Lives of Scripture

Elnathan son of Achbor was a prominent official in Jerusalem under King Jehoiakim, and his daughter Nehushta became queen mother when his grandson Jehoiachin took the throne (2 Kings 24:8). Scripture records two contrasting episodes involving him. In the first, when the prophet Uriah fled to Egypt after prophesying against Jerusalem in words matching Jeremiah's own warnings, King Jehoiakim sent Elnathan and other men to Egypt, where they retrieved Uriah and brought him back to the king, who had him killed and his body thrown into a common burial ground (Jeremiah 26:20-23) -- Elnathan was the instrument of a prophet's death by royal order. Yet later, when Baruch read Jeremiah's scroll of warnings aloud in the temple and the officials heard it, Elnathan was present with Gemariah and Delaiah among those who urged King Jehoiakim not to burn the scroll (Jeremiah 36:12, 25). The king refused, cutting the scroll apart with a scribe's knife and burning it in the fire pot despite their pleas (36:23-25). Elnathan's two appearances sit in tension: an agent of a prophet's execution in one episode, and one of the few voices attempting to protect a prophet's written word in another -- a portrait of a royal official only partially willing to resist his king's hostility toward the LORD's messengers.