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.
