A Righteous Branch and Words That Are Not Straw

Kings across the ancient Near East called themselves shepherds; Hammurabi opens his law code as “the shepherd”. Coming straight after the oracles on Shallum, Jehoiakim and Coniah, the shepherds here are Judah’s rulers. “Sheep of my pasture” is the phrase of Psalm 100:3. Ezekiel 34 later builds a whole chapter on this verse.

“Driven them away” is nadach, and in the very next verse God uses the same verb of himself: “whither I have driven them”. The shepherds scattered; God drove. The book lets both statements stand side by side without reducing one to the other.

“Be fruitful and increase” is the blessing of creation (Genesis 1:28) and of the new start after the flood (Genesis 9:1), here spoken over a returning remnant. “Folds” is naveh, a pasture homestead, the settled place where a flock is kept safe at night.

“Neither shall they be lacking” uses paqad a third time, the verb translated “visit” in verse 2: when the shepherd counts, none will be missing. The promise of shepherds, plural, picks up 3:15, “I will give you pastors according to mine heart”.

“Branch” is tsemach, a shoot springing from the ground; Zechariah takes it up as a title, “my servant the BRANCH” (Zechariah 3:8, 6:12). “Reign and prosper” is better “reign and deal wisely”, the verb hiskil used of the servant who “shall deal prudently” in Isaiah 52:13.

“Israel” means the northern tribes, scattered since Samaria fell in 722 BC; they are included beside Judah, the reunion promised in 3:18. “Dwell safely” is the security Moses spoke of in Deuteronomy 33:28, Israel dwelling “in safety alone”. The name reappears in 33:16, there given to the city.

These words repeat 16:14. In the Greek Septuagint, verses 7 and 8 do not stand here at all but at the end of the chapter, after verse 40, closing the section on false prophets with a promise rather than a curse.

Compared with 16:15, the wording adds a second verb, “and which led”, and names “the seed of the house of Israel”, the seed promised to Abraham. The oath now describes a journey guided all the way home, not only a departure.

The Hebrew opens with a heading, “Concerning the prophets”, a title for everything from here to verse 40, like the headings over the oracles to the nations (46:2). Jeremiah reels like the drunken kings and priests of 13:13, but his drunkenness comes from “the words of his holiness”.

“Swearing” is alah, the curse, the sanctions of the covenant (Deuteronomy 29:20), so the land mourns under a curse; Isaiah 24:6 says “the curse devoured the earth”. “Their course” is their running, the race they are set on, and their “force” is might used for the wrong ends.

“In my house” is the temple itself. Ezekiel’s vision of the temple court in the same years shows elders burning incense to images and women weeping for Tammuz (Ezekiel 8). Jeremiah had charged in 7:30 that they set their abominations in the house called by God’s name.

Psalm 35:6 prays that the wicked’s way be “dark and slippery”, a hill path at night with a push from behind. “The year of their visitation” is the phrase used against the men of Anathoth who plotted Jeremiah’s death (11:23).

“Folly” is tiflah, tastelessness, the word Job uses of food “unsavoury... without salt” (Job 6:6). The prophets of Samaria were the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal kept by Ahab and Jezebel (1 Kings 18:19). The next verse will call Jerusalem’s worse.

Ezekiel 13:22 lays exactly the same charge: the prophets “strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way”. Isaiah had already addressed Jerusalem’s leaders as “ye rulers of Sodom” (Isaiah 1:10), so the comparison had a history in the city’s own prophets.

The same sentence, wormwood to eat and poisoned water to drink, was pronounced against the whole people in 9:15. Now it is served to the prophets in particular. Wormwood is a bitter plant; the “water of gall” is water laced with a poisonous herb, as in 8:14.

“They make you vain” is literally they fill you with hevel, breath, vapour, the empty stuff of idols. A vision “of their own heart” is set against speech “out of the mouth of the LORD”, the phrase God used of speaking with Moses “mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:8).

“They say still” is a Hebrew construction of repeated action: they keep saying it. The Septuagint reads “to them that despise the word of the LORD” instead of “despise me”. The reassurance is aimed at exactly those who most need the warning.

“Counsel” is sod, the inner council. Micaiah saw the LORD enthroned with the host of heaven around him deliberating over Ahab (1 Kings 22:19–22), and Amos 3:7 says God reveals his sod to his servants the prophets. The verse piles up four verbs of perceiving.

Verses 19 and 20 recur almost verbatim at 30:23–24. The whirlwind is se’arah, the storm that took Elijah up (2 Kings 2:11). “Fall grievously upon the head” pictures a storm that whirls down and twists about the head of the wicked.

