Jeremiah 38:11

The scene is Jerusalem in its last, desperate siege by Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian army, around 588–586 BC. Zedekiah reigned as a king under Babylon, and his rebellion had brought the Babylonians to his walls. Famine and disease were in the city and its defences were giving way. At court a party of princes wanted to fight on and looked to Egypt for help. Jeremiah kept giving the LORD’s word that the city would fall to Babylon because Judah had sinned and broken his covenant, and that whoever went out to the Babylonians would live. Many in Jerusalem were sure that God would protect the city whatever they did, so to them his message sounded like treason.

Four princes, Shephatiah, Gedaliah, Jucal and Pashur, heard what Jeremiah was saying (Jeremiah 38:2–3) and went to the king: “Let this man be put to death: for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the hands of all the people, in speaking such words unto them” (Jeremiah 38:4). Zedekiah gave way at once: “Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you” (Jeremiah 38:5). They let Jeremiah down with cords into the cistern of Malchiah, “and in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire” (Jeremiah 38:6). Left there, he would die of hunger, exposure or the mud, and his death would come without any of them laying a hand on him.

The KJV’s word “dungeon” in these verses translates bôwr, a pit-hole: a cistern or a well, and at times a prison. Cisterns were dug to store rainwater, and many were shaped like a bottle with a narrow mouth. An old one with mud at the bottom made a cruel prison, hard to survive in and impossible to climb out of.

Jeremiah had already been imprisoned once in this siege. Zedekiah had sent for him in secret to hear the LORD’s word from him, and afterwards had him kept in the court of the prison (Jeremiah 37:15–21). Suffering for the word he carried runs all through Jeremiah’s ministry (Jeremiah 20:1–6).

His name, ʻEbed Melek, joins the Hebrew words for servant (ʻebed) and king (melek) and means “servant of a king”. It is his proper name, and it also fits his post in Zedekiah’s palace. In this story the servant of a weak king shows himself a servant of the LORD, and he acts with the justice his king lacked.

He is called “the Ethiopian”, that is, a Cushite, a foreigner in Jerusalem. He is also “one of the eunuchs which was in the king’s house”. The word for eunuch, çârîyç, comes from a root meaning to castrate and names a castrated man, and by extension it was used for a high officer of a king’s court. Eunuchs were often trusted officials in royal households, put in charge of a king’s house or his finances, partly because a eunuch could raise up no rival dynasty. Either way, the word places Ebedmelech close to the king, with the access he would need to plead for Jeremiah.

He was an outsider twice over. The law of Moses kept a eunuch out of the congregation of the LORD (Deuteronomy 23:1), and he was a foreigner besides. Yet when Judah’s own princes wanted the prophet dead and Judah’s own king let them have their way, this man stood up for him. Scripture tells of another Ethiopian eunuch too, and of Philip, whom the Lord sent to him (Acts 8:26–40).

Ebedmelech “heard” (shâma, the ordinary verb for hearing) that Jeremiah was in the pit, and he acted on what he heard. He “went forth out of the king’s house”. The verb yâtsâʼ means simply to go or come out, and bayith, house, here means the royal palace. He went to the king (melek) and spoke to him himself. The verbs for this, “spake” (dâbar) and “saying” (ʼâmar), are the everyday words for speaking and saying, and the courage of the moment lies in what he went on to say and where he said it.

“My lord the king” is a respectful address. The word ʼâdôwn means a lord, master or owner, and Ebedmelech gives Zedekiah the honour due to him. Then he names the wrong plainly: “these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet”. The verb ra’a covers doing harm and doing evil, and elsewhere it can also mean to displease or to be sad. Here it names the wrong the princes had done to a man of God. Ebedmelech calls Jeremiah “the prophet”, honouring the LORD who sent him, and he brings the charge to the very man who had handed Jeremiah over.

Then he gives the danger: “he is like to die for hunger in the place where he is”. The word for die, mûwth, is the plain word for dying, and Ebedmelech means it literally. Left where he was, Jeremiah would die. His reason follows: “for there is no more bread in the city.” The word lechem means bread or food in general. With the city’s food gone, a man shut in a pit would starve, and all of Jerusalem was suffering hunger along with him. Lamentations describes such a famine: “They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field” (Lamentations 4:9). The famine was part of the judgment Jeremiah had foretold, coming on Judah for its idolatry and disobedience.

“Then the king commanded Ebedmelech”. The verb tsâvâh means to charge, appoint or give an order. The same Zedekiah who had told the princes, “the king is not he that can do any thing against you”, now gave a royal order that undid what they had done.

He told Ebedmelech to take thirty men. That is a large party, enough for the heavy work of the rescue and enough to stand against any of the princes who might try to stop it. “Take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon, before he die,” the king said. Those last words show that Zedekiah knew how near death Jeremiah was, and that the princes had meant him to die there.

