Shredding the Sacred Scroll: A Parable for Today
Sources: 2 kings; 2 Chronicles; Jeremiah 31-39; Lutheran Study Bible notes; biblegateway.com; Wikipedia.
Backstory and timeline
721 BC, as prophesied by Isaiah and others, Northern Israel fell to Assyria. Her people were removed to Mesopotamia, and foreigners were imported into the region. This squelched national identity and made it impossible for captive rebels to stage an escape. Nor could Judah decide to ally with the north to strengthen resistance to invasion. It was genius, really. So, the towns and villages of Judah were the remnant of the people of Israel.
640 BC: 8-year-old Josiah became king of Judah in Jerusalem. Under the tutelage of faithful priests, he initiated reforms, trying to discourage idolatry and reboot Mosaic practices. Because the previous two kings were evil and neglected Temple maintenance, the actual manual—the written scroll—was missing.
628, God called a young man named Jeremiah to be a prophet. God informed him he knew Jeremiah and called him before he was conceived, suggesting that God knew the future, had a plan, and had the right man in place at the right time. He was a priest’s son, but probably not Hilkiah the High Priest. Ironically, he was prophesying doom during the reign of a righteous king who was bringing reform.
622, one of the reforms Josiah instigated was repair of the Temple that had been neglected and abused. Digging through some rubble, or perhaps blowing the dust off random shelves, the priests found the missing Law scroll. It had all the blessings and curses found in our modern book of Deuteronomy. When the priests read it to Josiah, he tore his garment and sent a delegation to the prophetess Hulda. She confirmed that judgment was fixed for Judah, but that Josiah would not live to see the destruction.
The problem was that in Judah and the city of Jerusalem, the people had forgotten the Law of Moses for a long enough span of time that generational knowledge of national history and religion had been lost. New gods, new ideas were baked in. The people were worshiping idols in the Temple and sacrificing their children to foreign gods in the Valley of Hinnom. Social justice was scarce, corruption greased all the wheels, and the Law of Moses was mixed with foreign superstitions. In God’s sight, it was intolerable.
621 BC, as prophesied by Isaiah and other Minor Prophets, the Babylonians and Medes ended the Assyrian empire. Now all the taxes and tribute—essentially protection money—went to King Nabopolassar of Babylon. Nebuchadrezzar II was still Commander-in-Chief at that time. The devil was being replaced by the deep, blue sea.
609 BC, Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt allied with the remnant of the Assyrian forces to challenge the Medes and Babylonians (also called Chaldeans) to reclaim his sovereignty over the city of Carchemish on the Euphrates River. As he marched north, Josiah came out with an army to confront him. Necho had no beef with Josiah and warned him away, but Josiah was determined to start a fight which ended with his death. Perhaps he thought Pharaoh Necho was the one that would fulfill the prophecies swirling about the city, or did he think he could win favor with the new Babylonian threat by opposing Babylon’s enemy? He poked the hornet’s nest and inadvertently brought trouble to his city.
The people mourned Josiah greatly and chose his younger son to reign. The text doesn’t say why they chose 23-year-old Jehoahaz rather than his 25-year-old brother Eliakim, but when I write the movie script in my head, I imagine Eliakim having a reputation as a scalawag. I write him as waylaying Pharaoh Necho on his way back from Carchemish to double deal and conspire against his brother. It worked, of course. Why else would Necho depose the new king after a 3-month reign, set Eliakim on the throne, and change his name to Jehoiakim? For about 3 years, Judah was a vassal to Egypt, paying heavy tribute raised by heavily taxing the citizens. Jehoahaz was taken to Egypt as a prisoner and died there. There is no record that Jehoiakim tried to get him released.
605, Nebuchadnezzar ascended to the throne of Babylon and was soon at the gates of Jerusalem. Jehoiakim quickly switched fealty. Nevertheless, the Babylonians (also called Chaldeans), went away with a cadre of elite citizens, possibly including Daniel. They also looted the Temple but didn’t depose Jehoiakim.
I’m not the only one who has imagined dire acts by Jehoiakim. From Wikipedia:
"Rabbinical literature describes Jehoiakim as a godless tyrant who committed atrocious sins and crimes. He is portrayed as living in incestuous relations with his mother, daughter-in-law, and stepmother, and was in the habit of murdering men, whose wives he then violated and whose property he seized."
I imagine that a king like Jehoiakim who is bold and malevolent enough to reign illegitimately would surround himself with other people like himself…corrupt, loyal, hungry for power…people who can’t be shamed, who live above fearing the law because they now are the law. He was a manly man’s king…decisive, cold, and tough on opposition.
He executed one prophet named Uriah ben Shemaiah. Jeremiah was high on his hate list, and the feeling was mutual. Long ago, Isaiah commanded that King Hezekiah of Judah not surrender the city. In that day, God delivered Jerusalem miraculously. Jeremiah was saying the opposite, that Jerusalem would not escape. There was a lot of religious confusion in the city, so the LORD told Jeremiah to dictate a scroll to his secretary Baruch to make it all very plain. If the leaders and people of the city would not turn from their sin and repent, the king must surrender Judah to Babylon or it would be destroyed.
604, during a fast day when many devout worshipers were in the city, Baruch read the scroll before the people. He read it in the Temple gate, which alarmed the secretaries there so much they sent a messenger to the palace office. Those secretaries sent a runner to Baruch to bring the scroll and read it to them. They told Baruch that they would read the scroll to the king, but meanwhile, he and Jeremiah should get out of town and hide.
