwood. And in order to deliver the tribute and to do obeisance as a slave King Hezekiah sent his personal messenger." The burden crippled the country. The new Assyrian monarch detained Judah’s king Manasse (687 – 642) in the Assyrian capital, before Assyria invaded and annexed Egypt in 671 BC. If King Manasseh ever wanted to see home again he had to explicitly acknowledge his obligations to Assyria; and he did. He lived long enough to see Egypt regain her independence in 652 BC. with the help of Lydian and Greek mercenaries.

This was the signal for a clique of landed gentry to hold a meeting in a corner of the temple in Jerusalem: Ahikam, Achbor, Shaphan, Asahiah and the chamberlain’s wife, the prophetess Huldah, approached the high-priest and drew Hilkiah into their circle. It would be wrong to call these meetings a conspiracy. It was more like a think tank exploring the options. The objective was to break with Assyria without getting crushed in retribution. Hilkiah came up with a plan. Out of the purges after King Amon’s assassination had emerged a mere boy of nine years as the new king. The high-priest swiftly took custody of young Josiah’s education and, unsurprisingly, the royal teenager was groomed to do “what was right in the sight of the Lord” and in the power struggle at Jerusalem’s court he became the trump card for Hilkiah’s faction.

To his sons’ relief, the high-priest now spent most of his time in Jerusalem leaving Jeremiah time to play with the other boys. Most of them were already taking an interest in women, telling Jeremiah the going rate for a commoner’s daughter – “fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley.” Sometimes his brother was caught in the barns with a wisp of hay in his curly hair, yet it was Gemariah’s strong-shouldered muscularity that made an impression on Jeremiah.

To his father’s dismay, Jeremiah was fond of sidling up to the tenants working the estate. The sharecroppers and goat-herders “burned incense to the Queen of Heaven, and poured out drink offerings to her,” saying it was what their forebears had been doing since times immemorial, even “our kings, and our princes.” Poor and uneducated they found comfort in an amorphous mix of shamanism, fertility cult and hero worship. With typically aristocratic disdain the prophet Isaiah had dismissed their ways: “they wank themselves into a frenzy and copulate under every green tree, slay their children under the rocks and pour drink offerings to the smooth stones of the stream.” Jeremiah found their stories as thrilling as the exotic news from distant nations in the “Isles of Chittim.” He listened to the tales about “Tehom,” the scaly dragon of the water-world; how Yahweh had assailed her in his chariot of fire and slain the monster, and how the whole host of the Elohim had used the carcass to shape the Sun, the Moon and the stars, and stretch out the skies like a tent cloth. Jeremiah’s father shook his head: “Every man is brutish in his knowledge and confounded by the graven image,” he said, “with the axe they cut a tree, deck it out with silver and gold; fasten it with nails. It’s all a workman’s handiwork, but it doesn’t move. It is as upright as the palm tree, and yet it doesn’t speak and they carry it on their shoulders, because it will not walk.”

His son was not so sure. Images are symbols, not the object of worship. Jeremiah recalled what a Babylonian prisoner-of-war had told him about the temple of Marduk. The inner sanctuary contained nothing else but an empty couch. Was this really any different to the allegedly unfurnished Holiest of Holies in Solomon's temple? 

Even the elite worshipped Yahweh only in conjunction with other, more visible deities. In Jerusalem, Tammuz, and his mother, the queen of heaven, Ashteroth, had mansions on the same premises as Yahweh’s male prostitutes. On every winter solstice the women of Judah carried a pole adorned with wreaths to the next river and sent it afloat, weeping and beating their bared breasts, until from the distance a young man would announce the arrival of the resurrected shepherd god and then disappear among the grazing herds. Not different from their neighbors, Judah was a land of tribal polytheists with shrines and “high places” dotting the countryside. Yahweh’s cult had originated in Shiloh, now on Assyrian territory, “my place where I set my name at the first.” After the fall of Samaria the shrine was in ruins but had lost little of its importance for the worshipper; it was the place where Yahweh resided with his consort Asherah – “she who gives birth to the gods.” Asherah was not without influence. Her 400 prophets used to dine at the table of Israel’s Queen Jezebel; and the mother of King Asa of Judah, too, it was said, had been a priestess of Yahweh’s consort.

In 627 BC., a messenger arrived at Anathoth. Hilkiah ordered his son to pack his bundle and meet him in Jerusalem. The discontent between three claimants to the throne had plunged Assyria into civil war. A Chaldaean Prince, Nabopolassar of Uruk, seized this opportunity, marching on Babylon, his future capital. Hilkiah, too, spotted a chance, maybe was even in communication with Nabopolassar. The time had come for a reshuffle of the deck. With a cocky and well-coached performance, Jeremiah, still only 15, addressed the public, introducing himself and his credentials: “The word of God came to me, saying, before I formed you in the belly I knew you, and I ordained you a prophet to the nations. Then said I, ah, my Lord! how can I speak: I am a child. But the Lord said to me, don’t say you are a child: you shall go where I send you, and what I command, you will speak. Then Yahweh put forth his hand, and touched my lips and said to me, behold, I have put my words in your mouth.” And this was the program: “This day I have set you over nations and over kingdoms, to root out, and to destroy, to build and to plant.”

