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
