The Word Is Eaten, and the Wound Remains

Both men are remembered for prayer that turned wrath aside: Moses after the golden calf and again at Kadesh (Exodus 32:11–14; Numbers 14:13–20), Samuel at Mizpeh and at Gilgal, where he said it would be sin to stop praying for Israel (1 Samuel 7:8–9; 12:23). Psalm 99:6 names the two together.

The reply to “Whither?” is chilling in its tidiness: each goes to the end allotted to him. “Death” here most likely means plague, as distinct from the sword. The same four-part formula is turned against Egypt in 43:11, where Jeremiah announces what Nebuchadrezzar will do there.

“Kinds” is literally “families”, as though the agents of ruin were clans assigned their work. Dogs in Israel were scavengers, not companions; the end of Jezebel (2 Kings 9:35–36) shows what their tearing meant. Birds and beasts over the dead come from the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28:26.

The phrase “removed into all kingdoms of the earth” is taken from Deuteronomy 28:25. Manasseh reigned fifty-five years, longer than any king of Judah (2 Kings 21:1), and the Book of Kings gives the same reason for the fall in 2 Kings 23:26 and 24:3. He is pointedly called the son of Hezekiah, the reformer.

“How thou doest” is literally to ask after thy peace, the ordinary greeting of the road. The three questions move from pity, to mourning, to the smallest courtesy of all, and not even the last is left to Jerusalem.

“Stretch out my hand” is the language of the plagues on Egypt, “when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt” (Exodus 7:5), now aimed at God’s own people. “Gone backward” recalls 7:24, where they “went backward, and not forward”.

The “fan” is a winnowing fork, used to toss threshed grain into the wind so the chaff blows away. Threshing floors often lay at a city gate (1 Kings 22:10), which may explain “in the gates of the land”; the gates may also be the passes where an invader enters.

“Above the sand of the seas” is the promise to Abraham (Genesis 22:17), inverted: what multiplies beyond counting now is widows. An attack at noon struck when armies and households rested through the heat, as Ish-bosheth was killed lying on his bed at noon (2 Samuel 4:5).

Seven children meant a full and blessed house. Hannah’s song says “she that hath many children is waxed feeble” (1 Samuel 2:5), and “languisheth” here is the same Hebrew verb. “Given up the ghost” is literally breathed out her life, the old sense of ghost as the breath or spirit.

Jeremiah addresses his mother, as he will curse the day she bore him in 20:14–18. Strife and contention are the words of a lawsuit. Lending at interest to a fellow Israelite was forbidden (Exodus 22:25; Deuteronomy 23:19), so usury marked just the sort of man a town would rightly curse.

“Cause the enemy to entreat thee” uses paga’, the verb of 7:16, “neither make intercession to me”. The book later shows the reversal in practice: Zedekiah sends to ask Jeremiah’s prayers (21:1–2; 37:3), and Nebuzar-adan, the Babylonian captain, frees him and offers him his choice (40:1–4).

“Steel” is the King James rendering of nechoshet, which is copper or bronze, the same metal as the “brasen walls” of 1:18. Iron and bronze together are the materials of Jeremiah’s own commission there, an iron pillar and walls of bronze, which is one reason the question is read as being about him.

The address has turned back to the nation, and these words recur almost exactly in 17:3. “Without price” means the plunder costs the taker nothing. “In all thy borders” means no district of the land will be spared the looting.

Many Hebrew manuscripts and 17:4 read “cause thee to serve thine enemies”, and the difference between “pass” and “serve” in Hebrew is a single letter, d for r, two characters that look much alike. “A fire is kindled in mine anger” is quoted from the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32:22.

“Thou knowest” opens the prayer on the ground Jeremiah stood on in 12:3, “thou, O LORD, knowest me”. His requests come in a rush: remember, visit, avenge, and do not let God’s patience with the persecutors go on so long that it costs the prophet his life.

“Thy words were found” may recall the book of the law found in the temple in Josiah’s eighteenth year (2 Kings 22:8), early in Jeremiah’s ministry; that is an inference, though many draw it. “Called by thy name” is the phrase the people used of themselves in 14:9, now claimed by one man.

The “assembly” is a sod, a circle of friends who sit and talk, the word Psalm 1:1 pairs with the seat of the scornful. The next chapter forbids him the house of feasting outright (16:8). “Thy hand” is the pressure of the prophetic call, the phrase Ezekiel uses in 3:14.

“A liar” renders achzav, a word for a deceptive wadi, a streambed that runs in winter and is dry when a traveller needs it in summer. Job uses the same picture of false friends: “my brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook” (Job 6:15).

The Hebrew turns on the verb shuv four times: return, bring again, let them return, return not. “Stand before me” is the phrase of verse 1, where even Moses and Samuel standing before God could not avail; the post of the intercessor is being given back to Jeremiah.

The promise renews 1:18–19 almost word for word, but chapter 1 had said only “to deliver thee”; here it is “to save thee and to deliver thee”, one more verb for the man who has just called God a failing brook. City walls were stone, so a wall of bronze is a picture of the unbreakable.

Two hands and two rescues: the wicked, and the “terrible”, aritsim, the ruthless men of violence. “Redeem” is padah, to buy free, the verb of Deuteronomy 7:8, where the LORD redeemed Israel out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh.