What Does Jeremiah 20:2 Mean?

(2) **Then Pashur smote Jeremiah the prophet.**—It is the first time that he has been so described, the office to which he was called being apparently named to emphasise the outrage which had been inflicted on him. Other prophets had, under Ahab or Manasseh, been slain with the sword, but none, so far as we know (with the one exception of Hanani the seer in 2Chronicles 16:10), had ever before been subjected to an ignominious punishment such as this. It was so far analogous to the outrage against which St. Paul protested in Acts 23:2-3. The word “smote” implies a blow struck with the priest’s own hands rather than the infliction of the legal punishment of forty stripes save one (Deuteronomy 25:3). The English word “stocks” expresses adequately enough the instrument of torture which, like the *nervus *of Roman punishment, kept the body (as in Acts 16:24) in a crooked and painful position. The word here used occurs in the Hebrew of 2Chronicles 16:10, as above, and in Jeremiah 29:26, but the A. V. there renders it as “prison-house.” In that humiliating position the prophet was left for the whole night in one of the most conspicuous places of the city, the temple-gate of Benjamin (the *upper *gate) on the northern side of the inner court, probably the higher or northern gate of Ezekiel 8:3; Ezekiel 8:5; Ezekiel 9:2.