201 The priest Pashur son of Immer was the senior priest in God's Temple. He heard Jeremiah preach this sermon. 2 He whipped Jeremiah the prophet and put him in the stocks at the Upper Benjamin Gate of God's Temple. 3 The next day Pashur came and let him go. Jeremiah told him, "God has a new name for you: not Pashur but Danger-Everywhere, 4 because God says, 'You're a danger to yourself and everyone around you. All your friends are going to get killed in battle while you stand there and watch. What's more, I'm turning all of Judah over to the king of Babylon to do whatever he likes with them - haul them off into exile, kill them at whim. 5 Everything worth anything in this city, property and possessions along with everything in the royal treasury - I'm handing it all over to the enemy. They'll rummage through it and take what they want back to Babylon. 6 "'And you, Pashur, you and everyone in your family will be taken prisoner into exile - that's right, exile in Babylon. You'll die and be buried there, you and all your cronies to whom you preached your lies.'"
Matthew Henry's Commentary on Jeremiah 20:1-6
Commentary on Jeremiah 20:1-6
(Read Jeremiah 20:1-6)
Pashur smote Jeremiah, and put him in the stocks. Jeremiah was silent till God put a word into his mouth. To confirm this, Pashur has a name given him, "Fear on every side." It speaks a man not only in distress, but in despair; not only in danger, but in fear on every side. The wicked are in great fear where no fear is, for God can make the most daring sinner a terror to himself. And those who will not hear of their faults from God's prophets, shall be made to hear them from their consciences. Miserable is the man thus made a terror to himself. His friends shall fail him. God lets him live miserably, that he may be a monument of Divine justice.