Jeremiah 52:28
This is the people whom Nebuchadrezzar carried away captive: in the seventh year three thousand Jews and three and twenty: This is the people whom Nebuchadrezzar carried away captive: in the seventh year three thousand Jews and three and twenty:
In the verse, “Jews” means members of the kingdom of Judah. The verse records that Nebuchadrezzar carried 3,023 Jews into captivity in the seventh year of his reign. The 832 captives are designated “souls” in the Hebrew margin, showing that “soul” can mean a person.
Together with the following verses, the verse gives the numbers carried captive to Babylon in successive deportations. The few thousand who survived the destruction of Jerusalem were only a remnant that escaped. They were a small remnant of a nation that had numbered millions.
The destruction of Jerusalem and carrying away of the people came a few years after Jeremiah’s warning. It fulfilled God’s promise and threat that if the people bore no burdens on the Sabbath and obeyed Him about His holy day Jerusalem would stand forever, but if they would not hearken He would destroy it. The verse belongs to the history of Babylon’s judgment, doom and fall and to the account of Jerusalem’s destruction and the people carried into captivity. Babylon’s unheeded warnings ending in destruction make the account a lesson warning other cities, places and people that forget and defy God of the consequences of defiance and of coming judgment.