In our modern understanding a “prophet” is foretelling the future. Not so for the ancients. To catch a glimpse at what the immortals held hidden in their lap, they would go to the local shrine, pay a fee and ask for an omen. “Prophets” received their commissions for something very different. They were asked to cast spells and pronounce blessings; old-fashioned sorcery under a different name. Prophets were to make things happen, not just foretell them. The classic example is Ezekiel’s curse on the Phoenician city of Tyre, the favorite object for curses of every apprentice prophet. The siege operations went on for sixteen years; the city never fell, not before the arrival of Alexander the Great, centuries later. So, the man who had commissioned the curse – the King of Babylon – told his Jewish court sorcerer in no uncertain terms that a second installment was due, or else! Ezekiel scrambled to save his reputation and promised the burned thief better success in his next burglary by laying a curse on Egypt. This, too, turned out to be only half a success but still was considered good enough to be included in the chronicle of “fulfilled” prophesies.

In Jerusalem, the son of Hilkiah was in a much better position. Assyria’s decline made the unthinkable possible. Speaking for the regime and with the priesthood by his side, it was easy to be a prophet. The new status opened doors; Jeremiah and Zedekiah, the king’s brother, became friends. Even so, all was not plain sailing. It took two more years to outmaneuver the opposing factions at court, but by 624 BC., Hilkiah’s cabal had full control of the government policies and the treasury.

Despite being the capital of Judah and a religious center, Jerusalem was only reachable by exiting from the main road between Egypt and Syria and trekking a whole day through rough terrain. It was still little more than a mountain fortress overseeing a suburban area stretching west on a narrow mountain ridge sheltering barely 9,000 people. On festival days numbers swelled to 20,000 and visitors could only pitch their tents outside the gates. By comparison, the old Samaria had been a thriving metropolis of merchants, with 40,000 people sitting next to the international highways. Cut off from the seaboard and sidelined by the arteries of trade, the state of Judah was surrounded by a quilt of Assyrian magistracies – Hamath, Byblos, Damascus, Sidon, Tyre, Hauran, Megiddo, Samaria and Ashdod. Only Ammon, Moab and Edom maintained autonomy; the Assyrians weren’t interested.

With the new cabinet at King Josiah’s court came changes. The people were told of an “ancient” book pulled out from underneath the debris of the crumbling temple, where it had lain hidden for centuries. The book was the autobiography of Moses, allegedly written at a time when the Hebrews had not yet invented script. The prophetess Huldah backed the fraud with her prestige and the propaganda machine staged the “discovery” in an opulent ceremony. Jeremiah was still only in his twenties when his public career reached its pinnacle. A cerebral figure standing tall before his audience, yet insecure about his voice, a key too high, somewhat lacking sonority: “Hear ye the words of this covenant, and speak to the men of Judah, and to the denizens of Jerusalem. The God of Israel says: cursed be the man that does not obey the words of this covenant, which I commanded your fathers in the day that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt. You shall be my people, and I will be your God, that I may perform the oath which I have sworn to your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as it is this day.” In a pronounced way the king turned and looked at the prophet, answering on behalf of his people: “So be it, oh Lord.” Yet what seemed a good idea at the time – a written contract with Yahweh in return for his help – was to haunt the custodians of the faith when the divine partner failed to deliver. The rabbis began interpreting the received letter and to reinterpret the interpretation. Gradually “Prophecy” fell into disrepute.

King Josiah’s extensive building program was running out of funds. The regime turned its attention to the shrines in the country. For centuries, the “high places” had hoarded valuable offerings. The king’s troopers vandalized the rural shrines, murdered their priests and desecrated ancient tombs, crushing every form of resistance. The intimidated populace was made to watch the temple prostitutes burned alive, their valuables auctioned off. People opposing the regime left the country joining the refugees from Samaria. In the capital cities of Mesopotamia and Greece emerged the avant-garde of a new cosmopolitan Jewry. Their hostility was aiming not just at the House of David, but the whole institution. The critics denounced monarchy as the tyranny it was and as a rejection of Yahweh’s dominion: A king, they said “will take the sons of the people, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and have them run before his train, and will appoint captains over us and will set us to ear the royal ground, and to reap the king’s harvest, and forge the king’s instruments of war and his chariots. Kings will take our daughters to be confectionaries, cooks and bakers, and take the best from our fields, vineyards and olive groves and give it to their servants.”

By now, the insurgent Nabopolassar had made Babylon his capital. It was the largest city on the planet, a metropolis in the truest sense of the word. In 614 BC., the Chaldaeans signed a pact with the Medes and, two years later, Assyria’s capital, Niniveh, fell to the coalition and was destroyed. Without delay, the Assyrian regime reconstituted itself in Harran which was captured as well, just three years after. Aided by his ally, Pharaoh Psametik, the Assyrian marshal Ashur-Uballit II and the still formidable Assyrian army marched to regain the city, creating a momentary vacuum in Palestine. King Josiah saw the time come to reunite the two Hebrew territories leading an expedition across the border towards Bethel. It seemed the end game, but Jeremiah’s announcement: “And Yahweh said to me, Israel has redeemed herself. Go and proclaim to the north: return, you backsliding Israel! I will not keep my anger for ever” was premature. The enterprise had to be terminated in all haste when the Assyrian forces were beaten back by the Babylonians and took positions in the Syrian desert to regroup. Carchemish became the new Assyrian capital.

In 608 BC., giving in to overtures by Nabopolassar, a new Pharaoh, Necho, thought it safe to change sides and marched against the Assyrians. Facing the prospect of a simultaneous attack on two fronts, Assyria needed to slow down the Egyptians to deal with one attacker at the time. Assyrian diplomats arrived in Jerusalem with one last bargaining chip: the province of Samaria. Judah and Samaria would be reunited under the House of David!

It is not known if Hilkiah lived to see his ambitions fulfilled. The offer was received with jubilation: “Again I will build you, o virgin of Israel, you shall again be adorned and go forth in merry dances. You shall plant vines upon the mountains of Samaria, and the watchmen upon the mount Ephraim shall cry, arise and let us go to Zion. Behold, I will gather them from the north country and the coasts of the earth, even the blind and the lame, the women and her that travails with child. I let them walk by the rivers in a straight way and they shall not stumble: for I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn. Behold, the days come that I raise unto David a righteous Branch and a King shall reign and Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely.” It was not to be. In 606 BC. “Pharaoh Necho went up against the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates: and King Josiah went against him.” The pharaoh gave fair warning and “sent ambassadors saying, what have I to do with you, king of Judah? I come not against you this day.” King Josiah would not listen, received a fatal wound and “his servants carried him dead from Megiddo.” What became of Yahweh’s pledge to assemble King Josiah to his ancestors in peace? Had Yahweh “peradventure had his late afternoon nap?” From one day to the next, Egypt had regained her traditional influence over the region whilst Jeremiah became the mouthpiece of a lost cause. Heartbroken, he lamented: “We looked for peace and a time of health but no good came.”

In Jerusalem, Josiah’s oldest son acceded to the throne, but Pharaoh Necho had other plans. He deported Judah’s king to Egypt where he died in exile and appointed another son of Josiah as his successor instead. Eliakim, was charged to “exact the silver and the gold of the people, an hundred talents of silver, and a talent of gold.”

Jeremiah became ever more isolated. The new regime held him and the cabal backing him responsible for the present situation. The realization dawned on Jeremiah that “prophets prophesy falsely and priests rule by their own means and my people love to have it so. Woe on us! The day goes away and the shadows of the evening are stretching out.” Jeremiah left Jerusalem and on his walks in the countryside mingled with the people in the mud hovels whose skin was “black like an oven,” and for whose emaciated daughters nobody would bother paying a dowry. Eliakim’s administrators pressed the mothers to send their chronically undernourished little ones to the mines; four- and five-year-old midgets, maggot-like crawling through the claustrophobic shafts. They look up to a swinging basket of food lowered down in exchange for a basket of ore going up. No ore, no food. What hopes are there for such a child? Jeremiah saw “the children gather wood, and the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead their pathetic little cakes to Asteroth, the queen of heaven, and pour drink offerings. Surely,” he said, “these are poor; they are foolish. I will go to the great men and speak to them.” Yet, in the eyes of his peers, Jeremiah was merely putting himself on the wrong side of the fence; and he was outraged about their indifference: “Wicked men: laying in wait to set a trap and catch you. As a cage is full of birds so are their houses full of deceit: that’s how they became great and rich. They put on fat, they shine, and damn them, they ignore the rights of the orphans and needy, and yet they prosper, troop in into the brothels every day and like horses lift their heads from their feed in the morning and neigh after the neighbor’s wife.” Jeremiah had his first run-in with the law.

