Jeremiah 52

The chapter opens not with the siege but with the man on the throne and the reason the siege came: Zedekiah… did that which was evil in the eyes of the LORD, according to all that Jehoiakim had done. For through the anger of the LORD it came to pass… that Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon (vv. 2-3). This is the chronicle's way of refusing to let the disaster be read as mere politics. It would have been easy to record the fall of Jerusalem as a tale of empires - a small kingdom crushed between Babylon and Egypt, a doomed rebellion, the ordinary cruelty of the strong against the weak. The text will not allow it. Before a single Babylonian forms up against the walls, it tells us the deeper cause: this came to pass through the anger of the LORD, because of a king and a people who did evil in the eyes of the LORD. The catastrophe about to unfold is not an accident of geopolitics. It is the long-warned consequence of a covenant abandoned. Babylon is the instrument; the reckoning is God's, and it is moral.

The narrative then nails down the siege with the precision of a war diary - year, month, and day: it began in the ninth year… in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month (v. 4) and ground on until the eleventh year of king Zedekiah (v. 5), roughly a year and a half of encirclement. The dates are recorded so exactly because this is the moment everything Jeremiah had said either proves true or proves empty, and the text wants no vagueness about it. By the end, the city is starving: the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land (v. 6). There is a bitter irony folded into that phrase. Jerusalem had treated the temple of the LORD as a guarantee - The temple of the LORD… are these (Jer. 7:4) - as though God's house in their midst made them untouchable no matter how they lived. Now there is no bread in the city of the One who is the bread of life. The siege strips away every false security one layer at a time, until a defended capital is reduced to hunger inside its own walls. Hold that phrase - no bread - in mind; the book will end on its exact reversal.

When the walls finally fail, the king runs. Then the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled… by night by the way of the gate between the two walls, which was by the king's garden (v. 7). Zedekiah slips out under cover of darkness, by a hidden gate, taking the road to the plain - the flight of a man who would not face the truth when it was spoken to him and now cannot face the consequence. He had been told plainly, again and again, that surrender meant life and resistance meant ruin (Jer. 38:17-18); he chose neither faith nor surrender, only escape. And escape fails: the army of the Chaldeans pursued after the king, and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho; and all his army was scattered from him (v. 8). The plains of Jericho - where centuries before Israel had first entered the land in triumph - are now where its last reigning king is run down, alone, his soldiers melting away. He is dragged north to Riblah, to Nebuchadrezzar's field headquarters, and there judgment is passed upon him (v. 9). The man who would not heed the word of God is brought, at last, before a human throne to be sentenced.

What follows is among the bleakest scenes the prophets record, and the text refuses to look away from it: the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes: he slew also all the princes of Judah in Riblah. Then he put out the eyes of Zedekiah (vv. 10-11). The cruelty is calculated. The last sight ever granted to Zedekiah is the killing of his own children; that image is burned in, and then his eyes are destroyed, so that the horror is the one picture he carries blind into a Babylonian prison till the day of his death. There is a grim, unspoken justice threaded through it that the prophets had foreseen. This was the king who would not see - who had eyes and would not read the plain word of God, who summoned Jeremiah in secret and still would not obey what he heard. Ezekiel had spoken a riddle of this very fate: the prince would be brought to Babylon, yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there (Ezek. 12:13). The blinding makes outward and literal what had long been true inwardly. It is not presented as anything but appalling; the chapter lets it stand in its full weight, a warning written in the dark of how a long refusal to see finally ends.

A month after the breach, the demolition is made deliberate and complete. Nebuzar-adan, captain of the guard… came… into Jerusalem, and burned the house of the LORD, and the king's house; and all the houses of Jerusalem… And… brake down all the walls of Jerusalem round about (vv. 12-14). The order of the burning is telling. The first building named is not the palace but the house of the LORD. The temple - the center of the nation's worship and identity, the place the people had treated as a charm that made them untouchable (Jer. 7:9-11) - goes up in flames first. Then the king's house, then the homes of the great, then the walls themselves, pulled down stone by stone all the way around. Everything the people had counted on as permanent is gone: the sanctuary, the throne, the defenses. It is worth sitting with how total this is. The visible religion of Judah is reduced to ash, and the question the ruin forces is the one the prophets had been asking all along: when the building is gone, is the faith gone with it? A temple can be burned; the God who filled it cannot. Judah would have to learn, in a land without a temple, that the LORD was never contained by the house they let burn.

Two verses about the people frame a quiet reversal. The strong are deported - Nebuzar-adan… carried away captive… the residue of the people that remained in the city, and those that fell away… and the rest of the multitude (v. 15) - but he left certain of the poor of the land for vinedressers and for husbandmen (v. 16). The mighty are marched off; the lowly, those with no power and nothing worth seizing, are left in the land to tend the vines and work the fields. There is a pattern here that runs all through Scripture: the proud are scattered and the humble are kept, the great are emptied and the least are given the soil to work (1 Sam. 2:7-8; Luke 1:52-53). Even in a chapter dominated by loss, the eye of the account lingers on the ones who had nothing, and they are not erased. The land is not left an empty wasteland; a seed of the poor remains in it, holding the ground, a small living pledge that the story of this people is not finished. The same hand that brings down what the proud trusted keeps a remnant of the lowly alive in the ruins.

