The God Who Needs to Be Carried

The Greek version and a Hebrew fragment of Jeremiah from Qumran (4QJerb) both give this chapter in a shorter form: they lack verses 6 to 8 and 10, and set verse 9 inside verse 5. The longer Hebrew text adds the hymn-like praise lines. “House of Israel” may be addressing exiles already living among idols.

“Learn not” echoes Deuteronomy 18:9, “thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations”. The “signs of heaven” are omens read from eclipses, comets and planets, the speciality of Babylonian astrologers, whom Isaiah 47:13 mocks as “the monthly prognosticators”. The heathen are frightened by the sky; Israel is told not to be.

“Customs” is chuqqot, statutes, the word for Israel’s own God-given laws, applied with irony to the procedure of idol-making. Isaiah 44:14–17 tells the same process at greater length and adds the sharpest detail: the carpenter burns half the log to bake bread, “and the residue thereof he maketh a god”. The tool is an adze or chisel.

Isaiah 41:7 has the same finishing touch: the smith “fastened it with nails, that it should not be moved”. The Philistines learned why this mattered when Dagon was found “fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the LORD” and they had to set him back in his place (1 Samuel 5:3).

“Upright as the palm tree” is probably better read “like a scarecrow in a cucumber field”, since tomer can mean a post and miqshah a melon patch. The apocryphal Letter of Jeremiah, which expands this chapter into a whole tract against idols, uses the same picture: “as a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers”.

“There is none like unto thee” answers the question of the Song of the Sea, “Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods?” (Exodus 15:11). The verse makes the name, not an image, the thing that is “great in might”: Israel’s God is known by what is said about him rather than by what is carved.

The song of the victors in Revelation 15:3–4 borrows the line: “King of saints”, many manuscripts reading “King of nations”, and “Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name?” “To thee doth it appertain” renders a verb found only here, meaning it is fitting: fear is what God is due.

“Brutish” is baar, from the word for cattle, beastlike in understanding. The second half is terse Hebrew, “the instruction of vanities, wood it is”: the only lesson an idol can teach is that it is a piece of timber. “Doctrine” is musar, the same word as the “correction” Judah refused in 2:30 and 7:28.

Tarshish was famous for its metals; Ezekiel 27:12 lists its trade as “silver, iron, tin, and lead”. Uphaz is unknown, perhaps a variant of Ophir, and Daniel 10:5 mentions its fine gold. Blue and purple, tekhelet and argaman, were costly dyes from Mediterranean sea snails, the colours of the tabernacle hangings (Exodus 26:1).

The last line is close to Nahum 1:6, “Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger?”, written against Nineveh a generation earlier. “The living God” is the title David used when Goliath defied “the armies of the living God” (1 Samuel 17:26). This is one of the verses the Greek lacks.

The Aramaic sentence carries a rhyme: the gods who did not make, avadu, will perish, yevadu. It even spells “earth” two ways in one line, arqa and then ara, an older and a newer form of the word. Aramaic was the international language of the day, so this is a reply the exiles could give their neighbours in their neighbours’ own tongue.

Verses 12 to 16 are repeated word for word in 51:15–19, in the oracle against Babylon itself. The three nouns, power, wisdom and discretion, are those of Proverbs 3:19, “The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens”. “Stretched out” is the verb for pitching a tent, an image that returns in verse 20.

Psalm 135:7 contains the same line almost word for word: “He causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings for the rain; he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries.” God’s “voice” is thunder, as in Psalm 29. The picture is of storehouses of weather, like “the treasures of the snow” in Job 38:22.

Psalm 135, which supplied verse 13, goes on in the same order to the idols: “neither is there any breath in their mouths” (Psalm 135:17). Habakkuk 2:19 mocks in the same way: “it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in the midst of it.” “Founder” is tsoref, the smelter of 9:7.

“The work of errors” is better “a work of mockery”, something to laugh at. When cities fell, their gods were carried off by the conquerors or broken up for metal, the scene Isaiah 46:1–2 pictures in Babylon itself: “Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth”, loaded on weary beasts. An idol’s day of reckoning is the day its city falls.

The Song of Moses says “the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance” (Deuteronomy 32:9); here the belonging runs both ways, God as Jacob’s portion and Israel as his. “Rod” is shevet, which also means a tribe. “The LORD of hosts is his name” is the signature line that closes Amos’s creation hymns (Amos 4:13).

“Thy wares” is kinah, a word found only here, most likely a bundle, the pack a deportee could carry. “The fortress” is matsor, a place under siege, so the address is to people already hemmed in. Ezekiel acts out the same order, packing “stuff for removing” and carrying it out through a hole in the wall (Ezekiel 12:3–7).

“Sling out” is the image Abigail used to David: the lives of his enemies God would “sling out, as out of the middle of a sling” (1 Samuel 25:29). A stone flung from a sling does not choose where it lands. The last clause is obscure in Hebrew; it may mean “so that they feel it”, or “so that they may be found”.

“My wound is grievous” uses the same pair of words as 30:12, “Thy bruise is incurable, and thy wound is grievous”; five verses later comes the reversal there: “I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds” (30:17). The speaker here is the city, accepting the blow: “this is a grief, and I must bear it.”

“They are not” is the phrase of Rachel in 31:15, weeping “for her children, because they were not”, and of Jacob mourning “Joseph is not, and Simeon is not” (Genesis 42:36). “Stretch forth my tent” uses natah, the verb of verse 12, where God “stretched out the heavens”: he pitches the sky, and Zion cannot pitch a tent.

“Brutish” is baar, the word used in verses 8 and 14 for the makers of idols: the kings have become as dull as the carvers. “Shall not prosper” is hiskil, which also means to act wisely; they neither act wisely nor succeed. Chapter 23 opens on the same charge: “Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!”

“Bruit” is the French-derived English word for a report, surviving in “bruited about”; the Hebrew shemuah is news heard. “A great commotion” is raash, the earthquake word of 4:24, used by Nahum 3:2 for “the noise of the rattling of the wheels”. The rumour arrives first, then the rumble of chariots behind it.

The prayer draws on wisdom sayings: “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps” (Proverbs 16:9), and “Man’s goings are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way?” (Proverbs 20:24). “Direct” is hekhin, to set firm, the verb used of God establishing the world in verse 12.

“Bring me to nothing” is literally “make me few”, dwindle away. The prayer uses the words of Psalm 6:1, “O LORD, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.” God answers in the same terms in 30:11: “I will correct thee in measure”, where “in measure” is lamishpat, this verse’s “with judgment”.

The prayer is almost identical to Psalm 79:6–7, a lament over the ruined temple: “Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee... For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place.” “Habitation” is naveh, a shepherd’s pasture, so Jacob is pictured as a flock devoured along with its grazing ground.