On a public holiday he positioned himself at the center of the temple’s court: “I will make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth,” he announced to the agitated crowd. In the ensuing riot, Jeremiah surrendered to the king’s guards. A risky move. Not very long before, a man had sought asylum in Egypt after expressing his unasked opinions. The Egyptians promptly extradited the man, giving him over to Elnathan, the commissioner of Judah. The fugitive was executed. Fortunately for Jeremiah, he was no ordinary commoner. Ahikam, the old friend of his father, pulled enough weight at the royal court and the prophet was permitted to retreat to his estates in Anathoth, staying there under house arrest. Yet, even at home, he felt he was in danger.

“I was like a lamb brought to the slaughter,” he says, “and I knew not that they had devised devices against me, saying, let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered. The men of Anathoth, seek my life and say prophesy not in the name of God, that you die not by our hand. I plead with you my Lord, let me talk with you of your judgments. Wherefore does the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? You have planted them, and now they have taken root: they grow, they bring forth fruit: you are near in their mouth, and far from their reins. How long shall the land stay in mourning, and the herbs wither in the field, for the wickedness of the people? Even my brothers, and the house of my father, even they have dealt treacherously.”

“Woe is me, my mother, that you have born me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent on interest, nor men have lent to me on interest; yet every one of them does curse me. You, Lord, said it shall be well with my remaining life; the enemy shall entreat me in the time of evil. Lord, know that for your sake I have suffered reprimand. Because of you I was made to eat your word; I sat alone because of your hand on me.”

 “Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound refuses to be healed? Will you be to me altogether as a liar, like water running through the fingers? Oh Lord, you have deceived me. Since I spoke I cried violence and spoil; your word exposed me to reproach and made me the butt of ridicule.”

“Then I said, I will not make mention of you, nor speak any more in your name. Your word was shut up in my bones and I was weary with forbearing. I heard the defaming of many, saw fear on every side. Report, say they, and we shall report you. All my familiars watch for my halting, saying, he may be enticed, and we shall prevail against him and take our revenge on him. Cursed be the day wherein I was born: cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, a son is born to you instead of slaying me from the womb.”

If he was honest he could not deny what was not his office to endorse, when he heard the poor people saying, that “since we’ve stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven, and pour out drink offerings to her, we live in misery, consumed by famine and the sword.” The conclusion seemed inevitable, it was not for a man to seek God in his own heart: “The heart is deceitful above all things, who can know it? I have heard the prophets say, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. Yes, they prophesy out of their own heart’s deceit. Say every one to his neighbor, what has Yahweh answered? Has he spoken? And don’t even mention the ‘burden of the Lord:’ every man's word shall be his own burden, a reproach never to be forgotten.” 

Of the more radical minds living in exile, Ezekiel took a different approach: “If the prophet be deceived when he has spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet. I gave my people statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; and I polluted them in their own gifts, that I might make them desolate.”

In 605 BC, just one year after his triumph over Judah and the Assyrians, Pharaoh Necho became overambitious. Nebuchadnezzar II had now ascended the throne of Babylon and Necho, in a complete turnaround, changed sides again and went to the assistance of Carchemish. It would have made him the senior partner in the new alliance with Assyria and have extended his sphere of influence into Mesopotamia – if he succeeded. He lost it all. Nebuchadnezzar’s army cut down the Egyptian forces to the last man. Jeremiah’s bitter comment, “you also shall be as ashamed of Egypt, as you were ashamed of Assyria. Pharaoh king of Egypt is but a noise; he has passed the time appointed. Egypt is like a very fair heifer, but out of the north destruction is coming; it is coming,” was something nobody wanted to hear since no more tributes were going to Egypt. People had enough of Jeremiah’s warnings: “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron upon your heart, and upon the horns of your altars. Hear ye kings of Judah, and inhabitants of Jerusalem; the Lord of the armies says he will bring evil upon this place, the which whosoever hears it, his ears shall tingle.” The outburst earned him a misdemeanor charge and another night in the stocks. Not that the cooler did him any good; on his release he had an altercation with his jailer. Already in his forties and considered an old man, Jeremiah was thought to be acting beneath his station and reacted with irritation to the sniggers behind his back.

Then, in 604 BC., something happened. From underneath the arch to his quarters in Jerusalem, Jeremiah was approached by a stocky man with strong shoulders and muscular limbs. The prophet recognized the quick smile. Baruch, the son of Neriah, made no secret of his Chaldaean partisanship. He was a known spokesman for the expatriates in the Diaspora and held contacts to officials at the Babylonian court. Jeremiah was smitten. Baruch had followed, perhaps was instructed to follow, the prophet’s dissolute activities for quite a while now. The time had come to offer Jeremiah what he needed most: direction, leadership, someone to ease that weight of the world from his shoulders.

