A Mouth Appointed Before a City Falls

Anathoth, about three miles north-east of Jerusalem, was a priests’ town (Joshua 21:18), and it was where Solomon banished the priest Abiathar, the last of Eli’s line, to his fields (1 Kings 2:26). Jeremiah’s family may descend from that deposed house. His father Hilkiah is probably not the high priest of the same name who found the book of the law.

The thirteenth year of Josiah is about 627 BC. Josiah had begun purging the high places the year before (2 Chronicles 34:3), and the book of the law would be found in the temple five years later, in his eighteenth year (2 Kings 22:3–8). The call comes in the early stirrings of reform, not in a time of open apostasy.

The fifth month is Ab. The burning of the temple fell on its seventh day according to 2 Kings 25:8 and its tenth according to 52:12, and Jewish tradition keeps a fast on the ninth. The heading stops at the fall, though the book follows Jeremiah on into Egypt (chapters 43–44); it frames some forty years of warning rather than the whole of his life.

The heading spoke about Jeremiah; with “unto me” he starts speaking for himself. First-person accounts of a prophet’s call are rare in the Old Testament, Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1–3 being the other great examples, and this is the only one that reaches back before the prophet was born.

“Formed” is yatsar, the potter’s verb, and in chapter 18 Jeremiah will watch a potter forming clay on the wheel. “Knew” carries the sense of choosing, as in Amos 3:2, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.” Paul describes his own call in these terms: God “separated me from my mother’s womb” (Galatians 1:15).

“Ah” is ahah, a cry of dismay, the word Joshua and Gideon used when things went badly (Joshua 7:7; Judges 6:22). Literally Jeremiah says “I do not know how to speak”, close to Moses’ “I am not eloquent” (Exodus 4:10). Solomon used the same word, naar, of himself at his accession: “I am but a little child” (1 Kings 3:7).

God quotes Jeremiah’s own words back to him and forbids them. “To all that I shall send thee” can equally mean “to whomever I send thee”: the audiences will be chosen for him. The two verbs, go and speak, are the whole job description; nothing is said about results.

“I am with thee” is the answer Moses received at the bush (Exodus 3:12) and Gideon at the winepress (Judges 6:16). “Their faces” looks ahead to the audiences not yet named, which verse 18 will list. “Deliver” is natsal, to snatch away, the verb David used of rescuing a lamb “out of his mouth” when a lion took it (1 Samuel 17:35).

Isaiah’s lips were touched with a live coal to purge them (Isaiah 6:7); Jeremiah’s mouth is touched by the LORD’s own hand, and the need is supply rather than cleansing. “I have put my words in thy mouth” is almost the wording of Deuteronomy 18:18, the promise of a prophet like Moses.

“Set thee over” is paqad, the verb for appointing an overseer, used when Potiphar made Joseph “overseer over his house” (Genesis 39:4). The six verbs return as a refrain through the book, and 31:28 joins them with the watching of verse 12: “like as I have watched over them, to pluck up... so will I watch over them, to build, and to plant.”

The almond is the first tree in the land to blossom, flowering in late winter while everything else is still bare, and Aaron’s rod proved his calling by putting out almond blossoms overnight (Numbers 17:8). The question “Jeremiah, what seest thou?” follows the pattern of Amos 7:8 and 8:2, where God names the prophet and asks the same.

“Thou hast well seen” is the chapter’s only word of approval, given for simply looking accurately. The verb of watching behind “hasten” comes back in 5:6, where “a leopard shall watch over their cities”, and in 44:27, “I will watch over them for evil, and not for good”: the same wakefulness can guard or stalk.

The pot is literally “blown upon”, a cauldron over a fire that is being fanned to keep it at the boil, the ordinary cooking pot of a household. Ezekiel later takes up the same image, with Jerusalem’s leaders boasting “this city is the caldron, and we be the flesh” (Ezekiel 11:3), and turns it against them (Ezekiel 24:3–5).

Babylon lies almost due east of Jerusalem, but armies from Mesopotamia came by the north, following the Euphrates round the desert and down through Syria. So “the north” is the direction every great invasion came from. “Break forth” is literally “be opened”, as a gate or a sluice is opened.

The prophecy is fulfilled with uncanny exactness in 39:3: when the city was broken, “all the princes of the king of Babylon came in, and sat in the middle gate”, and they are named one by one. The gate was where a ruler sat to judge, so thrones set there announce a change of government, not a raid.

“Utter my judgments” is courtroom language, a verdict pronounced. The three charges set the vocabulary of the whole book: “forsaken me” returns in 2:13, “burned incense” runs on to the incense offered to the queen of heaven in Egypt (44:17), and “the works of their own hands” are the idols mocked in 10:3–5.

“Gird up thy loins” means tuck the long robe into the belt so the legs are free, as Elijah did to run before Ahab’s chariot (1 Kings 18:46). The Hebrew plays on one verb, chatat: do not be shattered before them, or I will shatter you before them. Fear of the audience is met by a greater fear.

The temple’s two bronze pillars, Jachin and Boaz, would be broken in pieces and carried to Babylon (52:17); Jeremiah is made a pillar of iron that will not be. “The people of the land” is a term for Judah’s landed citizens, a political force that put kings on the throne, as it did Josiah (2 Kings 21:24).

The last clause repeats verse 8 word for word, closing the call as it began. God will say the whole promise again in 15:20, almost unchanged, just after Jeremiah has accused him of being “as a liar, and as waters that fail”: the original commission is simply reissued.