Lives of Scripture

Gemariah, identified in this entry as the son of Hilkiah, appears in two settings connected to Jeremiah's ministry during Judah's final decades. In Jeremiah 29:3, a Gemariah son of Hilkiah is one of the envoys King Zedekiah sends to Babylon, carrying Jeremiah's letter to the exiles there urging them to settle down, build houses, and seek the welfare of the city where they had been carried captive (29:1-7) -- a delivery role that placed him as a trusted courier of one of Jeremiah's most significant prophetic messages. Jeremiah 36 describes a Gemariah connected to the temple during an earlier reign, under King Jehoiakim: it was in "the chamber of Gemariah the son of Shaphan the scribe" that Baruch first read Jeremiah's scroll of prophecies aloud to the people (36:10). When officials heard of it and had the scroll read again in their presence, they were alarmed enough to report it to the king (36:11-19). As Jehoiakim proceeded to cut the scroll apart and burn it column by column, Gemariah was one of three officials, with Elnathan and Delaiah, who urged him not to burn it -- to no effect (36:25). Whether one Gemariah or two men of the same name are in view across these passages is genuinely uncertain, since the two contexts name different fathers (Hilkiah and Shaphan) and serve different kings. In either case, at least one Gemariah is remembered for a specific, courageous attempt to protect God's spoken word from destruction.