 For many years, Jeremiah had privately jotted down “in a book the words that I have spoken.” This manuscript laid the foundation for the re-education of the prophet and became Baruch’s first edition of the book now found in the Bible. “And Baruch wrote from the mouth of the prophet all the words of the Lord into a roll of a book.” Reprogramming the prophet was no simple task. Although Baruch didn’t need to convince Jeremiah that the outrage against the poor in the land had resulted in a debt of sin towards God, to believe that it was the Chaldaeans who had the mandate of God to bring justice to the disenfranchised was much harder to swallow. Baruch spoke for a growing faction among the expatriates who firmly believed that, as a payoff for their return from exile, God – or at least the overlord in Babylon – would cast away “the seed of Jacob and David, so not to take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

To Jeremiah the royalist, this didn’t sound kosher and he insisted that “even if this place shall become a pasture for the shepherds to rest their flocks, the days shall come that I will cause David to grow a branch of righteousness, Judah shall be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely; David shall never want a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel.”

In the book’s original preface Jeremiah spoke of a “conspiracy found among the men of Judah and Jerusalem. The house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken the deal God had offered their fathers and went to serve other gods. Therefore says the Lord, I will bring them evil, which they shall not escape; and though they cry to me, I will not listen.” In Baruch’s editing this became more inflammatory and something altogether different: “Who is the wise man, that may understand why the land is perishing? The Lord says, because they have walked after the imagination of their own heart, therefore I will scatter them among the heathen, and I will send the consuming sword. Therefore take the cup of fury from my hand, and give to drink from it to all nations. I will consume the nation and the kingdom which will not serve Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, with the sword, the famine, and with pestilence. But nations that bring their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, those shall remain in their land, says the Lord, and they shall live and prosper.”

The manuscript was now ready to be read to the public. Jeremiah, after his brushes with the law, was under a gag order, so the task fell on Baruch. It was a well-chosen festive season with countless visitors crowding the temple. The reading at the temple gate caused a stir among “Gemariah the son of Shaphan the scribe, Michaiah his son, Elishama the scribe, Delaiah the son of Shemaiah, Commissioner Elnathan, Jehudi the son of Nethaniah, Zedekiah the son of Hananiah, and all the princes.” A second private reading was quickly arranged for the king’s council. King Eliakim ordered for the book to be delivered to his winter residence. Sitting next to a fire, the king interrupted the reading after every three sheets and had them cut out and burned on the hearth. The first recorded act of censorship.

The king issued orders for the arrest of Baruch and the prophet but the authorities, somehow, pursued no further. The two fugitives put their time in hiding to good use trying to recover the lost manuscript from memory. Baruch added “many like words,” leaving a later editor every license to amend and rewrite as he chose.

There was a growing sense that King Nebuchadnezzar was gradually encircling Judah. Each year saw another campaign into surrounding territories. Egypt, still reeling from the disaster at Carchemish, could do little but watch. But the old crocodile still had teeth. In 600 BC., Nebuchadnezzar invaded Egypt. The Pharaoh’s Greek and Lydian mercenaries stood their ground and the Babylonian king was wounded in battle. He retreated and in the following season, stayed put, but spies reported that he “gathered his chariots and horses in great numbers.” Nebuchadnezzar had decided to consolidate and in a number of sharp actions against petty princes in the Arabian desert, he was preparing his untested, new recruits for bigger things to come. “Scouring the desert they took much plunder from the Arabs, their possessions, animals and gods.”

In the famine of 598 BC., Jeremiah, after a long absence, dared showing his face in public again and dutifully extended his prayers on behalf of the land: “Judah mourns, and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up. Their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters and they return with their vessels empty and cover their heads in shame. The ground is chapt, there is no rain in the earth, and the plowmen’s head is sinking. The hind has calved in the field and forsook it, because there is no grass. Oh Lord, though our iniquities testify against us and we have sinned against you, help us for your name's sake.”

But God would not listen and is said to have told his prophet: “Pray not for this people.” To compound problems, the king of Judah died leaving his successor Coniah a country where people, like flies, crowded the garbage dumps for food. If King Nebuchadnezzar needed an invitation, this was it; the handler received orders to unleash his prophet: “Say to king and queen, humble yourselves, for your principalities shall come down. Judah shall be carried away captive, all of it. The Lord says, they shall not lament Eliakim king of Judah, nor say ah my brother! or, ah sister! and shall not lament his dominion and glory! He shall receive the burial of an ass, dragged to the gates of the city and cast out of Jerusalem. And as I live, Coniah, his son I will give into the hand of assassins.” This was to be the first and only shot. On the 16th of March, 597 BC., facing no resistance, King Nebuchadnezzar occupied Jerusalem and began deporting the king, “the queen, the eunuchs, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem,” and 3,000 of “the carpenters, and the smiths.” The period of “exile,” had begun. King Coniah was replaced by his uncle, Zedekiah. The royal deportee arrived in a Babylonian prison. Every morning he and the other prisoners queued up to receive their daily ration.