His whole reign follows this pattern. He sent for Jeremiah in secret and acknowledged that he spoke for the LORD, and he feared his officials more than he trusted God’s word. He let Jeremiah be thrown into the pit when the princes pressed him, and pulled him out when Ebedmelech pressed him. That wavering helped bring Judah to ruin, and it brought Zedekiah himself to capture and punishment when the city fell (Jeremiah 39:5–7).

Ebedmelech took the men and went “into the house of the king under the treasury”. This was most likely a storeroom beneath the palace treasury where worn-out and surplus goods were kept, and he knew the palace well enough to know where to look. He took “old cast clouts and old rotten rags”. The word bᵉlôwʼ, “old”, comes from a root meaning to wear out, and here it describes worn-out rags. “Cast clouts” translates çᵉchâbâh, from a verb meaning to drag, a rag torn or dragged away. “Rotten rags” translates mâlâch, a rag or old garment, from a root that suggests being worn away. These were things ready to be thrown out. He let them down to Jeremiah by cords, and the word chebel means a rope or line.

“So they drew up Jeremiah with cords, and took him up out of the dungeon”. The verb mâshak means to draw or pull, to drag or draw out, and the men pulled him by the ropes from the bôwr where he had been left to die. Ebedmelech’s plea was answered, and the LORD’s prophet was out of the mire. A psalm speaks of this kind of rescue: “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings” (Psalm 40:2).

“And Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison.” The verb yâshab means to sit down, and so to dwell or remain. Jeremiah stayed under guard in “the court of the prison”, in Hebrew châtsêr, a court or enclosure, and maṭṭârâʼ, the guard or prison. He had been held there before (Jeremiah 37:21). It was an open enclosure, likely within the royal palace grounds, with light and space and some access to people, a far milder place than the pit. He was still a prisoner, and he was alive.

The LORD saw what Ebedmelech had done. Before Jerusalem fell, he sent word to him through Jeremiah that he would be delivered when the city was taken, “because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 39:15–18). The LORD himself gives the reason for the promise, and it is Ebedmelech’s trust in him. His mercy to Jeremiah came from faith in Jeremiah’s God, and that same God kept him safe. Righteousness and faith were found in a foreign eunuch in the very days when Judah’s princes and king failed.

God kept his prophet through a man from outside Israel when every ordinary source of help had failed. He does this often. Naaman the Syrian came to know the God of Israel (2 Kings 5), and a Roman centurion, “willing to save Paul”, kept the soldiers from their purpose so that all on board “escaped all safe to land” (Acts 27:43–44). Ebedmelech was in the king’s house at the moment Jeremiah needed him, and Mordecai’s words to Esther fit him well: “who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14).

The God who kept Noah through the flood (Genesis 6–9) and Daniel in the den of lions (Daniel 6) kept Jeremiah in the mire. He is faithful to those who are faithful to his word, even when every human authority has turned against them, and he is never short of a way to reach them.

Jeremiah was a prophet rejected by his own people for an unwelcome message of judgment and repentance, cast into a pit and left for dead, and then drawn up alive. Christ came to his own, and “his own received him not” (John 1:11). He was “despised and rejected of men” (Isaiah 53:3), made a little lower than the angels “for the suffering of death” (Hebrews 2:9), and laid in a tomb (Matthew 27:57–60). God raised him up, “having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24), and the angel told the women, “He is not here: for he is risen, as he said” (Matthew 28:6). Jeremiah came up from the pit into continued confinement. Christ came up from the grave in full victory, and all who believe in him are raised with him to “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4), delivered “from the power of darkness” (Colossians 1:13–14) by the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).

Ebedmelech’s name and work also point us to Christ. The “servant of a king” went out and pleaded for a man in the pit. Christ “took upon him the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7), and as our great high priest (Hebrews 4:14) “he ever liveth to make intercession” for those who come to God by him (Hebrews 7:25). The Spirit also “maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26). And in a city with “no more bread”, the words of Jesus stand out all the more: “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger” (John 6:35). Ebedmelech’s rescue is a small, partial picture, and Christ’s is the whole of it.

Ebedmelech did what Proverbs commands: “Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8–9). Proverbs also warns, “If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it?” (Proverbs 24:11–12). Ebedmelech knew, and he went. Isaiah tells how the LORD “saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor” (Isaiah 59:16). At the edge of Malchiah’s cistern there was one, and he was the last man Judah would have picked.

Speaking up for someone wronged can cost you, as it could have cost Ebedmelech. He went before the king against powerful men, in the same spirit as the apostles who answered the council, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). His help was also practical. James warns against saying to a hungry brother or sister, “Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled,” while keeping back what they need (James 2:15–16). Ebedmelech went himself, found ropes and rags, and stayed until the man was out. Jesus counts that kind of help as done to him: “I was in prison, and ye came unto me... Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:35–40).

Zedekiah stands beside him as the warning. He knew what was right, he had the power to do it, and he let fear of other people hold him back until someone else forced the question. When you learn that someone is being wronged, the LORD who honoured Ebedmelech’s trust honours the same courage today, and he can use whatever is at hand, even old rags, to lift someone out of the mire.