1. all the words of the LORD their God. This narrative report continues the procedure of the preceding textual unit in affirming that YHWH is the God of these people—the very people who have rejected God’s word delivered by Jeremiah.

3. Baruch son of Neriah is inciting you against us. This is a surprising accusation. It may be founded merely in a paranoid suspicion that someone must have misled the prophet on whom they were counting to confirm their decision about going to Egypt. The alternative possibility is that they are loath to accuse Jeremiah directly and so make his amanuensis responsible for what he has done.

6. and Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch son of Neriah. These two crucial figures are left till the very end of the list of those who were taken down to Egypt. The implication would seem to be that Jeremiah and Baruch were taken against their will.

9. the house of Pharaoh in Tahpanes. Tahpanes, near the northern border of Egypt, was not the capital city, but there may have been some sort of royal palace there.

10. Nebuchadrezzar My servant. What this epithet indicates is that the Babylonian emperor is God’s instrument in history, which in the present instance involves the conquest of Egypt.

he shall stretch out his splendor over them. The noun shafrir appears only here. Because of the verb “stretch out,” some think it means “canopy” or “pavilion,” but it reflects a Hebrew root that indicates beauty, and so the general term “splendor” may be the safest translation.

12. he shall set fire. The Masoretic Text has “I will set fire,” but the Septuagint, the Syriac, and the Vulgate all show the third-person singular, making Nebuchadrezzar the subject of the verb. It is, of course, possible that the original text simply switched from God’s human agent to God.

take them captive. It was common to cart off the gods of a conquered land. Presumably, the wooden ones were burned and those with precious metals were taken away.

wrap round the land of Egypt. This slightly odd image is meant to indicate Nebuchadrezzar’s total domination of the country. The comparison to the shepherd wrapping himself in his garment suggests that the Babylonian conqueror will take warmth and comfort from appropriating the entire land.

13. obelisks. The Hebrew matseivot in Canaanite and Israelite settings refers to steles, sacred piles of stones, but in the Egyptian context these would have to be obelisks, which in fact have been found at this site in archaeological excavations.

the House of the Sun that is in the land of Egypt. The qualifying clause is introduced because there is a place in Canaan that bears this same name in Hebrew, Beyt Shemesh. The Septuagint renders this as “Heliopolis [Sun City] which is in On.” There was a cult of sun worship at On.