Jeremiah, too, bade farewell to his brother. He asked Gemariah to deliver a letter to the expatriates in Babylon – a document testifying to bitter squabbling between the factions: “To the priests, and to the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried captive from Jerusalem to Babylon. The God of Israel says that Ahab the son of Kolaiah, and Zedekiah the son of Maaseiah prophesy a lie in his name! He will make them a curse to all the captives of Judah in Babylon, and people shall say: the Lord make you like Zedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire for villainy and their adultery with their neighbors' wives, and for their lying words spoken in God’s name. To Shemaiah the Nehelamite, the Lord says: because you have sent letters to the people at Jerusalem, and to Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, and to all the priests, saying, the Lord has made you priest instead of Jehoiada the priest, and that you should officiate in the house of the Lord, and that every man who makes himself a prophet should be put in the stocks, tell us, why have you not reproved the prophet of Anathoth? For his dispatch to us in Babylon says this captivity is going to be long and therefore we should build houses and plant gardens and eat their fruit.”

Among the expatriates, the opposition to monarchy became increasingly dogmatic, and not only because it was considered a political tradeoff for the return from exile. Similar sentiments echoed throughout the Mediterranean. In Athens, Solon issued a bill of rights, in Italy, the magistrates of a provincial town sent their king into exile and began the long march towards world dominion. Signs of a new era, but for Jeremiah, the sun was setting. He was the last of the tribal Hebrews, rooted in the soil and unwavering in his loyalty to the House of David. Baruch, on the other hand, was the new cosmopolitan Jew; gone were the days when “the fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” From now on, “every one shall receive his own reward” and home was to be every country where a synagogue opens the door.

The walls of Jerusalem had not yet tumbled but scribes and rabbis were already busy with the creation of a new national identity. The Torah was a product of Exile and became the portable country for the homeless Jew. Most of the expatriates in Babylon, Khorasan and Egypt modeled their lives on the story of Joseph who was carried away into bondage but nevertheless rose to prosperity and advancement in a foreign country.

In 595 BC., news began to circulate of a conspiracy in King Nebuchadnezzar’s military and of purges in the Chaldaean top brass. In Jerusalem the royal court took this as a sign and its speaker, the prophet Hananiah, announced that God was about to break the yoke of Babylon “within the space of two full years,” returning the captives, the royal princes and even the sacred vessels carried away from the temple. Revealing his true feelings, Jeremiah would have liked to think so as well: “In the presence of all the people the prophet said to Hananiah, amen, the Lord do so and perform your words which you have prophesied.” But, as a seasoned politician, Jeremiah was not leaving without a piece of friendly advice: “Nevertheless hear this: The prophets of old prophesied war, evil and pestilence. The prophet who prophesies peace, him shall we remember. And Jeremiah went his way.” This did not please his Chaldaean handlers. Through his contacts in Babylon Baruch made a few inquiries and then arranged for Jeremiah to make a public spectacle of his altercation with Hananiah.

He threw an iron yoke at the feet of the flustered prophet and shouted: “Yahweh has not sent you; but you make these people trust in a lie. Thus says the God of Israel, I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all nations, they shall serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and I have given him dominion over the beasts in the field as well.” Then he became personal: “Hear now, Hananiah, the Lord will cast you off from the face of the earth: this year you shall die, because you have taught rebellion against the Lord.” The “Lord?” Which lord? The one up high or the one in Babylon? Oddly enough, “Hananiah died the same year in the seventh month.” Hananiah’s family would not forget.

In 593 BC., Nebuchadnezzer himself delivered a punitive strike and ordered a second wave of deportations. At long last, King Zedekiah gave Jeremiah a hearing for what could very well be called the first Jewish bill of rights: “Execute righteousness and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood. If you will not hear these words, I swear by myself, says the Lord, that this house shall become a desolation. Woe unto him who uses his neighbor's service without wages, and gives him not for his work." In spite of opposition from his own advisers, all of them men of wealth, living in wide houses "and large chambers, cieled with cedar, and painted with vermilion,” King Zedekiah issued a writ of manumission “to proclaim that every man should let his Hebrew servants, men and women, go free.” Jeremiah considered this his finest achievement. However, four years on, Zedekiah rescinded his manumission orders. The well-informed Ezekiel is telling us what happened:

“Say now to the rebellious house, know ye not what these things mean? The king of Babylon has taken of the king's seed and made an alliance and has taken an oath of him. He has also removed the mighty of the land so that the kingdom might not lift itself up and so might continue. Yet Zedekiah sent ambassadors to Egypt, that they might give him horses and soldiers. Shall he prosper? Shall he escape who does such things? As I live, says the Lord God, surely he shall die in the place where the king dwells who’d raised him and whose oath he has despised and whose alliance he broke. Neither shall Pharaoh with his mighty army come to his aid. As I live, says the Lord, surely it was my oath he has despised and my alliance he broke; I shall make him pay.”

