⁹ Gedaliah vowed to them that the Babylonians^[a] meant them no harm. “Don’t be afraid to serve them. Live in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and all will go well for you,” he promised. ¹⁰ “As for me, I will stay at Mizpah to represent you before the Babylonians who come to meet with us. Settle in the towns you have taken, and live off the land. Harvest the grapes and summer fruits and olives, and store them away.”

¹¹ When the Judeans in Moab, Ammon, Edom, and the other nearby countries heard that the king of Babylon had left a few people in Judah and that Gedaliah was the governor, ¹² they began to return to Judah from the places to which they had fled. They stopped at Mizpah to meet with Gedaliah and then went into the Judean countryside to gather a great harvest of grapes and other crops.

¹⁸ “Son of man, tremble as you eat your food. Shake with fear as you drink your water. ¹⁹ Tell the people, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says concerning those living in Israel and Jerusalem: They will eat their food with trembling and sip their water in despair, for their land will be stripped bare because of their violence.

¹⁶ Then he told me, “Son of man, I will make food very scarce in Jerusalem. It will be weighed out with great care and eaten fearfully. The water will be rationed out drop by drop, and the people will drink it with dismay. ¹⁷ Lacking food and water, people will look at one another in terror, and they will waste away under their punishment.

¹⁶ the very war and famine you fear will catch up to you, and you will die there.

¹⁴ instead, we will go to Egypt where we will be free from war, the call to arms, and hunger,’

¹⁸ They were afraid of what the Babylonians^[a] would do when they heard that Ishmael had killed Gedaliah, the governor appointed by the Babylonian king.

The Murder of Gedaliah

41 But in midautumn of that year,^[a] Ishmael son of Nethaniah and grandson of Elishama, who was a member of the royal family and had been one of the king’s high officials, went to Mizpah with ten men to meet Gedaliah. While they were eating together, ² Ishmael and his ten men suddenly jumped up, drew their swords, and killed Gedaliah, whom the king of Babylon had appointed governor. ³ Ishmael also killed all the Judeans and the Babylonian^[b] soldiers who were with Gedaliah at Mizpah.

⁴ The next day, before anyone had heard about Gedaliah’s murder, ⁵ eighty men arrived from Shechem, Shiloh, and Samaria to worship at the Temple of the Lord. They had shaved off their beards, torn their clothes, and cut themselves, and had brought along grain offerings and frankincense. ⁶ Ishmael left Mizpah to meet them, weeping as he went. When he reached them, he said, “Oh, come and see what has happened to Gedaliah!”

⁷ But as soon as they were all inside the town, Ishmael and his men killed all but ten of them and threw their bodies into a cistern. ⁸ The other ten had talked Ishmael into letting them go by promising to bring him their stores of wheat, barley, olive oil, and honey that they had hidden away. ⁹ The cistern where Ishmael dumped the bodies of the men he murdered was the large one^[c] dug by King Asa when he fortified Mizpah to protect himself against King Baasha of Israel. Ishmael son of Nethaniah filled it with corpses.

¹⁰ Then Ishmael made captives of the king’s daughters and the other people who had been left under Gedaliah’s care in Mizpah by Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard. Taking them with him, he started back toward the land of Ammon.

¹⁷ “The Lord forbid that I should drink this!” he exclaimed. “This water is as precious as the blood of these men^[a] who risked their lives to bring it to me.” So David did not drink it. These are examples of the exploits of the Three.

¹¹ Then the angel of the Lord came and sat beneath the great tree at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash of the clan of Abiezer. Gideon son of Joash was threshing wheat at the bottom of a winepress to hide the grain from the Midianites.