THE PROPHETS WHO PAID · Part 2 of 4 · Jeremiah · CFM-08
Jeremiah Sank in the Mud of a Cistern and Was Left to Starve. An Outsider Pulled Him Out. Jeremiah 32–44 and Lamentations: the prison, the burned scroll, the dungeon, the chains, and the prophet dragged to Egypt
Last week Jeremiah was mocked. This week they try to kill him, more than once.
Crystal saw the comparison first: Jeremiah watched Jerusalem burn, like Mormon watched his people fall.
“O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord!” (Mormon 6:17)
“How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!” (Lamentations 1:1)
Tradition gives the book of Lamentations to Jeremiah, written over the ruins. Both men warned until the end. Both stayed to see it. Both left the grief in writing so we would have it.
Locked up in the palace prison
“For Zedekiah king of Judah had shut him up, saying, Wherefore dost thou prophesy…?” (32:3)
When this week opens, the Babylonian army is around the walls and the prophet is already a prisoner, “shut up in the court of the prison, which was in the king of Judah’s house” (32:2). From inside that prison he does the strangest thing in the book. He buys a field, for “seventeen shekels of silver” (32:9), signed, sealed and witnessed, in a land about to fall to the enemy, because the Lord had promised:
“Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land” (32:15)
A prisoner bought land in a doomed country, because he believed God more than he believed the army outside the wall.
The king who burned his words
Go back a few years, to King Jehoiakim. Jeremiah’s words had been written on a scroll and read to the king as he sat by the fire in his winter house (36:22):
“when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire” (36:23)
“Yet they were not afraid, nor rent their garments” (36:24)
The king cut the word of the Lord into strips, fed it to the fire, and felt nothing. Then he went after the men:
“to take Baruch the scribe and Jeremiah the prophet: but the LORD hid them” (36:26)
And Jeremiah’s answer to the fire:
“Then took Jeremiah another roll… and there were added besides unto them many like words” (36:32)
You can burn the paper. You can’t burn the word.
Beaten and thrown in the dungeon, “many days”
When the Babylonian army pulled back for a while (37:11), Jeremiah set out for his land in Benjamin. A captain at the gate stopped him: “Thou fallest away to the Chaldeans” (37:13). You’re deserting to the enemy.
“Then said Jeremiah, It is false; I fall not away to the Chaldeans. But he hearkened not to him” (37:14)
“Wherefore the princes were wroth with Jeremiah, and smote him, and put him in prison in the house of Jonathan the scribe: for they had made that the prison” (37:15)
“When Jeremiah was entered into the dungeon, and into the cabins, and Jeremiah had remained there many days” (37:16)
Beaten by the princes of his own nation and shut in a scribe’s house they’d turned into a dungeon.
Then the king sent for him in secret:
“Is there any word from the LORD? And Jeremiah said, There is: for, said he, thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon” (37:17)
Beaten, many days in the dark, standing in front of the one man who could set him free, and he gave him the hard word anyway. Only then did he plead for himself:
“cause me not to return to the house of Jonathan the scribe, lest I die there” (37:20)
The king moved him to the court of the prison and ordered him “daily a piece of bread out of the bakers’ street, until all the bread in the city were spent” (37:21). A city running out of bread, and one piece a day for the prophet.
The cistern
“Therefore the princes said unto the king, We beseech thee, let this man be put to death” (38:4)
“Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you” (38:5)
The king handed him over.
“Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah… and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.” (38:6)
No water. Only mud. Lowered on ropes into the dark of a pit and left there.
How long was he down there? The text doesn’t say. It does say where it was heading:
“he is like to die for hunger in the place where he is: for there is no more bread in the city” (38:9)
That’s Ebed-melech talking, “the Ethiopian, one of the eunuchs which was in the king’s house” (38:7). Not a prophet. Not a priest. Not even an Israelite. In the record, the one man in Jerusalem who went to the king for Jeremiah was a foreign servant.