A new pharaoh had ascended the throne and had moved his reserves to Migdol on the Sinai. Whatever his role was in this, Zedekaiah threw all his resources into the fortified strongholds in Lachish, Azekah and Jerusalem, and waited for Egyptian reinforcements. They never came. Instead Nebuchadnezzar wasted no time to pitch headquarters in Riblah, Lebanon, and his cavalry took possession of Judah’s open country side, cutting off all supplies to the cities. His general assembled forces at the gates of Jerusalem.

Jeremiah was beside himself: “For your treachery, says the Lord, I proclaim my kind of liberty for you, the sword, the pestilence, and the famine; the king of Judah, the princes, the eunuchs, and the priests, I will give into the hand of their assassins: and their corpses shall be meat for the vultures.” Zedekaiah saw no other way but to take the furious prophet into protective custody. The bitterly disappointed Jeremiah decided to occupy his mind with more worldly matters.

In the general panic real estate prices were dropping through the floor. Jeremiah was a noted partisan of the Chaldaeans; he could expect that after a regime-change his titles on recently acquired real estate from the deportees would be authenticated. From his confinement he managed not only to transact business but commanded access to a considerable amount of silver bullion – a testament to his standing and wealth. The move, however, didn’t look so smart anymore when in Jerusalem reports arrived of troop movements in the Sinai. The Chaldaean general immediately broke camp to confront the Egyptian forces. After a brief standoff, the pharaoh’s mercenaries returned to Egypt without firing a shot. When the news arrived, King Zedekiah released the prophet from custody and Jeremiah tried to reach his home in Anathoth. Whether at the city gate or already on his way, under the walls of Lachish, he was recognized by a captain of the guards. The man was a relative of the late prophet Hananiah. He arrested Jeremiah as a Chaldaean collaborator and after giving him a sound caning handed him over to the authorities in Jerusalem.

Snapped in iron, the prophet passed into the custody by another of his personal enemies, Jonathan the scribe. The whereabouts of Baruch at this point are uncertain. King Zedekiah hesitated to intervene. Jeremiah’s jailer commanded a powerful following and the king needed all the support he could get. At last, remembering his friendship with the prophet, Zedekiah arranged a meeting. Jeremiah pleaded for his life and the king had him moved to the prison’s courtyard with orders to supply him from the royal purse with food. Seeing nothing but uncertainty ahead, Jeremiah saw no reason why he should hold back on his feelings: “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me? The Babylonians shall set fire on this city, and burn it with the houses, upon whose roofs they have offered incense unto Baal, and poured out drink offerings unto other gods, provoking my anger.” Which was exactly what his enemies were counting on. The text gives us the names of these people, all of them royal blood. They went to speak with the king. Zedekiah duly abandoned the prophet.

The jeering courtiers roped down the struggling Jeremiah into the prison’s cesspool. However the king’s eunuch, Ebedmelech the Ethiopian interceded and Zedekiah changed his mind, again. He sent “thirty men” who pulled the prophet out of his hole with “old cast clouts and old rotten rags” propped under his armpits. Zedekiah held a perfumed handkerchief to his nose when he interviewed Jeremiah for the last time in the lives of both. The prophet asked for assurances if he spoke freely. Zedekiah granted him permission but insisted to keep the conversation confidential. The monarch was worried about “the Jews that are fallen to the Babylonians. I am afraid, once they deliver me into their hand, they will mock me.” So when the courtiers returned and inquired – under the wind and keeping some distance to his person – what this conversation was all about, Jeremiah kept to his end of the bargain and the courtiers eventually left him alone; stinking and still snapped in iron. The next morning news broke that King Zedekiah and a small retinue had escaped from the besieged Jerusalem. What the people didn’t know was, that Chaldaean cavalry had picked up the fugitives man by man. Locked in iron they were sent to Nebuchadnezzar’s headquarters. The king of Babylon felt he had to set an example. Zedekiah was made to watch the execution of his sons. Then, he himself was blinded. King Nebuchadnezzar moved on to summary executions of the ringleaders, of “Seraiah the chief priest, and Zephaniah the second priest, and the three keepers of the door, the eunuch, which had the charge of the men of war; seven of the king's bodyguards, the principal scribe of the armed forces who mustered the people of the land, and threescore of the people who were found in the midst of the city.”

