This post is the second in reply to a series of questions asked by someone who’s reading through the book of Jeremiah. The first post, about whether Jeremiah was a protester, is here.
Q. When Jeremiah’s nation didn’t listen to him, the king of Babylon ensured his safety when he finally captured Jerusalem. What’s going on there? The dynamics of how God is working seem to be very complicated. God calls the king of Babylon His servant, even though he doesn’t seem to acknowledge Him. Then at another time in the book, Jeremiah goes to Egypt, even though Nebuchadnezzar had some personnel attending to him while he was in Jerusalem. What is he accomplishing in Egypt besides prophesying, and doesn’t that get him in trouble with Nebuchadnezzar? Is he trying to create a movement or revolution of some sort?
God had already determined to judge and punish the Judeans for their disobedience, particularly the wrongs that the nation did under King Manasseh. In Samuel-Kings, a narrative compiled over time by the prophets God sent to the people, when the Babylonians effectively subjugate Judea, it says, “Surely these things happened to Judah according to the Lord’s command, in order to remove them from his presence because of the sins of Manasseh and all he had done, including the shedding of innocent blood. For he had filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the Lord was not willing to forgive.”
Since God had already decided to punish the Judeans through the Babylonians, God sent Jeremiah with the message that they should accept vassal status (i.e. being subjugated) and the exile of their king and many of their nobles and artisans. God promised through Jeremiah that he would bring the exiles back in a generation or two. In the meantime, they were to accept that their home would be in Babylon, and they should make a new life for themselves there.
However, after initially becoming vassals of the Babylonians, the Judean kings then betrayed them and tried to make an alliance with the Egyptians. False prophets claimed that this would “break the yoke of the king of Babylon” and bring the exiles back right away. This led Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian emperor, to lead an army against Judea and besiege its cities, notably Jerusalem. Jeremiah urged the people to surrender peacefully, in keeping with his earlier messages. But they continued to resist, and ultimately the Babylonians defeated them, destroyed Jerusalem, and sent most of the rest of the people into exile.
However, since Jeremiah was known to have counseled peaceful surrender, Nebuchadnezzar didn’t regard him as an enemy. He gave his officers instructions to protect Jeremiah, provide for him, and allow him to return to his own home. Shortly after this Jeremiah was apparently rounded up to be sent into exile anyway, but one of Nebuchadnezzar’s officials recognized him among the captives and set him free once more. I hope this answers the first part of your question, about why the Babylonians ensured Jeremiah’s safety.
The question of why God would call a pagan emperor his “servant” highlights how that term is used by the prophets with a variety of meanings. The usage here in Jeremiah is similar to that in Isaiah. On the one hand, the people of Israel and Judah are called God’s servants because God has chosen to use their nation to further his redemptive purposes in the world. God also refers frequently to “my servants the prophets” because he has sent them to bring his word to that people and call them back to their chosen role. But God also calls pagan emperors his “servants” (or something similar) because he is using them to fulfill his purposes. God calls Nebuchadnezzar his servant in Jeremiah, and in Isaiah he calls Cyrus “my shepherd” who will “accomplish all that I please.”
In the case of these emperors, the servants may not have known that they were actually serving God by carrying out his purposes. We learn in the book of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar was actually quite defiant and resistant at first towards the God of Israel, until he was humbled and he acknowledged him. Maybe the take-home message is that God accomplishes his purposes through human agents, as I’ve said in other posts on this blog, and it’s best if we human agents seek to discover those purposes and cooperate with them intentionally!
As for what Jeremiah was doing in Egypt, he actually didn’t want to go there. As you noted, the Babylonians appointed a governor over the Judeans who were left in their land. But this governor was assassinated by some men who apparently wanted to keep resisting the Babylonians any way they could. After this, the remaining Judeans were afraid of reprisals, and they wanted to flee to Egypt for safety. But they asked Jeremiah about this first, promising to do whatever he said. When he told them they could stay safely where they were, they fled to Egypt anyway—and forced him to come with them! So Jeremiah ended up among people who were rebelling, but he wasn’t trying to do that personally.
As a result of this forced departure from Judea, Jeremiah’s final oracles come to us from Egypt. (The image above depicts one of those oracles.) There, as far as we know, he completed his career as a prophet and died. These final oracles continue to challenge the people’s disobedience and call them back to the worship of the true God.
