"While ch. 36 is, in a sense, an independent unit, it is at the same time the last segment in a tradition complex' which begins at ch. 26, where Jeremiah is vindicated as a true prophet of Yahweh by Jerusalem's highest court and where the aim of his prophetic ministry is set out, and ends with ch. 36 where the continuing negative response of the people and of the king reaches a climax and the rejection of the nation is confirmed. The history of the mediation of Yahweh's word by the faithful prophet Jeremiah concludes and another complex of chapters dealing with the prophet's sufferings follows in chs. 37-43."469
36:1 The Lord sent a message to Jeremiah in the fourth year of King Jehoiakim's reign, sometime between April of 605 and April of 604 B.C. (cf. 25:1)
36:2 Jeremiah was to write on a scroll (Heb. megillath sepher) all the prophecies that he had delivered concerning Israel, Judah, and the other nations since he began prophesying in the reign of Josiah (627 B.C.; cf. 1:2; 25:3).470Perhaps the Babylonians' victory over the Assyrians and Egyptians at Carchemish in 605 B.C. provided the impetus for this project. With the Babylonians in power, Judah was one giant step closer to invasion.
36:3 All these recorded prophecies of coming judgment might move the Judahites to repent (cf. 25:13). If the people repented, the Lord would forgive them.
36:4 Jeremiah then called for Baruch ben Neriah who copied down these prophecies from the Lord as Jeremiah dictated them to him (cf. 32:12-13).
"Writing was a specialized skill, often restricted to a professional class. Learned men could read, but (like executives today) scorned to write."471
36:5-6 When the papyrus or parchment scroll was complete, Jeremiah instructed Baruch to take it and to read the prophecies to the people of Jerusalem and Judah in the temple courtyard. Baruch was to do this on a fast day so many people would hear him. At this time in Israel's history the nation's leaders sometimes called fast days in times of national emergency (cf. 2 Chron. 20:3; Joel 1:14; 2:12, 15). Evidently Jeremiah anticipated a crisis since Babylon became the major power in the ancient Near East, the "enemy from the north,"with its victory at Carchemish. Jeremiah could not go to the temple himself for reasons the text does not explain.
36:7 Jeremiah hoped that the reading of the scroll would move the people to repent and to pray since the Lord was very angry with His people.
36:8 Baruch then went to the temple and did as Jeremiah had instructed him.
36:9 During the winter of 604-603 B.C., the people, not the king, declared a fast. The occasion for the fast may have been the arrival of Babylonian armies on the Philistine plain or the Babylonians' defeat of Ashkelon then.472
36:10 On this occasion Baruch read Jeremiah's scroll to all the people. He stood in the room of Gemariah ben Shaphan the scribe (state secretary) in the upper or outer temple courtyard near the New Gate of the temple (cf. 20:2; 26:10; 2 Kings 15:35).473This position would have made it easy for the people there to hear him. It also suggests that Gemariah was sympathetic to Jeremiah (cf. 26:24). When the priests discovered the scroll of the law in the temple during Josiah's reign, it was Shaphan, Gemariah's father, who read it to the people (cf. 2 Kings 22:3-23:3).474
36:11-13 When Micaiah, Gemariah's son, heard the scroll read, he went into the scribe's room in the palace where all the king's officials had gathered and told them what he had heard. Achbor, the father of Elnathan, had been present at the reading of the law scroll in Josiah's day (2 Kings 22:12).
36:14 The officials then sent Jehudi to Baruch in the temple precincts and told him to bring Baruch and the scroll to them. Jehudi must have been an important person, though there are no other references to him in the Bible, since the writer mentioned three generations of his ancestors.
36:15-16 When Baruch arrived, the officials asked him to sit down and to read the scroll to them, which he did. What he read surprised them, and they told him that they would report what he had read to the king.
36:17-18 They asked Baruch how he wrote the scroll, and Baruch replied that he had written it as Jeremiah dictated the prophecies to him. They evidently wanted to make sure that Jeremiah was the source of the prophecies and not Baruch.
36:19 The officials then told Baruch to go into hiding with Jeremiah and to tell no one where they were. They expected the king to react violently and negatively when he heard the news. Earlier Jehoiakim had extradited and murdered the prophet Uriah who had also prophesied against Judah and Jerusalem (26:20-24).
36:20 The officials first deposited Jeremiah's scroll in the room where they were for safe keeping and then went and told Jehoiakim what the scroll contained.
36:21 The king proceeded to send Jehudi to get the scroll from Elishama in the scribe's room. When Jehudi returned with it, he read it to the king and his officials.
36:22 Since it was winter, the king was sitting in his winter quarters with a fire burning in the brazier before him (cf. Amos 3:15). The king's winter quarters were evidently warm rooms in the palace.
