Week 30 Jeremiah 37
The Lord told Jeremiah to buy some land. This wasn’t exactly textbook real estate advice. The Babylonian army was threatening to take over Judah. Soon enough none of the locals would own any land. Babylon would own it all.
Anyway Jeremiah didn’t argue. He bought the land. Then decided to go and check it out. As he was leaving Jerusalem he was stopped at the city gate and interrogated. The story says the arresting official was a sentry named Irijah son of Shelemiah and grandson of Hananiah. At first the names seemed like an irrelevant detail. What difference did it make who arrested Jeremiah?
But then I realized that even though I didn’t know Irijah I did remember Hananiah. Nine chapters ago Jeremiah had locked-horns with him when Hananiah had flat-out contradicted Jeremiah’s forecast. True Prophet vs. False Prophet. Jeremiah then predicted that Hananiah would die before the end of the year. That forecast proved out. Hananiah died two months later.
Maybe that’s what accounted for Irijah’s check-point challenge. Hananiah was Irijah’s grandpa and any enemy of his grandpa was his enemy too. And so Irijah used his legal authority to stymy a guy his family disliked.
The story was a reminder to me that for all the ways that life in the OT is hard to make sense of there are other ways where the ancient world sounds exactly the same as today.
Note: quote from Jeremiah 37:13 (NLT)