Then the chronicle does something striking: it slows down, almost to a halt, to inventory the temple's bronze. For seven verses it catalogues what was carried off - the pillars of brass… and the brasen sea… the caldrons… the shovels… the snuffers… the bowls… the spoons (vv. 17-19) - and then describes the two great pillars in loving, exact detail: eighteen cubits high, a span of twelve, four fingers thick, hollow, crowned with chapiters of network and pomegranates, ninety and six on a side (vv. 20-23). Why dwell so long on furniture in the middle of a national tragedy? Because these were not ordinary objects. The two bronze pillars, Jachin and Boaz, and the great molten sea had stood at the entrance of Solomon's temple for nearly four hundred years; their metal, the text says twice with quiet awe, was without weight - beyond measuring (v. 20). They were the visible glory of Israel's worship, monuments to the golden age. And now they are smashed for scrap and hauled to Babylon. The slow, grieving care of the inventory is itself a kind of lament: the chronicler counts each broken piece the way mourners count what is lost, refusing to let the glory of the house pass away unremembered.

The chronicle now turns from buildings to men, and specifically to the leadership of the nation. The captain of the guard took Seraiah the chief priest, and Zephaniah the second priest, and the three keepers of the door (v. 24), along with a senior military officer, seven royal counsellors, the chief recruiting scribe, and sixty ordinary men of the land (v. 25). These are the heads of every order that had governed Judah - the priesthood, the army, the court, the administration. They are taken to Riblah, to Nebuchadrezzar, and there the king of Babylon smote them, and put them to death (vv. 26-27). It is the deliberate decapitation of a society: the men who led the institutions are killed, and the institutions die with them. Among the executed is Seraiah the chief priest, the very office that stood between the people and God in the temple now gone. The priesthood that had grown corrupt, the court that had refused the prophet's counsel, the leaders who had told the people peace, peace; when there is no peace (Jer. 6:14) - all are gathered up and brought to account. The judgment falls heaviest on those who had the most responsibility and the most light, and used neither.

The section ends on a clause of stark finality and then a column of numbers: Thus Judah was carried away captive out of his own land (v. 27), followed by a careful tally of the deportations - three thousand Jews and three and twenty… eight hundred thirty and two persons… seven hundred forty and five persons: all the persons were four thousand and six hundred (vv. 28-30). At first the numbers seem strangely small for the destruction of a nation, and they likely count only certain groups of leading captives across several waves rather than the whole population. But the smallness is part of the point. The chronicler is not estimating; he is counting - person by person, year by year, as carefully as a man counts what he has lost. It is the same grieving exactness with which he counted the broken pillars. And the flat sentence that introduces the tally - Thus Judah was carried away captive out of his own land - is the saddest line in the book. The people promised this land as an inheritance, the people who had clung to it as proof of God's favor while abandoning the God who gave it, are marched out of it. The land itself, the prophets had said, would at last keep its sabbaths in their absence (2 Chr. 36:21). Yet even this is not a sentence without end: Jeremiah himself had set a term on it - seventy years (Jer. 25:11) - and a counted exile, unlike an endless one, is an exile with a far edge.

After thirty-three verses of unrelieved ruin, the book turns - and the turn is so quiet it can be missed. And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah… that Evil-merodach king of Babylon… lifted up the head of Jehoiachin king of Judah, and brought him forth out of prison (v. 31). Jehoiachin is the other king of Judah in this story - the young king carried to Babylon eleven years before Jerusalem fell, who had spent thirty-seven years in a Babylonian cell. He is the one through whom David's royal line ran; with Jerusalem burned and Zedekiah blinded and dead in prison, he was, humanly speaking, the last flicker of the dynasty - and that flicker was locked in a foreign jail. Then a new king of Babylon comes to the throne, and his first recorded act is to lift up the head of this forgotten prisoner and bring him out. The chronicler dates it precisely, as he has dated every disaster, because this small mercy is as much a fact of history as the fall itself. The God who watched over His word to perform every judgment also watched over a promise no one could now see: that David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel (Jer. 33:17). On the very last page of the book of judgment, that promise is kept alive by a prison door swinging open.

What is done for Jehoiachin is described with deliberate tenderness, each phrase a reversal of his long humiliation. Evil-merodach spake kindly unto him - literally spoke good things to him, the first kind words the chronicle records in the whole chapter - and set his throne above the throne of the kings that were with him in Babylon (v. 32). The prisoner is given a throne, and not merely a throne but the highest seat among all the captive kings in Babylon. And changed his prison garments (v. 33): the rags of thirty-seven years are stripped away and royal clothing put on. The transformation is complete and it is all gift - Jehoiachin does nothing to earn it; he is simply lifted, spoken to, seated, reclothed. It is hard to read the sequence - raised from prison, given a place of honor, the old garments exchanged - without hearing the deep pattern of grace that runs through all of Scripture: the lowly lifted, the shamed honored, the filthy garments removed and rich robes given (Zech. 3:4; Luke 15:22). A king who had nothing but a cell and prison clothes is given a seat and a robe by the hand of another. The chapter does not say he deserved it. That is precisely what makes it grace.

And then the book of Jeremiah - forty years of thundering judgment, fifty-one chapters of warning and woe - comes to rest on the gentlest image imaginable: a man eating at a table. He did continually eat bread before him all the days of his life. And for his diet, there was a continual diet given him of the king of Babylon, every day a portion until the day of his death, all the days of his life (vv. 33-34). The repetition is the point: continually… all the days of his life… every day a portion… all the days of his life. This is not a single act of mercy but a settled, permanent provision - a place at the king's table secured for the rest of his days. Remember where this book's last movement began: in a besieged city where there was no bread (v. 6). It ends with a son of David given bread at a king's table, continually, to the end of his life. The exact word of the hunger is answered by the exact word of the grace. The chronicler closes not with the smoke of the temple or the column of captives, but here - at a table, with a pardoned king being fed. It is a small light. It is not a homecoming; the throne is still in ruins and the people still in exile. But it is a true light, and a deliberate one: the line of David is alive, fed, and seated, and the long night ends with the faintest hint of dawn.