Jerusalem was put to the torch. Houses, temple, palace and all. The Great King Nebuchadnezzer expressed personal concern for Jeremiah, holding his commander responsible for the prophet’s welfare. General Nebuzaradan ordered the prophet’s release from prison, provided him with funds and handed him over to the care of the newly appointed governor of Judah, Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam. Jeremiah was again a free man. He approached the Chaldaean general, asking for the release of his benefactor, Ebedmelech the Ethiopian. The general was under orders to implement a sweeping land reform designed to win the hearts and minds of the underprivileged. The evicted landowners were forced to pack up and leave with the deportees. “This is the people whom Nebuchadnezzar carried away captive: in the seventh year three thousand Jews and twenty-three; in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar eight hundred and thirty-two; in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadnezzar, seven hundred forty-five persons: altogether four thousand and six hundred.”

Gedaliah, the new Governor, chose Mizpah – King Saul’s old lair – as his seat of government; a symbolism not lost on his opponents. Jeremiah withdrew from public affairs and returned to his estates in Anathoth. At home Baruch was already waiting; it was their first meeting since the prophet’s arrest. Seven months passed in pastoral peace. Then, in the autumn of 586 BC., a horseman cantered into the courtyard, covered in dust. He brought the worst possible news.

The new governor was a popular administrator. From Moab, Edom and Ammon, refugees returned and paid their respect to the new regime. With the Davidic bloodline out of the picture, Mizpah was on the cusp of becoming a center of national rebirth. Officers of Judah’s surviving regulars, their general Johanan, the son of Kareah, members “of the seed royal, and ten of the princes of the king,” as well as fugitive women from the royal harem and their bastards like Ishmael, the son of Nethaniah, gathered at the governor’s court. Johanan became Gedaliah’s chief of security. He was able and alert. Aware of Ishmael’s hostile intentions, he suggested to make the man disappear before things could go wrong. Unfortunately, Gedaliah would not listen; his was a policy of reconciliation. Johanan remained skeptical: “Can the leopard change his spots?” When Johanan’s duties required his presence in a remote part of the country, Ishmael seized the moment. Over dinner, he and his thugs killed Gedaliah, their host; a violation of every taboo in the book. Who ever was pulling Ishmael’s strings, this murder stripped away the last shred of credibility from the House of David.

Unable to muster support, Ishmael robbed a passing caravan, murdered most of the merchants, then burned Mizpah to the ground and took hostages to shield his escape. Johanan did what he could. His posse caught up, freed the hostages and killed most of Ishmael’s gang-members. But Ishmael himself and ten of his men escaped across the border. Johanan was under no illusion. He summoned the prophet to meet him near Bethlehem. Jeremiah, or perhaps Baruch, urged the man to put his trust in Babylon; but Johanan knew Nebuchadnezzar’s interrogators would not be in a forgiving mood.

He felt responsible for his charges and so the meandering train of courtiers and women went to Egypt into exile. Jeremiah was the only pillar of the old establishment left standing; he was the last best hope for a national rebirth. There was no question that he would stay. Yet Baruch was losing his grip. The prophet finally drew the line at Baruch’s suggestion that Jeremiah should become a second Moses. The prophet raised a sarcastic eyebrow: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel to you, yes you, Baruch: you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not.”

The two parted ways on the banks of the Nile. Jeremiah had a little farewell message for Baruch: “A prophet delivers a message to the king. He is instructed not to tarry and not to take food or shelter. Yet a colleague, under the ruse of a divine vision of his own, is cheating on the man and lures him to his table. The two sit at their meal when the spirit suddenly seizes the lying host and from his mouth issues genuine prophesy. He announces that lions shall eat his guest for his disobedience. And so it happens.” Jeremiah turned away and walked towards the waiting barge. “You didn’t tell the end of your story,” Baruch muttered to himself: “The prophet who had caused the calamity feels remorse, searches the road for the corpse and buries him in his own tomb. Brother!” It was the last time the two were ever seen together.

According to Josephus, the prophet traveled upstream to the district of Pathros and settled in the suburbs of Thebes. In 567 BC., he saw contingents of young recruits marching through the streets. In a military coup a new pharaoh, Amesis II, had assumed the throne, and the aging Nebuchadnezzar confronted him on the Sinai. Other news, like that of the amnesty for the last living Hebrew king, may never have reached Jeremiah. Zedekiah was already dead when, in 561 BC., Nebuchadnezzar’s son released Zedekiah’s predecessor, Coniah, from prison and allowed him to pass his final days as a pensioner at the royal palace in Babylon.

His Egyptian neighbors knew nothing of Jeremiah’s past. For them he was just an old man sitting on his porch, fanning away the mosquitoes. His garden by the riverbank was a pleasant place to be; the women were pretty, the men tanned and toned. Collections of stories and novels were available, but learning hieroglyphics is for the young. Jeremiah was late in his eighties when he died.

© – 1/10/2009 – by michael sympson, 9,600 words, all rights reserved