Jeremiah 51:59

Chapters 50 and 51 of Jeremiah are one long prophecy announcing Babylon’s fall for its pride, its idols and its cruelty to God’s people (Jeremiah 50–51). It may well be the longest single prophecy in the Old Testament. Our passage gathers all those words into one act that anyone could picture and remember. The scroll is read to its end, weighted with a stone and thrown into the river, and as it goes under, Seraiah says, “Thus shall Babylon sink.” The scroll carries Babylon’s sentence, so what happens to the scroll shows what will happen to Babylon.

The prophets often acted out God’s word in this way. Isaiah walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign of the captivity coming on Egypt and Cush (Isaiah 20). Ezekiel lay on his side for many days to picture the siege of Jerusalem and the years of Israel’s punishment (Ezekiel 4:1–8). He performed many such acts, among them cutting and dividing his hair to show what would become of the city’s people, and Ezekiel 4 is full of them. Before he spoke at all, he was given a scroll of prophecy to eat (Ezekiel 3:1–4). Signs like these made a message something people could see and keep.

Seraiah’s sign comes after the reading, and it sets a seal on every word just read. God’s word, once declared, will surely come to pass, as the LORD says through Isaiah: “it shall not return unto me void” (Isaiah 55:11). The stone and the river show that truth as plainly as an act can.

The words of verse 63 are plain and physical. “Made an end of reading” uses kâlâh, to finish or complete, a verb that elsewhere also means to cease, perish or be consumed, so the reading closes on a word that suits the end it announces. The stone, ʼeben, gives the scroll its weight, so that it goes straight down. “Cast” is shâlak, to throw or hurl, often with a sense of throwing something away. “The midst of Euphrates” joins tâvek, the middle or inside, to Pᵉrâth, the Hebrew name of the river, so the book goes out into the middle of the stream.

Verse 64 gives the words Seraiah says as the scroll goes down. “Sink” is shâqaʻ, to subside or go down, and in other forms to drown or quench, so the picture is of something heavy disappearing under water. “Rise” is qûwm, the ordinary verb for getting up or standing up, and “shall not rise” says that Babylon will stay down. The “evil” here is calamity, the disaster that God says he himself “will bring upon her.” Babylon’s end is his doing, and that is why it is certain.

Verse 59 opens with “The word which Jeremiah the prophet commanded Seraiah”. The word for “word”, dâbâr, means a word or speech and also a matter or thing, and here it is the whole charge Jeremiah lays on Seraiah. “Commanded” is tsâvâh, to charge, enjoin or appoint, the verb for giving someone a task with authority behind it. Jeremiah gives the order as the LORD’s prophet, one of those through whom God promised to speak his words to his people (Deuteronomy 18:18), and Seraiah’s errand is a formal assignment. Seraiah is named with his father Neriah and his grandfather Maaseiah, which fixes exactly who he was and marks him as a man of known family and standing in Judah.

The date is the fourth year of Zedekiah’s reign, about 593 BC. Nebuchadnezzar had made Zedekiah king after carrying off the leading men of Judah in 597 BC, and the prophet Ezekiel had gone into exile with them. The destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, told in 2 Kings 25, was still seven years away, in 586 BC. Zedekiah’s journey was most likely the visit of a king who served Babylon, bringing tribute and assurances of loyalty, perhaps at a time when other kings were stirring against Babylon. Into that journey Jeremiah sent a scroll announcing the end of the empire the king had come to honour. God’s word went with the king’s party, on a long and dangerous road, into the heart of the empire that ruled Judah.

Verse 60 tells how the message was made ready. “Wrote” is kâthab, to engrave, inscribe or write, and “book” is çêpher, a writing or document, which in Jeremiah’s day was a scroll. The scroll held “all the evil that should come upon Babylon,” where “evil”, raʻ, means calamity and disaster. The verse then says it again, “even all these words that are written against Babylon,” with dâbâr for “words”, the whole matter of the prophecy. “Babylon” stands twice in this verse, and so does “all”, so the scroll holds the whole of the judgment and every word of it is aimed at one city.

Writing the prophecy down gave it a lasting form. A written word could be carried to Babylon, read aloud there, and kept, so that when the judgments came to pass all could see that God had said so beforehand. Scripture speaks of God’s word in the same way: “God is not a man, that he should lie” (Numbers 23:19), “the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8), and prophecy came as holy men spoke from God (2 Peter 1:20–21). Jeremiah had already announced that the LORD would punish Babylon (Jeremiah 25:12), and this scroll set that sentence down in full.

Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar was the greatest power of its day, famous for its armies, its great walls, its wealth, the Ishtar Gate and the gardens of legend, and its people worshipped many gods with Marduk at their head. Jeremiah’s prophecy calls it “the hammer of the whole earth” (Jeremiah 50:23), and to human eyes its fall looked impossible. To write a book of judgment against such a city, and send it there, took faith, and it carried real risk for the prophet.

In verse 61 Jeremiah gives Seraiah his instructions: “When thou comest to Babylon, and shalt see, and shalt read all these words.” “Said” is ʼâmar, the common verb to say, tell or command, and here it introduces a charge. The speaker is Jeremiah, Yirmᵉyâh, a name that Strong’s explains as “Jah will rise” and that eight or nine men in Israel bore.

Seraiah is first to “see”. He would look on Babylon in all its power, its wealth and its idols, and take in the size of what God had spoken against. Then he is to “read”, qârâʼ, a verb whose root sense is to call out, and which covers proclaiming and reading aloud. The reading is a declaration, God’s sentence spoken out inside the city it condemns. Who heard it is left unsaid. It may have been a small group at the Babylonian court or among the exiles, and even so it was God’s verdict pronounced in Babylon itself.

The message was for Babylon as well as for Judah’s comfort. God removes kings and sets up kings (Daniel 2:21), and he declares the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10). At Jeremiah’s call the LORD had promised that he would perform his word (Jeremiah 1:12), and this reading in Babylon rests on that promise.

People ask how a judgment this severe fits with God’s love and mercy. God’s judgment on Babylon comes from his justice and holiness, and these belong to the same God whose love and mercy are boundless. Babylon was judged for real wrongs, its pride, its idols and its brutal treatment of God’s people (Jeremiah 50:7). God had shown mercy to Judah through warning after warning and call after call to repent, which they largely ignored. In Babylon’s fall God vindicated his suffering people, showed his rule over every nation, and upheld what is right in all the earth. The same act was justice to the oppressor and deliverance to the oppressed.

In the New Testament, Babylon becomes the name for the whole world order that sets itself against God and oppresses his people. In Revelation, “Babylon the great” is the great harlot of Revelation 17, and her fall is announced with Jeremiah’s finality: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen” (Revelation 18:2). Then a mighty angel takes up a stone like a great millstone and casts it into the sea, saying that with such violence Babylon shall be thrown down and found no more (Revelation 18:21–23). Seraiah’s stone in the Euphrates and the angel’s millstone in the sea tell of the same end.

That victory belongs to Christ. The Lamb overcomes the kings who make war with him (Revelation 17:14), for he is King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16). At the end the beast and the false prophet are cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 19:20), and death and hell after them (Revelation 20:14). Jesus, the Lamb of God (John 1:29), has already triumphed over principalities and powers (Colossians 2:15). Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon was himself shown in a dream that God rules over the kingdoms of the earth (Daniel 2). The kingdom God sets up in that dream “shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44), and it outlasts them all.

Christ is the judge as well. The Son of Man will come in his glory (Matthew 25:31) as the one God has ordained to judge the living and the dead (Acts 10:42), and all things, every throne and power among them, were made by him and for him (Colossians 1:16). Every sin and every system of rebellion will meet a judgment as sure as Babylon’s. Beyond it lie the new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13), with death and sorrow gone (Revelation 21:4).

The word Seraiah carried also points to Christ. He is the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1), the Word made flesh (John 1:14), and the Son through whom God has spoken in these last days (Hebrews 1:1–3). Like Seraiah he was sent with a charge, and he carried it out in obedience to the point of death on the cross (Philippians 2:8). The message of judgment against sin and the message of salvation meet in him. He fulfils all that was written of him (Luke 24:44), and he said that “one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18). The word of God is “quick, and powerful” (Hebrews 4:12), as Babylon learned.

This passage gives us a God whose word holds. What he wrote against Babylon came to pass, and the same God stands behind every promise and warning in Scripture. It shows a God whose rule reaches into the capital of the greatest empire of its day, who sent his sentence on Babylon to be read inside its walls while Judah lay under its power. For people who suffer under proud and cruel powers, that is comfort, because evil has an end that God has set. For anyone who holds power, it is a sober warning against pride and oppression.

It also shows how God works. He put his word against an empire into the hands of a quiet official on a journey of state, and the charge was carried out with a scroll, a stone and a river. Faithfulness in a task that few would ever see mattered more in Seraiah’s errand than rank or display. And we hold the written word that Jeremiah set down, a word that, like his scroll, will stand when every Babylon has gone down.