The Covenant Reaches Jeremiah’s Own Town

This heading opens several of the book’s prose sermons (7:1; 18:1; 21:1), whose vocabulary is close to Deuteronomy’s. Many scholars connect this one with the covenant Josiah made after the book of the law was found in 622 BC, when “all the people stood to the covenant” (2 Kings 23:3). The text itself names no occasion.

The command “Hear ye” is plural, though Jeremiah alone is then told to speak, and interpreters differ over who else is addressed. “The words of this covenant” is the heading of the covenant made in Moab, “These are the words of the covenant” (Deuteronomy 29:1), and the phrase used of the book read to Josiah’s assembly (2 Kings 23:2).

The curse is the last of the twelve pronounced from Mount Ebal: “Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen” (Deuteronomy 27:26). Each of those curses was answered with “Amen” by the people, which is exactly what Jeremiah will say in verse 5.

“The iron furnace” is Moses’ name for Egypt: “the LORD hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace” (Deuteronomy 4:20), and Solomon repeated it at the temple’s dedication (1 Kings 8:51). A kur was a smelting furnace, and iron needed the fiercest heat; Israel was forged there long before the refining fires of 6:29 and 9:7.

“So be it” is the Hebrew amen. Jeremiah says it once more in the book, with heavy irony, to the false prophet Hananiah: “Amen: the LORD do so” (28:6). “Milk and honey” is goats’ milk and devash, which usually meant a thick syrup boiled from dates or grapes as well as bees’ honey: the produce of pasture and orchard.

At Sinai the people answered, “All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Exodus 24:7), literally “we will do and we will hear”. Jeremiah’s commission puts the two verbs in their natural order, “hear... and do”, and takes them on the road, town by town, as Jehoshaphat’s Levites once carried the book of the law round the cities of Judah (2 Chronicles 17:9).

“Earnestly protested” is the doubled verb of formal testimony, “testifying I testified”, a witness giving solemn warning in court, as Moses did: “I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish” (Deuteronomy 8:19). Most of verses 7 and 8 are absent from the Greek, which keeps only “but they did them not”.

Daniel’s prayer in exile looks back and agrees: “the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses... And he hath confirmed his words, which he spake against us” (Daniel 9:11–12). “Every one” makes the refusal personal, each walking in the imagination of his own heart, not merely the nation as an abstraction.

“Conspiracy” is qesher, the word for a palace plot against a king, as when Athaliah tore her clothes and cried “Treason, Treason” (2 Kings 11:14). The people are charged with treason against their divine king. Isaiah 8:12 told the prophet not to join the popular talk of conspiracy; here God himself uses the word.

“Their forefathers” is literally “their first fathers”, the wilderness generation, so the relapse reaches all the way back. “Have broken my covenant” uses the verb of Leviticus 26:15, and 31:32 will use it again to explain why a new covenant is needed: “which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them”.

Proverbs gives Wisdom the same reply to those who ignored her: “Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me” (Proverbs 1:28). Micah 3:4 says it of Jerusalem’s rulers. “Not able to escape” is literally “not able to go out from”, a trap with no exit.

God had said it before, in the days of the judges: “Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of your tribulation” (Judges 10:14). The Hebrew doubles the verb, “saving they shall not save them”, a flat certainty. The incense is still smouldering on the altars as the cry goes up.

The altars in the streets were often on the flat rooftops; 32:29 speaks of houses “upon whose roofs they have offered incense unto Baal”. Josiah had pulled down “the altars that were on the top of the upper chamber of Ahaz” (2 Kings 23:12), yet the count has climbed back to one for every street.

The ban on intercession from 7:16 returns almost word for word, with a new reason: “in the time that they cry unto me for their trouble”. “Trouble” is raah, the same word as the “evil” God brings in verse 11 and the evil they have done in verse 17; Hebrew uses one word for the wrong and for the ruin it brings.

“My beloved” is yedidi, the word in Solomon’s other name, Jedidiah, “beloved of the LORD” (2 Samuel 12:25), and in Isaiah’s song, “my wellbeloved hath a vineyard” (Isaiah 5:1). The Greek reads the obscure middle of the verse as a question: “Can vows and holy flesh take away thy wickedness from thee?”

“Green” is raanan, the word used each time the book has condemned worship “under every green tree” (2:20; 3:6, 13): Israel was the green tree God himself planted. Psalm 52:8 has the faithful say, “I am like a green olive tree in the house of God.” Paul’s olive tree in Romans 11:17 also has branches “broken off”.

“Planted” is one of the six verbs of Jeremiah’s commission, “to build, and to plant” (1:10), and here it is the one that makes the judgment painful. God later says to Baruch, “that which I have planted I will pluck up, even this whole land” (45:4). Israel and Judah are named together as a single tree.

The book turns abruptly from national oracle to Jeremiah’s private danger. This is the first of the passages often called his “confessions”, laments in which he argues with God about his own life (11:18–12:6; 15:10–21; 17:14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–18). The knowledge comes to him as revelation, not as rumour.

“A lamb or an ox” is better “a docile lamb”: alluf means tame or familiar, the same word rendered “guide” in 3:4. Isaiah 53 uses both pictures of the Servant: “brought as a lamb to the slaughter” and “cut off out of the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:7–8). Early Christian readers linked this verse to the Passion.

“Reins” are the kidneys, which Hebrew treats as the seat of feeling, as the heart is of thought: God examines both. The verse returns almost unchanged in 20:12. “Revealed my cause” can be read “rolled my cause” onto God, the verb of Psalm 37:5, “Commit thy way unto the LORD”, literally roll it on to him.

Amos met the same order from the priest of Bethel, “prophesy not again any more at Bethel” (Amos 7:13), and Amos 2:12 lists silencing prophets among Israel’s sins. One suggested motive is inference only: Josiah’s reform closed the country shrines and left priests of towns like Anathoth without their altars (2 Kings 23:8–9).

The division follows the realities of a siege: the young men of fighting age fall by the sword on the walls, and the children die of hunger inside them. Lamentations 4:4 describes the second scene after the fall: “the young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them.”

Anathoth did not vanish from the map: Jeremiah later bought a family field there during the siege as a sign that fields would be bought again (32:7–9), and Ezra 2:23 counts “the men of Anathoth, an hundred twenty and eight” among the returning exiles. “The year of their visitation” gives the reckoning a date, not a vague threat.