Article January 8, 1921 Issue

"The little more"

LAURA BLANDFORD JENNINGS

In the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters of Jeremiah there is told in a few verses a story furnishing much food for thought, a story of an obscure Ethiopian eunuch, called Ebed-melech. One can readily imagine how the fierce hatred raging about Jeremiah because of his denunciations of idolatry, how the words of Jeremiah himself, and the king's vacillating stand, must have impressed this man as he went about in the intimacy of the court, though himself only a servant—for the word Ebed-melech is not a name, but simply means "servant of a king." Undoubtedly he thought deeply of these things, and there is nothing in the account to preclude the supposition that he was all the while learning something of the truth about Israel's God.

A slave he was, yet when he heard that Jeremiah had been taken from the court of the prison and cast into an empty well, "and in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire," he courageously went to his master, Zedekiah, and told of the situation which this king of Judah was too indifferent or dishonest to be concerned about. Then when Ebed-melech had secured the king's command to take thirty men and ropes and rescue Jeremiah, he took also "old cast clouts and old rotten rags, and let them down by cords into the dungeon," and said, "Put now these old cast clouts and rotten rags under thine armholes under the cords." Then they drew him up. It was a true example of

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