The king gave him thirty men (38:10). And watch how Ebed-melech did it:
“Put now these old cast clouts and rotten rags under thine armholes under the cords. And Jeremiah did so.” (38:12)
He padded the ropes so they wouldn’t cut into a starving man’s arms. Rescue, done with tenderness. They drew him up out of the mud (38:13). And he still wasn’t free: he “abode in the court of the prison until the day that Jerusalem was taken” (38:28).
The Lord didn’t forget the man with the rags:
“I will surely deliver thee… because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the LORD” (39:18)
And Lamentations seems to remember a pit:
“They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon me… I called upon thy name, O LORD, out of the low dungeon… Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not.” (Lamentations 3:53, 55, 57)
Freed by the enemy, then chained again
“Even they sent, and took Jeremiah out of the court of the prison” (39:14)
“They” were the princes of Babylon (39:13). The men who finally let Jeremiah out of prison weren’t his own leaders. They were the enemy he’d been accused of joining.
In the chaos he ended up in chains at Ramah, “bound in chains among all that were carried away captive” (40:1). The Babylonian captain freed him and gave him a choice:
“I loose thee this day from the chains which were upon thine hand. If it seem good unto thee to come with me into Babylon, come; and I will look well unto thee” (40:4)
Safety in Babylon, or the ruins.
“Then went Jeremiah unto Gedaliah… and dwelt with him among the people that were left in the land” (40:6)
He stayed. With the poor, the broken remnant. The people who had rejected him for forty years.
Dragged to Egypt
The remnant came and asked him to pray for them, and promised:
“Whether it be good, or whether it be evil, we will obey the voice of the LORD our God” (42:6)
He prayed, and after ten days the answer came (42:7):
“Go ye not into Egypt” (42:19)
“Thou speakest falsely: the LORD our God hath not sent thee to say, Go not into Egypt” (43:2)
They went anyway, “for they obeyed not the voice of the LORD” (43:7), and they took “Jeremiah the prophet” with them (43:6). The man who told them not to go to Egypt was carried to Egypt.
The last we see of him, he’s still preaching, and his people are answering:
“As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the LORD, we will not hearken unto thee” (44:16)
Scripture doesn’t record his death. An old Jewish and Christian tradition says his own people stoned him in Egypt. That’s tradition, not scripture. But Hebrews seems to have men like him in mind:
“others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned” (Hebrews 11:36–37)
The same hands, in every book
Jeremiah’s leaders called him a traitor going over to the enemy (37:13). Six centuries later, the leaders in Jerusalem went over to the empire themselves:
“all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death: And when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor.” (Matthew 27:1–2)
“The chief priests answered, We have no king but Caesar.” (John 19:15)
“both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together” (Acts 4:27)
Zedekiah handed Jeremiah over: “he is in your hand.” The council handed the Son of David to Rome: “no king but Caesar.” The Book of Mormon saw the same alliance among the Nephites, judges, high priests and lawyers who covenanted “to combine against all righteousness” (3 Nephi 6:28).
And it saw the same kind of prophet. Abinadi, standing before a king and his priests:
“Yea, and I will suffer even until death, and I will not recall my words, and they shall stand as a testimony against you.” (Mosiah 17:10)
Where this lands
Jeremiah was beaten, jailed, starved, sunk in a cistern to die, chained, and dragged into exile by the people he spent his life trying to save. And when he had a way out, he stayed.
That’s what Crystal saw. That’s why he’s her hero.
“It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22–23)
Those words were written from the ruins.
For us today
“Thy words were found, and I did eat them” (15:16)
Why would a man pulled out of a pit go right back to saying the words that put him there? Because they weren’t his words. They were God’s, and he had already eaten them.
The question for us is the same one. Will I obey God when it gets hard? Not when it’s easy, or popular, or rewarded. When it costs.
And look for the Ebed-melechs.
“willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18:9)
He wasn’t a prophet or a priest. He was an outsider who saw a man dying in the mud, walked into the king’s court, and then thought to pad the ropes. Someone near you is in a pit this week. Be the one who brings the rags.
Crystal and Ken Krogue team-teach a Sunday School class of 14-year-olds. They write with two AI research partners, Orson (Claude) and Nathan (ChatGPT), and approve every word.
Series illustrations are artistic interpretations of the scriptural accounts and their present-day applications.
