Jeremiah Meets Hananiah (28:1-17) 341filled, then it will be known that Yahweh has truly sent that prophet. The wait
could be a long one. Hananiah has set a limit of two years. Jeremiah's move is
a deft one. He himself has been preaching against neighboring nations, and
Hananiah now is preaching rebellion against Babylon. Who is the prophet of
peace? And who is the prophet of war, evil, and pestilence? Jeremiah does not
give an answer. Those in the audience must make up their own minds. If the
crowd is hostile, it cannot resort to violent action on hearing such words. But
Hananiah, who was probably angry before things began, now becomes physi-
cal, pulling the yoke bar off Jeremiah's neck and breaking it. He is ready also
with a third oracle summarizing the other two: in two years the yoke of Nebu-
chadnezzar will be broken from the neck of all the nations. The nations are on
his mind too. Is this Hananiah's answer to Jeremiah's test for the true prophet?
What will Jeremiah do next? His prophecy has been roundly contradicted; at
the hands of Hananiah he has been publicly shamed. No mention is made of
anyone intervening on Jeremiah's behalf. The narrator says simply that Jere-
miah "went his way." There was probably little else he could do. That his deci-
sion was the right one can be assumed in that he was able to walk away. No one
harmed him. Humiliated he was, but in no way forced to back down.
The audience then learns that Jeremiah received another word from Yah-
weh and is told what happened next. If Jeremiah failed to deliver an oracle
when he and Hananiah first met, he is not without oracles now. In a first or-
acle, he is instructed to tell Hananiah: "Yoke bars of wood you have broken, but
you have made in their place yoke bars of iron." In a second oracle, Yahweh
says that he has put an iron yoke on all the nations, a veiled reference doubtless
to the nations recently represented in Jerusalem, but also to other nations not
represented. All will have to serve Nebuchadnezzar. Yahweh has given even
the wild animals over to him! Jeremiah is not finished.
After telling Hananiah straight out that Yahweh has not sent him and that
his prophecy is making the people trust in a lie, he says in a final oracle that
Yahweh is sending Hananiah off the face of the earth. Once, a prophet not
sent; now, a prophet who is being sent. This very year Hananiah will die, for he
has spoken rebellion not simply against Nebuchadnezzar but against Yahweh.
If Jeremiah was cautious, indirect, and willing to suffer abuse in his first en-
counter with Hananiah, he is none of these things now. One cannot imagine a
more direct, a more stinging, and a more specific prophetic utterance. The
narrator concludes in laconic style: "Hananiah the prophet died in that year, in
the seventh month." Jeremiah's word was fulfilled in two months! The audi-
ence is thus brought back to the beginning, where it was told that this incident
took place in the fourth year of Zedekiah, the fifth month. A date for this nar-
rative, then, is anytime after 594-593 B.C.
When this incident took place, there had to be uncertainty in the minds of
some about which word was Yahweh's word and which prophet was Yahweh's
prophet. For later audiences who might have heard a report such as we have
presently in the narrative, it was clear that Jeremiah had spoken the truth, even
if it was not clear that Hananiah had spoken a lie. For post-586 audiences