For My people have committed a double evil:
They have abandoned Me,
the fountain of living water,
and dug cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns that cannot hold water.

So they took Jeremiah and dropped him into the cistern of Malchiah the king’s son, which was in the guard’s courtyard, lowering Jeremiah with ropes. There was no water in the cistern, only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud.

A spring or cistern containing water will remain clean, but someone who touches a carcass in it will become unclean.

Drink water from your own cistern,
water flowing from your own well.

Its collapse will be like the shattering
of a potter’s jar, crushed to pieces,
so that not even a fragment of pottery
will be found among its shattered remains—
no fragment large enough to take fire from a hearth
or scoop water from a cistern.”

Don’t listen to Hezekiah, for this is what the king of Assyria says: “Make peace with me and surrender to me. Then every one of you may eat from his own vine and his own fig tree and drink water from his own cistern

They captured fortified cities and fertile land
and took possession of well-supplied houses,
cisterns cut out of rock, vineyards,
olive groves, and fruit trees in abundance.
They ate, were filled,
became prosperous, and delighted in Your great goodness.

Their nobles send their servants for water.
They go to the cisterns;
they find no water;
their containers return empty.
They are ashamed and humiliated;
they cover their heads.

But Ebed-melech, a Cushite court official employed in the king’s palace, heard Jeremiah had been put into the cistern. While the king was sitting at the Benjamin Gate,

“My lord the king, these men have been evil in all they have done to Jeremiah the prophet. They have dropped him into the cistern where he will die from hunger, because there is no more bread in the city.”

So the king commanded Ebed-melech, the Cushite, “Take from here 30 men under your authority and pull Jeremiah the prophet up from the cistern before he dies.”

So Ebed-melech took the men under his authority and went to the king’s palace to a place below the storehouse. From there he took old rags and worn-out clothes and lowered them by ropes to Jeremiah in the cistern.

and they pulled him up with the ropes and lifted him out of the cistern, but he continued to stay in the guard’s courtyard.

But when they came into the city, Ishmael son of Nethaniah and the men with him slaughtered them and threw them into a cistern.

Now the cistern where Ishmael had thrown all the corpses of the men he had struck down was a large one that King Asa had made in the encounter with Baasha king of Israel. Ishmael son of Nethaniah filled it with the slain.

The men of Israel saw that they were in trouble because the troops were in a difficult situation. They hid in caves, thickets, among rocks, and in holes and cisterns.

Then Saul himself went to Ramah. He came to the large cistern at Secu, looked around, and asked, “Where are Samuel and David?”

“At Naioth in Ramah,” someone said.

As for you,
because of the blood of your covenant,
I will release your prisoners
from the waterless cistern.

“Don’t listen to Hezekiah, for this is what the king of Assyria says: ‘Make peace with me and surrender to me. Then every one of you may eat from his own vine and his own fig tree, and every one may drink water from his own cistern