Jeremiah 41 Study Notes

41:1 Gedaliah was assassinated in the seventh month, our month of October. This occurred either in 587 BC, three months after the fall of Jerusalem, or five years later in 582 BC in connection with another deportation of Jews mentioned in 52:30. The year cannot be fixed with certainty. Ishmael son of Nethaniah . . . of the royal family, was a member of the Davidic line and one of King Zedekiah’s chief officers. He did not agree with Jeremiah’s advice to surrender to the Babylonians either before or after the fall of Jerusalem.

41:2-3 Ishmael came with his ten men and sat down for a meal with Gedaliah, who did not suspect treachery. In a breach of Eastern hospitality, they killed both Judeans and Chaldean soldiers on the spot.

41:4-5 Ishmael continued his slaughter by killing seventy of the eighty men who came from Shechem, Shiloh, and Samaria, carrying grain and incense offerings . . . to the temple. Though the temple was destroyed (note that these were bloodless sacrifices), the plot of ground it had occupied was still regarded as sacred, just like the Western Wall in Jerusalem today. Even though these men lived in pagan northern Israel, they continued to worship God in Jerusalem.

41:5 Though the eighty pilgrims were genuine worshipers of the Lord, syncretism was evident in the fact that they gashed themselves, a cultic practice adopted from Baal worship yet forbidden in the law of God (5:7; Dt 14:1; 1Kg 18:28).

41:7 The motive for the killing is unknown.

41:8 Ishmael spared ten men among the eighty because they offered him hidden treasure in the field. Ishmael’s greed and deceit showed his true character. He had no good reason for killing the seventy men.

41:9 The cistern into which Ishmael stuffed the bodies of the slain was a large one from the time of King Asa. Three hundred years previously, Asa had built a fortress at Mizpah from the material he had dragged off from Baasha’s construction of a fortress at Ramah (1Kg 15:22; 2Ch 16:6). Excavations at Tel en-Nasbeh may have uncovered this very cistern.

41:10 The phrase daughters of the king is puzzling. There are no references anywhere else to Zedekiah’s daughters, so they may have been women of royal descent. Did the Babylonian garrison at Mizpah not know about their existence? Were they released after they were blinded? Did Nebuchadnezzar offer clemency to some of the royal princesses? We do not know.

41:11-18 Johanan, who opposed Ishmael, apparently returned to Mizpah, where he learned about Ishmael’s treachery. Johanan tracked Ishmael with all the captives he had taken from Mizpah to the great pool in Gibeon, about three miles away. This large pit, hewn out of rock, is about eighty-two feet deep. Twelve of Abner’s men fought twelve of Joab’s men (2Sm 2:12-16) near this pool at what is today the city of el-Jib. Johanan rescued the captives, and Ishmael escaped with eight men. Johanan feared what the Babylonians might do as reprisals for Ishmael’s killing spree, so he was determined to take the remnant of people left in Judah off to Egypt.