Jeremiah 41

Chapter 41 is the most violent chapter in the final narrative of Jeremiah and one of the most densely packed with event in the book. Ishmael ben Netaniah — who is of royal blood, a fact the narrative notes pointedly — arrives at Mizpah in the seventh month with ten companions and kills Gedaliah at a meal. The killing is treacherous: Gedaliah has been warned and has refused to believe the warning. The murder eliminates the one figure who might have managed survival under Babylonian authority, and along with it goes whatever had been rebuilt in the brief months since the fall of Jerusalem. The Babylonian soldiers stationed at Mizpah are also killed. The chapter then records a grotesque extension of the violence: pilgrims from the northern territories, making their way south to the ruins of the temple with offerings, are met by Ishmael weeping, led into the city, and slaughtered — seventy of eighty, the ten survivors buying their lives with the location of hidden food stores.

The bodies are thrown into the large cistern that Asa had made in his war against Baasha of Israel — the kind of topographical detail that anchors the narrative in specific terrain. Ishmael then takes the remaining population of Mizpah captive: the daughters of the king, the rest of the people, and all those left under Gedaliah's care. He heads toward Ammon. Johanan ben Kareah and the other military commanders pursue and catch him at the great pool of Gibeon. The captives, seeing their rescuers, desert Ishmael and come over to Johanan. Ishmael and eight of his men escape to the Ammonites. The remnant of the population is now gathered at Geruth Chimham, near Bethlehem, terrified of Babylonian retaliation for the assassination of the appointed governor — and preparing for the flight to Egypt that the next chapters will record and condemn.