21:1–2 This brief chapter opens by recording the desire of Zedekiah, the final king of the southern kingdom, to determine whether Yahweh will lift Babylon’s current siege of Jerusalem. The historical setting is the final years of Judah (shortly before Jerusalem’s fall in 587 BC), when false teachers such as Pashhur, son of Malchiah, and Zephaniah, son of Maaseiah, predict that Jerusalem will soon be delivered (v. 1). The former is a different Pashhur from the one who seized Jeremiah and had him imprisoned in the Benjamin Gate (cf. 20:1–6), while the latter is not the same Zephaniah as the prophet who ministered earlier, during Josiah’s reign (cf. Zeph. 1:1).

Pashhur and Zephaniah have been sent by the king to learn whether Jerusalem will survive Babylon’s onslaught. Would Jeremiah offer the same promise that Isaiah did a century earlier to Hezekiah, the ancestor of Zedekiah, that Jerusalem would be miraculously delivered from another Mesopotamian empire (cf. Isa. 37:31–38)? For Zedekiah’s messengers to seek history to repeat itself comes not only from the eighth-century deliverance from Assyria; their wish for Yahweh to perform “all his wonderful deeds” (Jer. 21:2) refers to nothing less than his “wonders” in Israel’s exodus from Egypt (Ex. 3:20; 15:11).

21:3–7 No miracle like the exodus is forthcoming, however. To a people who apostatized countless times after Yahweh saved them, the prophet Jeremiah responds (Jer. 21:3) that Yahweh is now fighting in an anti-exodus against his people (v. 4), using the same “outstretched hand and strong arm” (v. 5) once deployed against Egypt (cf. Deut. 2:14–16).75 It is not just Babylon but Yahweh himself who will slay all Israel’s creatures with sword and pestilence (Jer. 21:6). Those who survive these punishments, Zedekiah among them, will live through Jerusalem’s fall only to become captives killed by Nebuchadnezzar. The king of Babylon has, unthinkably, become Yahweh’s instrument of judgment (v. 7). Later in the book, the God of Israel even names Nebuchadnezzar as “my servant” (25:9; 27:6; 43:10)—a Davidic title (33:21, 22, 26; cf. 2 Sam. 7:5, 8)! In Yahweh’s surprising purposes, Babylon will stand in for Jerusalem as the keeper of his people (Jeremiah 24), while Nebuchadnezzar temporarily replaces David’s descendant as ruler (ch. 25).

21:8–10 Turning now from Zedekiah (cf. v. 4) to address the people, Yahweh offers a grim but real option for survival. His offer to Judah (“I set before you the way of life and the way of death”; v. 8) is no longer the straightforward choice that Moses offered Israel between life and death in the land (Deut. 30:15–19). In Jeremiah’s generation, the impending success of Babylon’s invasion means that death will be the only option for those who remain in the land, while life must be found in surrendering to Babylon and becoming exiles in a foreign land (Jer. 21:9). Judah’s ultimate enemy is not Babylon but Yahweh himself, who has “set [his] face against this city for harm and not for good” (v. 10; cf. Lam. 2:4–5).

21:11–14 These verses return to confronting the king of Judah (Jer. 21:11), but now the entirety of the “house of the king of Judah” (v. 11) and the “house of David” (v. 12) rather than only Zedekiah. David and his descendants were appointed by Yahweh to uphold justice in Israel (v. 12c–e) as a microcosm of Yahweh’s just rule over the whole earth (Psalm 72). But this ideal often clashed with the reality that Judah’s kings were often the worst purveyors of injustice. The following chapter, for example, describes how King Shallum (also known as Jehoahaz), a brother of Zedekiah whose reign began a decade before his, withheld the wages of the workers who built his grandiose palace (Jer. 22:13–14). The sinful combination of extravagance toward self and oppression toward others will bring divine wrath upon Judah’s kings (21:12f–h).

Finally in this chapter, Yahweh issues an edict of destruction against the whole land and its rebellious inhabitants. People (“O inhabitant of the valley”) as well as the rest of creation (“O rock of the plain”) must face the consequences of Babylon’s assault (v. 13). The reason for the suffering of both parties is hinted at in the explanation that this is the “fruit of your deeds” (v. 14). This creational image is borrowed from the prophet Hosea and indicates that Judah, like the northern kingdom of Israel before it, will suffer the consequences of syncretism with Canaanite nature religion (e.g., Jer. 7:9; 11:13, 17). The imagery of sowing and reaping indicates that people and land have become tainted in symbiotic ways (cf. Hos. 9:16; 10:1, 13).