Through My Bible Yr 02 – April 23

Through My Bible – April 23

Jeremiah 34 (EHV)

See series: Through My Bible

Go to Zedekiah king of Judah and tell him this is what the Lord says. I certainly am giving this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he will burn it. ³ You will not escape his grasp. You will surely be taken and handed over to him. You will see the king of Babylon eye-to-eye, and he will speak with you face-to-face. You will go to Babylon.

The Lord says concerning you: You will not die by the sword. ⁵ You will die in peace. Just as people made a funeral fire in honor of your fathers who were kings before you, so they will make a fire for you. They will lament for you, saying, “Alas, master!” This is my word, declares the Lord.

¹³ This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. I made a covenant with your fathers on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of slavery. I said that ¹⁴ every seven years you are to set free any fellow Hebrew who has sold himself to you. After he has served you six years, you are to set him free. ^[1] But your fathers did not listen to me or pay attention to me. ¹⁵ Now, after you repented and did what is right in my sight, each of you proclaimed freedom for his neighbor. You made a covenant before me in the house that bears my name, ¹⁶ but you have turned around and profaned my name. Each of you has taken back and enslaved his male and female slaves, whom you had set free to go where they wished. You forced them back into slavery, to serve as your male and female slaves.

¹⁷ Therefore this is what the Lord says. You have not listened to me by proclaiming freedom for your brothers and your neighbors. So I am proclaiming freedom to you, says the Lord. Freedom to fall by the sword, plague, and famine! I will make you a horror among all the kingdoms of the earth. ¹⁸ I am going to make the men who walked between the covenant pieces, ^[2] but who did not keep the terms of the covenant that they had made in my presence, just like the calf they cut in two and then walk between its pieces. ¹⁹ The officials of Judah and the officials of Jerusalem, the government ministers, ^[3] the priests, and all the people of the land who walked between the parts of the calf, ²⁰ I will hand over to their enemies, to those who seek their lives. Their corpses will be food for the birds in the sky and the wild animals in the land.

²¹ I will hand over Zedekiah king of Judah and his officials to those who seek their lives and to the army of the king of Babylon, which has withdrawn from you. Watch, I will give a command, says the Lord, and I will bring them back to this city. They will fight against it, capture it, and burn it down. I will make the cities of Judah desolate so that no one can live there.

Footnotes

1. Jeremiah 34:14 Deuteronomy 15:12
2. Jeremiah 34:18 See Genesis 15:17 for an example of making a covenant by cutting a sacrificial animal into pieces and then walking between the two rows of pieces as a way of invoking a curse on anyone who broke the covenant.
3. Jeremiah 34:19 Or perhaps eunuchs