Context at a Glance
Author:Traditional Attribution
Topic:jeremiah Chapter 52 Study
This chapter provides a foundational look at the theological themes of jeremiah, analyzed across multiple historic translations for maximum scholarly depth.
Jeremiah 52
New Revised Standard Version
1Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign; he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.
2He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, just as Jehoiakim had done.
3Indeed, Jerusalem and Judah so angered the LORD that he expelled them from his presence. Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon.
4And in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon came with all his army against Jerusalem, and they laid siege to it; they built siegeworks against it all around.
5So the city was besieged until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah.
6On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine became so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.
7Then a breach was made in the city wall; and all the soldiers fled and went out from the city by night by the way of the gate between the two walls, by the king's garden, though the Chaldeans were all around the city. They went in the direction of the Arabah.
8But the army of the Chaldeans pursued the king, and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho; and all his army was scattered, deserting him.
9Then they captured the king, and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah in the land of Hamath, and he passed sentence on him.
10The king of Babylon killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and also killed all the officers of Judah at Riblah.
11He put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him in fetters, and the king of Babylon took him to Babylon, and put him in prison until the day of his death.
12In the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month — which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon — Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard who served the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem.
13He burned the house of the LORD, the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down.
14All the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down all the walls around Jerusalem.
15Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried into exile some of the poorest of the people and the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had defected to the king of Babylon, together with the rest of the artisans.
16But Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard left some of the poorest people of the land to be vinedressers and tillers of the soil.
17The pillars of bronze that were in the house of the LORD, and the stands and the bronze sea that were in the house of the LORD, the Chaldeans broke in pieces, and carried all the bronze to Babylon.
18They took away the pots, the shovels, the snuffers, the basins, the ladles, and all the vessels of bronze used in the temple service.
19The captain of the guard took away the small bowls also, the firepans, the basins, the pots, the lampstands, the ladles, and the bowls for libation, both those of gold and those of silver.
20As for the two pillars, the one sea, the twelve bronze bulls that were under the sea, and the stands, which King Solomon had made for the house of the LORD, the bronze of all these vessels was beyond weighing.
21As for the pillars, the height of the one pillar was eighteen cubits, its circumference was twelve cubits; it was hollow and its thickness was four fingers.
22Upon it was a capital of bronze; the height of the capital was five cubits; latticework and pomegranates, all of bronze, encircled the top of the capital. And the second pillar had the same, with pomegranates.
23There were ninety-six pomegranates on the sides; all the pomegranates encircling the latticework numbered one hundred.
24The captain of the guard took the chief priest Seraiah, the second priest Zephaniah, and the three guardians of the threshold;
25and from the city he took an officer who had been in command of the soldiers, and seven men of the king's council who were found in the city; the secretary of the commander of the army who mustered the people of the land; and sixty men of the people of the land who were found inside the city.
26Then Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard took them, and brought them to the king of Babylon at Riblah.
27And the king of Babylon struck them down, and put them to death at Riblah in the land of Hamath. So Judah went into exile out of its land.
28This is the number of the people whom Nebuchadrezzar took into exile: in the seventh year, three thousand twenty-three Judeans;
29in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar he took into exile from Jerusalem eight hundred thirty-two persons;
30in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadrezzar, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard took into exile of the Judeans seven hundred forty-five persons; all the persons were four thousand six hundred.
31In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of King Jehoiachin of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-fifth day of the month, King Evilmerodach of Babylon, in the year he began to reign, showed favor to King Jehoiachin of Judah and brought him out of prison;
32he spoke kindly to him, and gave him a seat above the seats of the other kings who were with him in Babylon.
33So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes, and every day of his life he dined regularly at the king's table.
34For his allowance, a regular daily allowance was given him by the king of Babylon, as long as he lived, up to the day of his death. LAMENTATIONS
1625LAMENTATIONS Introduction Lamentations is a sequence of five lyric poems that lament the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in
586BCE (see
2Kings 25.8-21). The dense and highly charged poetry constitutes some of the Bible's most violent and brutal pieces of writing. Though mostly lacking traditional statements of hope, the poems do manifest a stubborn and tenacious hold on life. Several of the ancient versions (the Greek, Latin, and Aramaic translations) attribute the authorship of these poems to Jeremiah, which accounts for their placements after the book of Jeremiah in the Christian canon. Although Jeremiah was active during the last days of the kingdom of Judah and spoke in moving and emotional terms of the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the nation (Jer 8.18-9.1; 9.1722), it is unlikely that he is the author of the poems found in the book of Lamentations. The language, forms of expression, and religious perspectives do not seem to be quite like those expressed in Jeremiah's own prophetic poetry. Moreover, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of Lamentations do not mention Jeremiah or associate him with the book. In the Jewish canon Lamentations is placed with the prophets, but in the third section of the canon, the Writings. Thus it is more likely that the tradition connection Jeremiah with Lamentations is a reflection of the common practice in antiquity of ascribing authorship of anonymous materials to well-known figures, for example, David and the Psalms or Solomon and the books of Proverbs and Song of Songs. The poems of Lamentations may be dated to the sixth century, probably between
586and
520BCE, when the Temple was rebuilt. They were likely composed in Palestine for the community that remained in the land after the catastrophe. LAMENTATIONS
1626In later Jewish tradition Lamentations was counted as one of the five festival scrolls (Megillot), together with the Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. Lamentations is read as part of the liturgy of the "Ninth of Ab," the day that commemorates the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in
70CE. In Christian tradition readings from Lamentations are part of the liturgies of Holy Week. Lamentations draws on a variety of literary genres, including communal and individual laments, the funeral dirge, and wisdom traditions, but gets its overarching shape and much of its imagery and subject matter from the city lament, a genre best known from ancient Mesopotamia (e.g., the "Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur," the "Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur," and the "Nippur Lament"). Lamentations, however, differs from most of the Mesopotamian city laments, which end happily in celebration or restoration and the return of the gods. It ends tragically: The Lord remains silent and absent throughout, and there is no suggestion of the restoration of Jerusalem or its Temple. The imagery of Lamentations evokes a sense of fragmentation and discontinuity, reflecting the suffering of the past. There is no narrative structure to give shape to the raw emotions expressed, nor even a clear rhetorical movement from grief to hope, such as one often finds in laments in Psalms. Although the poetic meter varies throughout the book, much of the poetry is composed in "qinah" meter in which the lines are unbalanced, giving a sense of language broken off in grief. In counterpoint to such a sense of fragmentation, however, the formal structures of the poetic form itself produce a strong sense of coherence. The first four chapters of Lamentations are each composed as an alphabetic acrostic, a formals scheme in which the initial word of each stanza begins with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, twenty-two in all (ch 5, though not an acrostic, also contains twentytwo verses). In ch
3all three verses of each stanza begin with the same letter (vv. 1-3 with an "alep," vv. 4-6 with "bet," etc.). The alphabetic acrostic functions as the material, physical container of this poetry, literally holding each poem's component verses together and conveying a strong sense of closure through its clear structure and fixed length. Yet the acrostic conveys meaning symbolically as well. The LAMENTATIONS
1627poet's whole attempt to render the chaos of his world into language, to contain his fragmented lyrics within the frame of the alphabetic acrostic, thus becomes an attempts to control and contain, and ultimately to transform, the suffering and hurt that engulfed Jerusalem and its inhabitants.