Ebed-melech, the Cushite who pulled Jeremiah from the cistern with old rags and ropes: what we know about Zedekiah's official
BAS revisits Jeremiah 38. No inscription naming him has turned up in our reporting, but seals of two nobles from the same chapter were found in Jerusalem.
Not yet confirmedUnder investigation. Here is what is known and what still needs proof.
The Biblical Archaeology Society on October 29, 2026, published a popular article on Ebed-melech, the court official who, according to the Book of Jeremiah, pulled the prophet out of a muddy cistern during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. The author is Robin Gallaher Branch, who holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. It is a reading of the biblical text, published in the society's series.
The figure deserves a closer look anyway. He appears in only a handful of verses, the Bible calls him a Cushite, meaning someone from the region south of Egypt, and he is one of the few foreigners the story of those final days presents in an entirely positive light. This report separates what Scripture says, what archaeology confirms about the setting, and what remains unanswered.
The official who spoke up when the nobles stayed silent
The episode is in Jeremiah 38:7-13, with a sequel in Jeremiah 39:15-18. The BAS describes Ebed-melech as a Judahite official whom the Bible identifies as a Cushite, and dates the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem to roughly 588 to 586 B.C.E. Jeremiah had been telling the city that anyone who stayed would die by sword, famine and pestilence, and that anyone who surrendered to the Chaldeans would live (Jeremiah 38:2-3). Four men, Shephatiah, Gedaliah, Jucal and Pashhur, heard those words and asked the king to put the prophet to death, arguing that he was demoralizing the soldiers (Jeremiah 38:4).
King Zedekiah answered that he could do nothing against them. They lowered Jeremiah by ropes into the cistern of Malchiah in the court of the guard. It held no water, only mud, and Jeremiah sank into it.
Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, a eunuch in the king's house, went to the king, who was sitting in the Benjamin Gate. He said the men had done evil to the prophet and that Jeremiah would die of hunger, because there was no bread left in the city. The king ordered him to take thirty men and lift Jeremiah out before he died.
The next detail is what makes the scene so human. Ebed-melech went to a storeroom in the king's house, took old rags and worn-out clothes, and let them down to Jeremiah by ropes. He told the prophet to put them under his armpits, between his skin and the ropes, and only then did the men pull. Jeremiah remained in the court of the guard.
Chapter 39 closes the story with a promise. Ebed-melech would not be handed over to the men he feared, would not fall by the sword, and would keep his life as a prize of war, “because you have trusted in me” (Jeremiah 39:15-18, NRSV). The text itself says the word came while Jeremiah was still confined in the court of the guard, that is, before the city fell, even though the narrative places it afterward. The BAS notes that the promise resembles the one given to Jeremiah's scribe Baruch in Jeremiah 45.
A Cushite in the court of Judah
Cush, which Egyptian sources call Kush, covered what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt, the Nubia of Egyptologists. It should not be confused with modern Ethiopia, which lies much farther south in the Horn of Africa, cautions Kevin Burrell, an Old Testament professor, in an ANE Today article. That is why traditional translations such as the King James say “Ethiopian” where others say “Cushite.”
According to Burrell, the Hebrew Bible mentions Cushites 54 times, mostly in military settings. Jeremiah 46:9, for example, mentions Cushite warriors in Egyptian armies. The Cushites conquered Egypt and founded the 25th Dynasty, which lasted about a hundred years beginning in the middle of the eighth century B.C.E. Taharqa, the “Tirhakah, king of Cush” of 2 Kings 19:9, marched his army toward Judah in 701 B.C.E. to confront the Assyrians. Iconographic, archaeological and textual evidence indicates that Cushite-Egyptian soldiers were defending Judean towns such as Lachish at the same time.
That makes a Nile Valley African in Judah unsurprising. It does not explain how Ebed-melech ended up in Jerusalem more than a century after Taharqa's campaign. The text is silent. The BAS asks whether he was a mercenary, an adviser, a servant or perhaps a proselyte, and notes that the Bible tends to give only the information that serves a book's themes. None of those options rests on a document. They are questions.
Name, title and eunuch: what the Hebrew leaves open
The name means “servant of the king,” and scholars disagree on whether that combination is a title or a personal name. The doubt is old. The Targum rendered the name as “a servant of King Zedekiah,” and later writers went so far as to make Zedekiah himself the “Ethiopian.” The Jewish Encyclopedia records that the Talmud adopted that reading (Moed Katan 16b). Another tradition, in Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, identifies him with Baruch son of Neriah. These are rabbinic readings, not historical evidence, but they show the ambiguity is not a modern invention.
Then there is the word “eunuch.” The Hebrew term can mean a eunuch or, more broadly, a court official. The NIV renders it “an official”; the King James, “one of the eunuchs.” The BAS points to commentator J. Andrew Dearman for the double possibility. In the nineteenth century, Keil and Delitzsch argued that because the king had many wives, a eunuch in charge of the harem would not be strange.