“In the latter days” is literally at the end of the days, the far horizon of what is being announced. “Consider it perfectly” doubles the verb, you will understand it with understanding: what the prophets of peace could not see now, hindsight will make plain.

Runners carried royal messages. Ahimaaz once insisted on running to David after Absalom’s death although he had no clear tidings, and when he arrived could only say he saw a great tumult and knew not what it was (2 Samuel 18:19–29). The false prophets are Ahimaaz without the honesty.

“Their evil way, and... the evil of their doings” is the pair Jeremiah used in 18:11 and 25:5. Zechariah 1:4 later sums up all “the former prophets” with the same two phrases, so this double call to turn became the recognised mark of a true prophet.

The Greek Septuagint reads it as a statement, “I am a God at hand, and not a God afar off.” As a question it attacks the false prophets’ idea of a local deity close enough to be managed, and sets against it a God whose reach no distance limits.

“Secret places” is mistarim, the word used in 13:17 of Jeremiah weeping in secret. At the temple’s dedication Solomon had said that the heaven of heavens cannot contain God (1 Kings 8:27). “Saith the LORD” comes twice in one verse.

The doubled cry, chalamti chalamti, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed”, is a claim to credentials. Dreams were a recognised channel of revelation (Numbers 12:6), but Deuteronomy 13:1–5 had warned against a “dreamer of dreams” whose message leads away from the LORD.

The Hebrew syntax breaks off, “How long? Is it in the heart of the prophets...?”, as though the sentence itself runs out of patience. The deceit of their own heart was one of the four sources of false prophecy named in 14:14.

Judges 3:7 records that Israel “forgat the LORD their God, and served Baalim”. Hosea 2:17 promised that God would take the names of Baalim out of her mouth. Here the dreams do Baal’s old work by pushing the LORD’s name out of memory, while using it.

“Chaff” is teven, straw, the food of animals: Isaiah 11:7 has the lion eat straw like the ox. Wheat feeds people. The line concedes the dream a place, “let him tell a dream”, so long as it is called a dream and not passed off as a word.

The fire echoes 5:14, “I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people wood”, and Jeremiah’s own burning bones in 20:9. The hammer is a smith’s or a quarryman’s, heavy enough to split rock. Neither image is gentle; both describe what the word does to what it meets.

Three sentences in a row begin “I am against the prophets”, one for each offence. Stealing words from a neighbour may mean copying one another’s oracles, or, as some suggest, lifting genuine lines from true prophets and reusing them for a different message.

“Say, He saith” renders a verb coined from ne’um, the solemn formula “saith the LORD”, found only here: they “oracle an oracle”. “Saith the LORD” occurs twenty-one times in this chapter of the King James alone, which shows how easily the formula could be borrowed.

“Lightness” is pachazut, recklessness or swagger. Zephaniah, Jeremiah’s contemporary, used the same root: “her prophets are light and treacherous persons” (Zephaniah 3:4). Their only product, the verse ends, is that they “shall not profit this people at all”.

“The burden of the LORD” was a standard heading for an oracle, as in Isaiah 13:1, “The burden of Babylon”. The questioners are asking for the latest word with a smirk. “Forsake” is natash, to let drop or leave lying, as one sets down a load.

The order of speakers changes from verse 33: prophet, priest, people. The punishment is “that man and his house”, one household at a time, for using one phrase. The verb for “punish” is paqad again, the visitation language that has run through the chapter since verse 2.

The approved questions are plain: what has the LORD answered, what has he spoken? “Every one to his neighbour” is the third time the chapter mentions neighbour talk, after the dreams told to a neighbour (verse 27) and words stolen from a neighbour (verse 30).

“The living God” is rare in Jeremiah; its only other use is 10:10, where the living God is set against idols that cannot move. Perverting the words of a living God treats his speech like that of a dumb idol, something the speaker can shape at will.

The instruction narrows from “every one to his neighbour” to “the prophet”, singular: Jeremiah is given the question to put to any prophet directly, a test of source rather than of style.

The phrase “The burden of the LORD” occurs three times in this one verse, as the people’s habit is quoted back to them. God had sent word forbidding the phrase; they used it anyway, which makes the offence one of refusing an explicit instruction.

“Utterly forget you” doubles the verb nashah. Several Hebrew manuscripts and the ancient versions read nasa instead, “I will surely lift you up”, the root of massa, burden: God would pick them up like a load and throw them away. Either reading answers the forgetting of his name in verse 27.

The words nearly repeat 20:11, where Jeremiah said of his persecutors “their everlasting confusion shall never be forgotten”. Those who made God’s name forgettable are given a shame that cannot be.