Pashur, being charged with the police of the temple, smites Jeremiah, i.e. causes stripes to be given him, and then orders him to be put into the stocks; literally, that which distorts—some instrument of punishment which held the body in a bent or crooked position (comp.
Jeremiah 29:26). The "stocks" were sometimes kept in a special house (2 Chronicles 16:10); these mentioned here, however, apparently stood in public, at the high—or rather, upper—gate of Benjamin, which was by—or, at—the house of the Lord.
The gate, then, was one of the temple gates, and is called "the upper" to distinguish it from one of the city gates which bore the same name (Jeremiah 37:13; Jeremiah 38:7). It is presumably the same which is called "the new gate of the Lord's house" (Jeremiah 26:10; Jeremiah 36:10), as having been comparatively lately built (2 Kings 15:35).