The man of true faith who saved Jeremiah
by Julian Mann, TCW:
THE account of Ebed-melech, ‘the Ethiopian eunuch’, in the Old Testament book of the prophet Jeremiah, may seem a vignette but it is of profound spiritual significance.
Jeremiah proclaimed the word of the Lord in the kingdom of Judah from 627 BC until the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587. He became extremely unpopular for predicting that the Babylonians would succeed in their siege against Jerusalem as a divine punishment on the people of Judah for their idolatry and unfaithfulness to their Lord and God.
During the reign of Zedekiah (597-587), the king of Judah who eventually had his eyes put out on the order of the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar, palace officials had Jeremiah thrown into an underground dungeon where ‘there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sank in the mire’ (Jeremiah 38v6). Ebed-melech, who the Authorised (King James) Version of the English Bible describes as an ‘Ethiopian’ and ‘one of the eunuchs in the king’s house’, persuaded Zedekiah to send a posse of men to lift the prophet out the dungeon.
Jeremiah 38v11-13 records: ‘So Ebed-melech took the men with him, and went into the house of the king under the treasury, and took thence old cast clouts and old rotten rags, and let them down by cords into the dungeon to Jeremiah. And Ebed-melech the Ethopian said unto Jeremiah, Put these old clouts and rotten rags under thine armholes under the cords. And Jeremiah did so. So they drew up Jeremiah with cords, and took him up out of the dungeon: and Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison’ (AV).
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