Jeremiah 41:7, commentary and pictures

Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, with the men that were with him, slew those who came into the midst of the city and cast them into the midst of the pit. The victims were seventy of the eighty men who had come to see Gedaliah, whom Ishmael had already killed. The wider account is the assassination of Gedaliah at Mizpah and the scattering of the Jewish remnant left by the king of Babylon. Gedaliah was the Jewish viceroy left by Nebuchadnezzar after the destruction of Jerusalem. The account is part of the dispersing of the Jews who remained in Judah after Babylon carried the nation into captivity under the action of the Ammonite king.

The verse belongs to Jeremiah 32 to 45, which records the history of the two years before the fall of Jerusalem, and stands in the portion uttered during the reign of Gedaliah. It belongs to the block Jeremiah 40-45, which in chronological order comes after Jeremiah 39:15-18 and Jeremiah 39:1-14. Jeremiah's prophecies after chapter 20 are not placed in chronological order, the displacement having come when the manuscript rolls were gathered together in one book, the chapter itself nearly always clearly indicating its chronology, and the displacement making no change whatever in the teaching.

This event was the reason the Jews observed a fast in the seventh month. The murder is commemorated by the Fast of Gedaliah on Tisri 3, one of four fasts commemorating events connected with the fall of Jerusalem, and that fast begins at daybreak.