What is happening when the word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah?

The next two chapters (Jeremiah 32:1–44 and Jeremiah 33:1–26) are written in prose and they give an account of events that take place while the prophet is shut up in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah (Jeremiah 32:2;Jeremiah 33:1). The events recorded here actually belong with Jeremiah 37:1–38:28 which describe how Jeremiah is accused of desertion and arrested. However, these accounts have been included here in Jeremiah 32:1–44 and Jeremiah 33:1–26 because they continue the theme of Jeremiah 30:1–24 and Jeremiah 31:1–40. Jeremiah 32:1–44 and Jeremiah 33:1–26 are therefore included in the Book of Consolation by most commentators even though the events were originally separate from the message of a new covenant¹.

The date when Jeremiah received this word from the Lord is given as the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah. It is also the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. This takes place during the reign of Zedekiah, but as in Jeremiah 25:1, the more significant factor for Judah, politically speaking, is that Nebuchadnezzar was ruling in Babylon and his army was besieging Jerusalem. The Babylonian army arrived at the gates of Jerusalem in the tenth month of the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign (Jeremiah 52:4–5) which would have been towards the middle of 588 BC. About a year after the siege began, Nebuchadnezzar briefly withdrew his army from Jerusalem because the Egyptian army attacked the Babylonians in an attempt to help Judah (Jeremiah 37:1–10). This intervention was short-lived and soon the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem was continued. Jeremiah had tried to use the break in the siege to return to his hometown of Anathoth but he had been intercepted, accused of treason and arrested (Jeremiah 37:11–15). The events of chapters Jeremiah 32:1–44 and Jeremiah 33:1–26 therefore took place somewhere in the second half of 587 BC, probably after the siege has started again, and Jeremiah is imprisoned.