Textual criticism adds another wrinkle. According to Emanuel Tov, the Greek text, which he considers the original, does not call Ebed-melech a eunuch. The Septuagint's Jeremiah is about one-eighth shorter than the Masoretic Hebrew, and the Qumran manuscripts attest both the short and the long forms. Most scholars hold that the Hebrew behind the Greek version is older than the Masoretic text. On Tov's reading, the reference to a eunuch would belong only to the longer Hebrew edition. That is a hypothesis about the history of the text, and the debate is not closed.
The number of men varies too. Translations range between three and thirty, and the Jewish Encyclopedia notes that Ewald and Duhm preferred “three.”
What archaeology has, and what it lacks
In our reporting, we found no seal, ostracon or inscription that names this Ebed-melech. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the name occurs in a Phoenician inscription (CIS I 46), which suggests the name type existed in the Semitic world, not that it is the same man.
What does exist are clay seal impressions, called bullae, belonging to people mentioned in Jeremiah 38. In 2005, excavations in the City of David turned up a bulla reading “belonging to Jehucal son of Shelemiah son of Shovi.” In 2008, Eilat Mazar found another bearing the name Gedaliah son of Pashhur, in the same stratum and a few yards from the first. Both names appear in Jeremiah 37:3 and 38:1, and both men were among those who urged the king to imprison the prophet. Mazar told the Trumpet that the Jehucal bulla came from inside the palace structure and the Gedaliah bulla from outside the wall at the foot of the same spot, according to the blog BiblePlaces.
There are caveats. The names were common: Jehucal also turns up at Tell es-Safi and in one of the Arad letters. BiblePlaces, which covered the 2008 find, noted that Mazar had earlier had to apologize for reading an inscription backward after announcing a previous seal too quickly, and it criticized elevating archaeologists on the strength of unreviewed identifications, while stressing that the new seal was not part of that dispute. Moreover, Mazar believed the Large Stone Structure, near where the seals turned up, might be King David's palace, an identification other scholars dispute, suggesting it was a Jebusite building.
What can be said with caution is that the seals show an administration in Jerusalem in which men with those names and patronymics were active in the period the book describes. They do not prove Ebed-melech existed, and they do not contradict it. A few meters down the slope, Yigal Shiloh had found an archive of more than fifty seal impressions, among them that of Gemariah son of Shaphan (Jeremiah 36), an official more friendly to Jeremiah.
Why the story matters to readers of the Bible
For Burrell, the Hebrew Bible judges foreign peoples on moral and theological grounds, not ethnic ones: what counts is the response to God. He cites Amos 9:7, Zephaniah 3:10, Psalm 68:31 and Isaiah 18:7, passages in which Cush appears under judgment and also under the promise of salvation. Ebed-melech fits that frame. In a chapter where Judah's nobles act by force and the king gives way, it is a foreigner who stands against them, and Jeremiah 39:18 credits him with trust in God.
Many scholars draw a parallel with the other Cushite eunuch in the Bible, the one in Acts 8:26-40. Deusdedit Musinguzi, author of a monograph on the passage, sees in Ebed-melech a model of compassion, justice and courage, and First Things calls the Ethiopian of Acts a latter-day Ebed-melech. That is a theological reading, not a demonstrated historical link.
Later tradition made him the hero of legends. In “The Rest of the Words of Baruch,” published in Greek by J. Rendel Harris in 1889, Ebed-melech sleeps under a tree for sixty-six years while the figs he was carrying stay fresh. Rabbinic sources count him among those who entered paradise alive, and an Ethiopian legend has him sleep seventy years. None of this is history, but it shows how deeply the episode marked Jewish and Christian imagination.
The discussion therefore has layers: the Targum and the Talmud, Harris's 1889 edition, the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901 to 1906, Tov's 2000 article in Bible Review, Ronnie S. Sadler Jr.'s 2005 book on race and othering in the Hebrew Bible, the bullae of 2005 and 2008, Burrell's work in 2020, and now the BAS piece.
Where popular readings go too far
The first caution is the label of novelty. There is no new find, no new dig and no new study here, only a fresh reading of old verses. The second is the word “Ethiopian,” which leads many readers to picture today's Ethiopia, when ancient Cush was something else. The third is social status: devotional writing often calls him a slave, while the Bible says only that he was an official in the king's house.
Then there is the image at the top of the BAS article. Its caption identifies it as “The Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem,” by Francesco Hayez, 1867. The canvas depicts the Roman army's destruction of the Second Temple during the Great Jewish Revolt, in A.D. 70, not the Babylonian siege in which Ebed-melech acted, more than six centuries earlier.
Finally, some passages in the article are the author's interpretation, not data from the text. The scene at the Benjamin Gate as a possibly routine audience, and the closing line that makes him more kingly than the king, are legitimate readings, but what the Hebrew records is plainer: a foreign official, a cistern, rags, ropes and a promise.