36:23 After Jehudi had read a few columns of text, Jehoiakim reached over and cut off what he had read and tossed it into the fire.475He did this with the whole scroll; he burned it all up. This was a symbolic act; Jehoiakim was claiming that Jeremiah's prophecies would come to an end just as surely as his scroll came to an end.476Jehoiakim's slow, methodical destruction of the scroll made his rejection of its message a much more emphatic gesture than if he had burned the whole thing at once in a fit of rage.477
This king's response to hearing the Lord's word stands in stark contrast to that of his father Josiah who tore his clothes in remorse when he heard the law scroll read to him (2 Kings 22:11-20). Josiah had feared and called the people to repentance, but Jehoiakim feared nothing and called for the prophet's arrest.
36:24-25 Jeremiah's prophecies did not frighten the king or his servants at all nor did they express any grief over what Jeremiah had predicted. The entreaties of three of his officials did not discourage Jehoiakim from burning up the whole scroll. One of these men, Elnathan ben Achbor, had previously extradited the prophet Uriah from Egypt (cf. 26:20-23). The people had failed to listen to the Lord, and now the king and his servants did the same thing. Surely the possibility of national repentance seemed remote.
"This is an exact picture of our own generation. Men today do not perhaps burn the Bible, nor does the Roman Catholic Church any longer put it on the index, as it once did. But men destroy it in the form of exegesis; they destroy it in the way they deal with it. They destroy it by not reading it as written in normal literary form, by ignoring historical-grammatical exegesis, by changing the Bible's own perspective of itself as propositional revelation in space and time, in history."478
36:26 Then Jehoiakim ordered the arrest of Baruch and Jeremiah, but those sent to find them could not because the Lord had hidden them.479Having destroyed the scroll, the king turned next to destroy its authors. Jehoiakim did not continue to hunt down Jeremiah, however, because later the prophet was able to move about the city (ch. 35).
"The narrative in these verses seems to have been composed as a conscious parallel to 2 K. 22. In each case a scroll is brought before the king. First the scroll comes into the hands of a state official (2 K. 22:9-10; Jer. 36:10-11). Both narratives record the reaction of the king (2 K. 22:11-13; Jer. 36:23-26). Both narratives refer to an oracle that follows the king's response (2 K. 22:15-20; Jer. 36:28-31). In 2 K. 22:11 Josiah rent his clothes'; in Jer. 36:24 Jehoiakim did not rend his clothes but rent the scroll."480
"Josiah burns altars in an attempt at reform; Jehoiakim attempts to invalidate the message by burning the scroll. Josiah heard' the word of the LORD, while Jehoiakim pointedly does not hear.' Finally, the end result is that God hears' Josiah, but the outcome for Jehoiakim and Judah is another matter as Jer 36:30-31 clearly indicate . . ."481
36:27-28 The Lord commanded Jeremiah to make another copy of the scroll that the king had burned (cf. 2 Kings 22:15-20).
36:29 He was also to send a message from the Lord to the king. Jehoiakim had burned the first scroll because it contained prophecies that Nebuchadnezzar would come and destroy the land and its inhabitants.
36:30 Because Jehoiakim had done this, he would have no descendant to follow him on Judah's throne; his dynasty would end. His son Jehoiachin did reign for three months after his father, but Jehoiachin assumed the throne without authorization and Nebuchadnezzar quickly deported him to Babylon. Furthermore Jehoiakim would suffer an ignominious death without burial (cf. 22: 18-19). He who threw (Heb. hishlik) the scroll into the fire would be thrown (Heb. hushlak) out into the elements. Josiah, in contrast, received an honorable burial (2 Kings 23:30; 2 Chron. 35:24). Jehoiakim evidently died either in a palace uprising or in a revolt by the people (cf. 22:18-19).482
36:31 The Lord would also punish him and his descendants and his servants with all the judgments that Jeremiah had predicted for the people of Jerusalem and Judah. He would send them because they had refused to listen to the Lord.
36:32 Jeremiah then dictated the prophecies to Baruch again, and he wrote them down on a second scroll. This time Jeremiah included other prophecies, those that he had received since he had dictated the first scroll. This document probably became the "first draft"of the present Book of Jeremiah.483The prophet uttered many more oracles between 604 and 586 B.C.
"As Hananiah later attempts to render the symbolic word of judgment futile by destroying the wooden yoke, so Jehoiakim attempts to destroy the word literally, in the fire. In Jer 28, a yoke of iron is Yahweh's last word. The end of this scene introduces a new scroll, with specific words' added for Jehoiakim in light of his rejection of the scroll. Jehoiakim cannot thwart the word of the LORD, and to attempt to do so brings inevitable consequences."484
