Lives of Scripture

Jehucal, son of Shelemiah, appears in Scripture as a messenger sent on the king's business during Judah's final, desperate years. King Zedekiah, who alternated between fearing and ignoring the prophet Jeremiah, sent Jehucal along with Zephaniah the priest to Jeremiah with a specific request: "Please pray to the LORD our God for us" (Jeremiah 37:3). The request came at a fragile moment -- the Babylonian army besieging Jerusalem had temporarily withdrawn to deal with an advancing Egyptian force, and Zedekiah wanted prophetic reassurance that the reprieve would hold. Jeremiah's actual answer, delivered elsewhere in the chapter, was not the reassurance the king hoped for: the Egyptian army would retreat and the Babylonians would return to besiege and burn the city (37:6-10). Jehucal's brief appearance as a royal envoy captures the anxious posture of Judah's leadership in its final days -- outwardly still observing the forms of seeking the LORD through His prophet, while the king himself continued to disregard the substance of what Jeremiah actually said. It is a small window into how close, and how unheeded, God's word was to Jerusalem's rulers right up to the city's fall.