37:17 Zedekiah secretly sent for Jeremiah and brought him into the palace. The king feared his nobles who were "hawks"militarily and hostile to Jeremiah. Zedekiah asked the prophet if the Lord had given him any message in response to his previous praying (v. 3). Jeremiah replied that he did have a message from the Lord and it was that the king would become a prisoner of Nebuchadnezzar. The king was really the one bound in this situation, and the prisoner was the truly free man.488
37:18-19 Jeremiah then asked Zedekiah what he had done to deserve imprisonment. His prophecies had proved true whereas the messages of the prophets who predicted that Nebuchadnezzar would not invade the land had proved false. These false prophets were evidently free, but Jeremiah was in prison.
37:20 Jeremiah begged the king not to send him back to prison because he would die there.
37:21 Zedekiah conceded and sent him to a better place of confinement, the court of the guard (cf. 32:2; Neh. 3:25).489He also ordered that the prophet receive bread regularly as long as there was bread in the city (cf. Rom. 8:28).490Had Zedekiah not feared his nobles this vacillating king might have given Jeremiah his freedom.
"In many ways, Zedekiah is a tragic figure. It seems that he is attracted to Jeremiah and his message like iron filings to a magnet, yet he is never able to summon enough resolve to act in response to that message. While such conclusions are speculative, it is possible that Zedekiah presents a paradigm of persons whose rejection of the purposes of God through their weakness of character is every bit as damaging and damning as the aggressive rebellion of Jehoiakim."491
