as Grotius remarks, were subdued by Nebuchadnezzar; and therefore it is not improbable that the said messengers or ambassadors were sent to Zedekiah for the purpose of forming a league against the Babylonian power: the public declarations of the false prophets above mentioned, and the actual rebellion soon afterwards of Zedekiah himself, renders the said supposition about the business of the messengers very probable; so that, if this singular state of affairs be considered, the sending, at such a seasonable time, to the several neighboring kings, by the return of their ambassadors, the yokes which had been worn by Jeremiah, together with God's awful message, that he would punish that nation which will not serve Nebuchadnezzar, and put their neck under his yoke, (Jer. xxvii. 8,) must needs strike these heathen monarchs, if they were not entirely abandoned in their principles, with fear and reverence; especially as their ambassadors would hear at Jerusalem, that the divine message concerning the yokes, then sent, had been revealed to the prophet long before (thirteen or fourteen years) in the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign, in token of which the prophet had worn yokes upon his own neck (see chap, xxviii. ver. 10, 12, 13); and that no less than three circumstances of that extraordinary revelation were now already fulfilled: the prophet having not only foretold the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, and the reign of Zedekiah, a name not applicable to Zedekiah himself till the Babylonian conqueror thought proper to give it him, so that no worldly prudence could foresee such an event, but had also foretold the very circumstance in which they themselves were concerned, viz. that messengers should be sent to this Zedekiah by such and such kings!
In what year these messengers or ambassadors really arrived at Jerusalem, or returned from thence, does not appear; but as the yokes were, first of all, to be put upon the prophet's own neck, before he was to send them to the kings (compare the 2d and 3d verses), and as it appears that he really wore such a wooden yoke, as a sign against them, in the temple, so late as the 4th year of Zedekiah, when a false prophet took it from his neck, and broke it,