The scroll came before the king as he and his
cabinet lounged before a fireplace. The concerned delegation from the outer
office joined them to see what the reaction to the holy words would be. As the
official read a few columns, the king took the scroll, sliced them off what was
read, and burned the piece. Because of the belief that genuine prophecy was
important intelligence, the secretaries begged him to stop, but this was a king
who was above all laws, including God’s. No one tells him what to do. We’ll
destroy this scroll, he thought to himself. Problem solved. The people must not
hear it.
Well, that didn’t work, because Jeremiah just dictated another scroll and hid it. He had a few extra words to say to Jehoiakim:
29 And you shall say to Jehoiakim king of Judah, ‘Thus says the Lord: “You have burned this scroll, saying, ‘Why have you written in it that the king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land, and cause man and beast to cease from here?’ ” 30 Therefore thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah: “He shall have no one to sit on the throne of David, and his dead body shall be cast out to the heat of the day and the frost of the night. 31 I will punish him, his family, and his servants for their iniquity; and I will bring on them, on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and on the men of Judah all the doom that I have pronounced against them; but they did not heed.” (Jer. 36:29-31, NKJV, biblegateway.com)
598, Babylon came calling again to the gates of the city. Nebuchadnezzar transported more elite leaders of the city, more loot from the Temple—treasure, money, golden implements, and furniture. 2 Kings doesn’t mention how Jehoiakim died, but 2 Chronicles says he went to Babylon in chains and died there.
Jehoiakim’s son is placed on the throne, but after 3 months, the Babylonians were back for more, and Jehoiachin quickly caved. The royal family was packed off to a foreign land, but the Temple still stood.
586, the story ends. King Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon and the warnings of the prophets. A long, ugly siege brought famine, chaos, and ruin to the city, which you can read about in the book of Lamentations. When the Babylonians broke into the city, they razed it, killed thousands, took others prisoner, and burned the Temple after looting every last bit of value in it. Zedekiah’s sons were killed before him, and then he was blinded.
Judah’s story didn’t fully end there, of course. Jeremiah promised that the LORD would bring them back in time (basically, after a whole generation of people had passed away). They did return and rebuild, and Israel today is a continuum of that story.
The Parable
I’m no prophet so I’m making no prediction of what will happen in our politics today, but I do follow the news carefully, and I’ve seen a man who is now president-elect of the U.S. who said on video at one of his campaign rallies, “Just get me in there, and you’ll never have to vote again.” He said that his “instructions” were to not worry about the vote, that he had all the votes he would need. Russian state TV took credit for his win and said that they fully expect the appropriate payback.
This wannabe king is choosing people for his cabinet that are so awful, that even the most compliant, spineless enablers in Congress can’t stand them. Mr. King wants to deport a million illegal immigrants because they are rapists and criminals, yet he himself has been convicted by juries of his peers of rape, misuse of top-secret documents, and fraud, and proposes people for top positions in the government who have been accused of similar crimes.
This would-be king has threatened to use his appointees to threaten, investigate, harass, and ruin the careers of the people who tried, unsuccessfully, to prosecute him. Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that Donald Trump won the election, his sentencing and imprisonment would be next week’s news. Now, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, Trump now has almost unlimited power to abuse, stretch, and break the law.
I’m pointing the finger at Trump because he has a few superpowers—he can commit multiple crimes and not be held accountable, he can tell outrageous lies and be believed, he can turn otherwise normal people into his evil surrogates, and he can convince all the rest to stand by and let it all happen. But he’s not working alone. He has many enablers and co-conspirators, including lots of rich people who expect to be America’s new oligarchs. The plan has been implemented all the way upline to wealthy foundations who want to consolidate conservative power and gut the U.S. Constitution. We no longer have to know who all these people are because of Citizens United. Our elections are now awash in dark money that would be unimaginable decades ago. But the average voter doesn’t know that. You have to be a news junkie to see the web of connections.
Wait, did I say “gut the Constitution?” Yes, yes I did. That’s the plan. Former Vice President Mike Pence stated unequivocally that President Trump ordered him to break the law and overturn the election. That wimpy little puppy of a man actually found the courage and moral compass to refuse. And now, of course, like the other resistors, Pence’s political career is road kill. Trump ordered Georgia Sec of State Raffensperger to find 11,780 more votes to change the result of the 2020 election (another crime, by the way). Brad Raffensperger refused. Be sure that when the dust of the election settles, there will be an investigation of Raffensperger. It’s retribution time, something Pres-elect Trump is famous for. And somehow, it has been so normalized that the press hardly notes it, because every day brings a new shock and a new scandal. We on the Left warned that the Constitution was on the ballot. Where the hell were the several million voters who understood that? The Right couldn’t stop talking about the price of groceries and gas. There is a conspiracy in the land to shred and gut the Constitution, one of the greatest governmental gifts ever given to mankind by inspiration of the Creator. America, if you stand by and let them burn it, it may be an entire generation before we get it back…if ever.
Oh, there will be an accounting. All the liars, all who sold our heritage for a bowl of authoritarian pottage, all who preferred a vile, nasty wife-cheating man over a woman promising to support the middle class…all those will face the courts…God’s courts. One of the descriptors of the Anti-Christ is found in 2 Thessalonians 2;7, 8: "For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains (the Holy Spirit) will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming." (NKJV, biblegateway.com) I'm not saying Donald Trump is the Anti-Christ, but that they both have a few things in common.
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