Read to Remember

1 August 2026  Jeremiah 26:11-16,24

“But the hand of Ahikam, son of Shaphan, protected Jeremiah, so they did not hand him over to the people to be put to death.” (Jeremiah 26:24)   

The end of Jeremiah’s life was one of spiritual torment, and political agony. The kingdom of Judah lay between three competing kingdoms – Egypt to the west, Assyria to the north, and Babylon to the northeast – and Jeremiah was at odds with all four of them. It was something of a miracle that he was not killed as a result of the “Temple Sermon” (Jeremiah 26). Fortunately for him, Ahikam, son of Shaphan, was there. Jeremiah had known Ahikam’s family for years, and Ahikam was a high official in the monarchy of the last good king, Josiah, and at least for a little while in the reign of the exceedingly wicked king Jehoiakim.

Josiah was a zealous advocate of religious reform, but his son Jehoiakim rebelled against Josiah and his religion, undergoing a painful surgery to reverse and cover up his circumcision, and tatooing his body with pagan religious symbols.

Today we take writing and literacy for granted, but in those days, when paper, pens and ink were expensive and difficult to make, and when literate people were few and far between, writing down and preserving any document required intense and valuable commitment.

Ahikam still had some clout in Judah, and was able to protect Jeremiah when he said unpopular things – another prophet, Uriah, son of Shemaiah, was not so lucky (cf. 26:20-24). Jehoiakim cast his lot with Egypt and Assyria, and lost disastrously – Babylon defeated Egypt, and then conquered Judah, beginning the Exile. Some Jewish thugs loyal to Jehoiakim assassinated Gedaliah, son of Ahikam, who had been appointed governor of Judah by the Babylonians, and then fled in fear to Egypt. They kidnapped Jeremiah and took him with them. Jeremiah was later stoned to death in Egypt.

So how do we know any of this?

The Egyptians were no friends of Jeremiah, and not inclined to preserve any of his writing. Jeremiah’s kidnappers weren’t either.

Mostly it was because Jeremiah had a friend named Baruch. It was Baruch who wrote down all the prophecies of Jeremiah, and protected them even when King Jehoiakim seized some of them, tore them to bits and burned all the pieces (36:22-23). According to some later traditions, Baruch later wound up in Babylon where he composed what is now called the book of Baruch, and no doubt brought with him the book of Jeremiah. The soul-searching of the Exile became the occasion for writing down and preserving the rest of what we know today as the Old Testament.

This was not even remotely the last time that the preservation of Holy Scripture depended on a faithful friend. Luke was a disciple and traveling companion of St. Paul, and composed the two longest books in the New Testament (the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles). Mark was a disciple of St. Peter, and composed the earliest of the canonical gospels (the Gospel of Mark). Isaiah relied on a circle of disciples who preserved and stored his prophetic oracles, and although we will never know their names, we know there were groups of elite scribes who compiled and edited what we know as the Old Testament during the Babylonian Captivity. Today we take writing and literacy for granted, but in those days, when paper, pens and ink were expensive and difficult to make, and when literate people were few and far between, writing down and preserving any document required intense and valuable commitment.

Writing has always been a way of storing information, a recognition of our tendency to forget even very important things. Scientists are discovering that there is something very much like writing in every individual human cell, in every strand of DNA. Even though there is a lot of bad writing, it appears that when we are trying hardest to be good and godly, we are writing things down. Certainly Baruch thought so.

Perhaps we should be reading more.

Baruch, St. Luke, St. Mark, pray for us.