Overlooked

The Other Ethiopian Eunuch

He was called Ebed-melech. It is uncertain if this was his name, or if it was just his title; a person considered so insignificant that he didn’t have an identity of his own.  I found him while reading through the book of Jeremiah, in chapters 38 and 39. He was a servant in the court of king Zedekiah and lived in Jerusalem during the siege by king Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian army. He was an Ethiopian, a eunuch and a despised foreigner, and therefore not permitted to enter the temple or participate in many of the Jewish rituals. And yet, he had somehow come to know the One True and Living God and trust Him by faith.

As I read his story, I found myself wondering why I could not recall ever hearing about him before. I’ve certainly read the book of Jeremiah before (skimmed might be a better word than read), but recently, Ebed-melech’s story inexplicably leaped off the pages and into my curious brain. I have no memory of hearing this story in a Sunday School class, even though it lends itself to an epic flannelgraph story. I searched for his story in an early edition of Egermeier’s Bible Story Book, a children’s classic, but there was nothing there. I even went to GotQuestions.org, my current go-to source for puzzling Biblical questions and came up empty. I searched the online catalog for Child Evangelism Fellowship, but there was no material available on this man. As a last resort, I Googled Ebed-melech and found that he had been included in Lockyer’s All Men of the Bible (Zondervan). But, in my opinion, this man and his story have clearly been overlooked.

Usually, when we turn to the book of Jeremiah, we cherry-pick the more appealing and reassuring verses, like 29:11 ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’ Or 33:3 ‘Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’ These are wonderful promises of God and their comforting messages have been highlighted in our Bibles, committed to memory, or even placed in frames and hung on our walls. But the bulk of Jeremiah can be a little hard to swallow. In the book of Jeremiah, God has given His prophet the very unpleasant task of warning the kings and the people of Judah of impending doom. God has finally lost His patience with these people and is about to unleash His wrath on His disobedient children.  Of course, no one wants to believe Jeremiah; they’re having too much fun ignoring God’s laws, precepts, and statutes and dabbling in every form of apostacy and idolatry imaginable. King Zedekiah’s inner circle of royal officials, in particular, hate Jeremiah and his message and are not about to relinquish their positions, status, and privilege to this upstart “so-called” prophet. They have prophets of their own who refute everything Jeremiah says, exchanging truth for lies and causing confusion and unrest among the people.  

When Ebed-melech enters the story, Jeremiah has been imprisoned and shuffled from one prison to another within the city of Jerusalem. He has repeatedly warned the people that the Chaldeans are coming and anyone who stays in Jerusalem will die, either by the sword, or by starvation, or by disease. But anyone who surrenders to the Chaldeans will live; they will be taken captive and exiled to Babylon, but they will live. Their lives will be like a prize of war. The Lord also instructs Jeremiah to tell the people that Jerusalem will surely be taken and given into the hand of the Babylonian army and utterly destroyed. This warning so enrages the royal officials, that four of them conspire together and take their complaint to king Zedekiah. “Jeremiah needs to be put to death,” they argue before the king. “He is having a negative effect on morale in the city of Jerusalem, especially among the soldiers. This man is not seeking the welfare of the people,” they lie, “but their harm.” King Zedekiah weakly responds by telling them to do whatever they want to Jeremiah, that there is nothing he can do to stop them. So, the four officials take Jeremiah and lower him down into an abandoned cistern and leave him there to die. The cistern no longer has any water in it, but there is mud at the bottom and Jeremiah begins to sink in the mud. When Ebed-melech hears what has happened to Jeremiah, he boldly appeals to his master, king Zedekiah, telling him that these men have done evil in the way they have treated Jeremiah and reminding him of certain promises he had made to Jeremiah, namely the provision of daily bread as long as there was bread available in the city. King Zedekiah, waffling once again, gives Ebed-melech permission to gather 30 men that report directly to him and go rescue Jeremiah. Ebed-melech immediately gathers his men, and then with remarkable presence of mind, first goes into a storage closet in the king’s house and gathers old clothes and rags. They rush to the cistern where Jeremiah is trapped in the mud and lower the rags and worn-out clothing down to Jeremiah with ropes. “Put the rags and clothes between your armpits and the ropes,” the Ethiopian calls down to Jeremiah. Jeremiah complies.

Let’s just pause here a moment. When I first read this part of the story, I thought “Rags? Old clothes? Why?” but after considering Jeremiah’s predicament and Ebed-melech’s dilemma in getting him out quickly and safely, I realized that without the cushion of the rags, the force of the ropes on Jeremiah’s skin as he was pulled from the mud would have caused serious injury. Like sin, mud has a way of sucking one in and grabbing hold. The force required to extricate someone from it would have been significant. We don’t know how long Jeremiah was in that cistern, or how far down into the mud he had sunk, but he was probably in a weakened physical state due to lack of food and water, as well as exposure. His skin may have been tissue-thin and vulnerable to tearing. All we are told in this passage is that Ebed-melech and his men “drew Jeremiah up with ropes and lifted him out of the cistern. And Jeremiah remained in the court of the guard. He remained imprisoned there until the day that Jerusalem was taken.” (Jeremiah 38: 13, 28)

The next time we hear of Ebed-melech is at the end of Chapter 39. God tells Jeremiah to go and seek out Ebed-melech because God has a message for him:  ¹⁶“Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will fulfill my words against this city for harm and not for good, and they shall be accomplished before you on that day. ¹⁷But I will deliver you on that day, declares the Lord, and you shall not be given into the hand of the men of whom you are afraid. ¹⁸For I will surely save you, and you shall not fall by the sword, but you shall have your life as a prize of war, because you have put your trust in me, declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 39:16-18 – emphasis mine)

God rewarded Ebed-melech, not because of his boldness in appealing for Jeremiah’s release from the cistern; not because of his resourcefulness and compassion in rescuing Jeremiah in the safest way possible; but simply because he had put his trust in God.

We are not told what became of Ebed-melech or just how God rescued him and preserved his life, but we can be certain that He did. We may have overlooked Ebed-melech, but God most certainly did not.

Because he has loved Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him securely on high, because he has known My name. He will call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him. With a long life I will satisfy him and let him see My salvation.” (Psalm 91:14-16)