Good Question 
Hi Chris,
Did parts of the Jeremiah prophecies regarding Egypt (and those fled to Egypt) fail to come true, as Nebuchadnezzar did not conquer Egypt? Are there some later redactions like the following links suggest?
https://www.thetorah.com/article/cambyses-conquest-of-egypt-is-ascribed-to-nebuchadnezzar
https://www.thetorah.com/article/nebuchadnezzar-fails-to-conquer-egypt-so-jeremiahs-prophecy-was-updated
Thank you for your question. I find that it helps to think in terms not so much of biblical prophecy “coming true” as of it being “fulfilled.” Biblical prophecy, I would say, is not so much a certain future foreseen as a statement about the future implications of current actions. In that sense it provides a snapshot, it traces the trajectory, of what will happen if people do not respond to the moral and spiritual imperatives of the prophecy. But depending on people’s responses, the trajectory may change.
One clear example is in 1 Kings 21. Because King Ahab is so wicked, the prophet Elijah says that this is the Lord’s word to him: “I am going to bring disaster on you. I will wipe out your descendants and cut off from Ahab every last male in Israel—slave or free.” But the Bible then records, “When Ahab heard these words, he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and fasted. He lay in sackcloth and went around meekly.” And so the Lord said to Elijah, “Have you noticed how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself, I will not bring this disaster in his day, but I will bring it on his house in the days of his son.”
I think it’s important to recognize that the same opportunity for repentance was also open to Ahab’s son Ahaziah, who succeeded him on the throne. But Ahaziah was unrepentantly wicked and idolatrous. When he fell out of a second-story window and was badly injured, he sent to consult the Philistine god Baal-zebub to see whether he would recover. Elijah intercepted his messengers and told them that because Ahaziah had not turned to the Lord in his injury but to a foreign god, he would certainly die. And he did. His brother Joram, another son of Ahab, succeeded him as king. He too “did evil in the eyes of the Lord,” and he and the rest of Ahab’s family were ultimately assassinated by Jehu.
So the initial prophecy about Ahab did not “come true” in a literal sense, and even the follow-up prophecy about “his son” came true not about the first son to succeed him on the throne but about the second one. But the moral imperative was fulfilled. Ahab and his successors were judged and punished for their idolatry, oppression, and persecution of the Lord’s prophets.
Similarly the moral imperative of Jeremiah’s prophecy was fulfilled. Throughout his prophesying, he was trying to get the people of Judah to return to the Lord, but instead they relied on Egypt, trusting that the Egyptians would protect them from the Babylonians. Even after the Babylonians conquered and destroyed Jerusalem, rather than stay in Judah where they should have seen that they were safe under a Babylonian-appointed governor, they assassinated that governor and fled to Egypt. Jeremiah’s message in response was that they should not continue thinking that they could rely on the Egyptians for protection. They needed to return to the Lord. And while it was not Nebuchadnezzar himself who ultimately conquered Egypt, or even a later Babylonian emperor, but an emperor from the successor Persian empire, in effect, Jeremiah was right that the Egyptians would not be able to resist the rising Mesopotamian empires. But even more importantly, he was right that this meant that the Judeans need to return to the Lord to save and protect them.
And ultimately the story has a positive ending. Over the following centuries, the Jewish community in Egypt did return to an active trust in the Lord. It produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that we find quoted most frequently in the New Testament. From that community also came figures such as Apollos, who was a powerful speaker and teacher of the message of Jesus in the Mediterranean world.
So as I said, it’s really a matter of what we expect of prophecy. As I say in the post linked below, speaking of the statements in the Gospel of Matthew that prophecy was “fulfilled”: “When Matthew speaks of ‘fulfillment,’ he does not mean that a foreseen future has come to pass. Instead, he means that words spoken at an earlier time in redemptive history have taken on a fuller and deeper meaning in light of later, more developed redemptive-historical circumstances. This, to me, is actually a much more powerful concept: not that humans were given an advance glimpse of what was going to happen in the future, but that the God who superintends and overrules human affairs has demonstrated His unchanging character consistently through time and has revealed more and more of his purposes while reaffirming the earlier-revealed ones.” I hope these thoughts are helpful. Thanks.