The Murder of Gedaliah

After Nebuzaradan, the general of the army, had carried the Jewish people into captivity, he left the poor and the deserters in the country, and made a man named Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, a man of noble family, their governor. This Gedaliah was considerate and just. Nebuzaradan also ordered them to farm the land and to pay a fixed tribute to the king. He also took Jeremiah the prophet out of prison and tried to persuade him to come with him to Babylon, for he had been ordered by the king to supply him with whatever he needed; and if he did not wish to go, he asked him to say where he had decided to live, so that he could report it to the king. But the prophet had no wish to go with him or to live anywhere else. He would gladly live among the ruins of his country and its miserable remains. When the general understood what he intended, he charged Gedaliah, whom he was leaving behind, to take every possible care of him and to supply him with whatever he needed. Then he gave him rich presents and let him go. So Jeremiah lived in a city of that country called Mizpah. He asked Nebuzaradan to set free his disciple Baruch, the son of Neriah, a man of a very distinguished family and exceptionally skilled in the language of his country. [a]

When Nebuzaradan had done this, he hurried off to Babylon. Now those who had fled during the siege of Jerusalem and had been scattered over the country heard that the Babylonians had gone, and had left a remnant in the land of Jerusalem, people who were to farm it. So they gathered from every quarter to Gedaliah at Mizpah. Their leaders were Johanan the son of Kareah, Jezaniah, Seraiah, and others besides. There was also a man of the royal family named Ishmael, a wicked and very crafty man, who during the siege of Jerusalem had fled to Baalis, the king of the Ammonites, and had stayed with him all that time. Gedaliah persuaded them, now that they were there, to stay with him and to have no fear of the Babylonians; if they farmed the country, he said, they would suffer no harm. He assured them of this on oath, and said they would have him as their protector, and that if any trouble arose they would find him ready to defend them. He also advised them each to live in whatever city they pleased, and to send men along with his own servants to rebuild their houses on the old foundations and live in them. And he warned them in advance to lay in grain, wine and oil while the season lasted, so that they would have something to live on during the winter. When he had spoken to them in this way, he sent them off, so that each might live in whatever part of the country he pleased. [c]

When the report spread as far as the nations bordering on Judea that Gedaliah kindly received those who came to him after their flight and let them live on the land and farm it, on condition that they pay tribute to the king of Babylon, they too came readily to Gedaliah and settled in the country. Johanan and the leaders with him, seeing the state of the country and the kindness of Gedaliah, grew very fond of him. They told him that Baalis, the king of the Ammonites, had sent Ishmael to kill him treacherously and in secret, so that Ishmael, being of the royal family, might rule over the Israelites. They said he could save himself from this plot if he would give them leave to kill Ishmael, and no one would know of it; for they were afraid, they told him, that if he were killed by the other man, the last of the Israelites’ remaining strength would be utterly ruined. But he declared that he did not believe them when they told him of such a plot by a man he had treated well. It was not likely, he said, that one who in such a general want had lacked nothing he needed would prove so wicked and ungrateful toward his benefactor that, when it would be wicked of him not to save Gedaliah if others attacked him treacherously, he would try, and eagerly, to kill him with his own hands. And even if he ought to believe this report, it was better for him to be killed by that man than to destroy one who had fled to him for refuge, had entrusted his own safety to him, and had put himself in his hands. [d]

So Johanan and the leaders with him, unable to persuade Gedaliah, went away. When thirty days had passed, Ishmael came again to Gedaliah at the city of Mizpah, with ten men. Gedaliah entertained Ishmael and his companions splendidly at his table and gave them presents, and while he tried to be very merry with them, he became drunk. When Ishmael saw him in that state, sunk in his cups to the point of senselessness and fallen asleep, he suddenly rose up with his ten friends and killed Gedaliah and those who were with him at the feast. When he had killed them, he went out by night and killed all the Jews who were in the city, and also the soldiers the Babylonians had left there. The next day eighty men came in from the country with presents for Gedaliah, none of them knowing what had happened to him. When Ishmael saw them, he invited them in to Gedaliah; and when they had come in, he shut the courtyard, killed them, and threw their bodies down into a deep pit so that they would not be seen. Of these eighty men, however, Ishmael spared those who begged him not to kill them until they had handed over to him the goods they had hidden in the fields: their furnishings, their clothing and their grain. Then he took captive the people who were in Mizpah, with their wives and children, among them the daughters of King Zedekiah, whom Nebuzaradan, the general of the Babylonian army, had left with Gedaliah. When he had done this, he went to the king of the Ammonites. [f]

When Johanan and the leaders with him heard what Ishmael had done at Mizpah, and of Gedaliah’s death, they were indignant. Each of them took his own armed men, and they came suddenly to fight Ishmael and overtook him at the spring in Hebron. When the captives Ishmael had carried off saw Johanan and the leaders, they were overjoyed, taking them to be coming to their rescue; so they left the man who had carried them off and went over to Johanan. Then Ishmael fled with eight men to the king of the Ammonites. Johanan took those he had rescued out of Ishmael’s hands, with the eunuchs, the women and the little children, and came to a place called Mandra, and they stayed there that day. For they had decided to move on from there and go into Egypt, afraid that the Babylonians would kill them if they stayed in the country, out of anger at the murder of Gedaliah, whom they had set over it as governor. [g]

While they were deliberating on this, Johanan the son of Kareah and the leaders with him came to Jeremiah the prophet and asked him to pray to God that, since they were at a complete loss what to do, God would show them; and they swore that they would do whatever Jeremiah told them. The prophet said he would intercede with God for them, and after ten days God appeared to him. He told him to inform Johanan, the other leaders and all the people that he would be with them as long as they stayed in that country, would take care of them, and would keep them from harm at the hands of the Babylonians whom they feared; but that he would abandon them if they went into Egypt, and in his anger against them would inflict on them the same punishments they knew their kinsmen had already suffered. So the prophet told Johanan and the people that God had foretold these things. But he was not believed when he said that God commanded them to stay in the country. They imagined that he was saying it to please his own disciple Baruch, and was lying about God, and was persuading them to stay there so that they would be destroyed by the Babylonians. So both the people and Johanan disobeyed the counsel God had given them through the prophet, moved into Egypt, and took Jeremiah and Baruch with them. [i]

When they were there, God revealed to the prophet that the king of Babylon was about to march against the Egyptians, and commanded him to foretell to the people that Egypt would be taken, and that the king of Babylon would kill some of them and take others captive and bring them to Babylon. And so it came to pass. In the fifth year after the destruction of Jerusalem, which was the twenty-third year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, he marched against Coele-Syria; and when he had taken it, he made war on the Ammonites and the Moabites. When he had brought all these nations under his power, he fell on Egypt to overthrow it. He killed the king who was then reigning and set up another, and he took captive the Jews who were there and led them away to Babylon. Such, as it has been handed down to us, was the end of the Hebrew nation, which was twice carried beyond the Euphrates. The people of the ten tribes were carried out of Samaria by the Assyrians in the days of King Hoshea; after that, the people of the two tribes who were left were carried off, when Jerusalem was taken, by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon and Chaldea. Shalmaneser removed the Israelites from their country and settled in it the nation of the Cutheans, who had formerly lived in the interior of Persia and Media, but were then called Samaritans, taking the name of the country to which they were moved. But the king of Babylon, who carried off the two tribes, settled no other nation in their country. Because of this all Judea and Jerusalem and the temple remained a desert for seventy years. The whole interval of time from the captivity of the Israelites to the carrying away of the two tribes came to a hundred and thirty years, six months and ten days. [j]