JEHUDI

(Je·huʹdi) [a Jew].

An officer of King Jehoiakim sent by the princes of Judah to bring to them Baruch with Jeremiah’s scroll. When Jehudi later read the same roll to Jehoiakim, the king cut it up and burned it, piece by piece, until the whole scroll was destroyed.—Jer. 36:14, 21-23, 27, 32.

Jehudi was a great-grandson of Cushi. (Jer. 36:14) His name (meaning “a Jew”) and that of his ancestor are thought by some to denote that he was not a Jew by birth, but a proselyte, his grandfather’s name suggesting that the family was from Cush, or Ethiopia. However, those of the two generations in between both have typical Jewish names (Nethaniah his father and Shelemiah his grandfather) and even the name Cushi itself is elsewhere found as a proper name of a natural-born Jew. (Zeph. 1:1) So Jehudi was most likely simply a proper name given at birth and not a name first acquired as a proselyte.