The Cup Reaches the Hand That Conquered

The fourth year of Jehoiakim is 605 BC, the year Nebuchadrezzar defeated Pharaoh Necho at Carchemish on the Euphrates (46:2). Nebuchadrezzar became king that same summer when his father Nabopolassar died, so the date marks the moment the balance of the whole region tipped toward Babylon.

Chapter 36 is dated to the same year: Jeremiah, barred from the temple, dictates his oracles to Baruch to be read in his place (36:1–5). This speech to “all the people” may be the kind of material that scroll contained, though the book does not say so.

Josiah’s thirteenth year (1:2) is 627 BC, and counting both ends gives twenty-three years to 605. “Rising early and speaking” is a phrase almost peculiar to Jeremiah, used eleven times in the book (7:13, 11:7, 26:5, 35:14 among them), for effort begun at first light and kept up.

“His servants the prophets” is the phrase 2 Kings 17:13 and 17:23 use to explain the fall of Samaria: the LORD had testified “by all the prophets”, and Israel would not hear. Judah is being shown the same explanation before its own fall.

The Hebrew makes a pun of the call: shuvu, “turn”, and shevu, “dwell”. Turning back is the way to stay put. “For ever and ever” is literally from age to age, the permanence the land was given on.

“The works of your hands” are idols, the phrase of 1:16, where Judah “worshipped the works of their own hands”. The promise “I will do you no hurt” uses ra’, the same word for evil that runs through the chapter, the disaster God would have held back.

The voice has changed: verses 3 to 6 were Jeremiah reporting what he and the prophets said, and now God speaks in his own person, “unto me, saith the LORD”. The purpose clause is bitterly ironic, as if provoking him were the goal and their own harm the prize.

The charge is reduced to a single clause. “Not hearkened” or “not heard” has now come four times in six verses (3, 4, 7, 8), the one refrain of the whole speech.

“Families of the north” recalls 1:15. “Utterly destroy” is the verb of the ban, cherem, used for Jericho and the Canaanite cities in Joshua; it now falls on Judah. The Greek Septuagint lacks both Nebuchadrezzar’s name and “my servant” here, as it does again in 27:6 and 43:10.

Grinding grain on a hand mill was the first sound of every morning, women’s daily work (Exodus 11:5; Ecclesiastes 12:4), and a lamp burned in an inhabited house all night. Revelation 18:22–23 takes up these same losses, the millstone and the candle, against a later Babylon.

Seventy was a lifespan (Psalm 90:10), and Isaiah 23:15 gives Tyre seventy years, “according to the days of one king”. An inscription of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon says the god Marduk had decreed seventy years of desolation for Babylon itself, so the figure was a known span of divine judgment.

Babylon fell to Cyrus of Persia in 539 BC, sixty-six years after this oracle, on the night Daniel 5:30 records. “I will punish” is paqad again, the verb of visitation, here applied to the empire that carried out the visitation on others.

“All that is written in this book” refers to the book itself, a scroll already in existence. In the Greek Septuagint the oracles against the nations (in the Hebrew, chapters 46–51) stand at this very point, directly after these words.

“Serve themselves of them” means reduce them to slavery. “The works of their own hands” is the phrase used of Judah’s idols in verses 6 and 7, now turned on Babylon’s deeds: the conqueror will be repaid by the same measure it used.

The cup of wrath is an old picture: Psalm 75:8 has a cup in the LORD’s hand whose dregs the wicked must drain, and Isaiah 51:17 speaks of Jerusalem having drunk “the cup of his fury”. “At my hand” casts God as the host passing the cup to each guest.

“Be moved” is ga’ash, to reel or heave, a word used of the earth quaking (Psalm 18:7). “Be mad” is the verb for acting like a madman, the behaviour David feigned before Achish (1 Samuel 21:13). The cause is named at once: the sword.

Jeremiah had been appointed “a prophet unto the nations” and set “over the nations” (1:5, 1:10); this is that commission carried out. The sentence reports the action in a line, with none of the effort or distance it would have required.

The cities of Judah come second, and the book later names the last two still holding out, Lachish and Azekah (34:7). Kings and princes drink alongside the people; no rank is served a different cup. Of all the names in the roll, only Jerusalem’s is given its four words of ruin.

In 605 the Pharaoh was Necho II, whose army had just been broken at Carchemish. Egypt comes second, straight after Judah and before its neighbours, the power Judah had leaned on. Its roll runs from king to servants to princes to all his people.

“Mingled people” is erev, foreign mercenaries or mixed populations, as in the “mixed multitude” that left Egypt (Exodus 12:38). Uz was Job’s homeland (Job 1:1), placed near Edom by Lamentations 4:21. Gath is missing from the Philistine cities; the “remnant of Ashdod” had survived a siege by Psammetichus I that Herodotus says lasted twenty-nine years.

Three neighbours east of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, each descended from a relative of Israel: Edom from Esau, Moab and Ammon from Lot. All three send envoys to Zedekiah in 27:3, and each receives its own oracle in chapters 48 and 49.

Tyre and Sidon were the Phoenician ports. The “isles which are beyond the sea” are the coastlands and colonies Phoenicia planted across the Mediterranean. Nebuchadrezzar later besieged Tyre for thirteen years, a campaign Ezekiel says earned him no wages (Ezekiel 29:18).

Dedan and Tema were oasis towns on the Arabian caravan route; Nabonidus, Babylon’s last king, lived ten years at Tema. Buz appears with Uz as a son of Nahor (Genesis 22:21). “Utmost corners” is literally those with the corners of the hair clipped, a desert custom Leviticus 19:27 forbade; the same phrase is in 9:26.

In unpointed Hebrew “Arabia” and “mingled people” are spelled with the same three letters, ‘rb, so the two phrases may be variants of one line. Either way the verse sweeps up the tent-dwelling tribes of the desert fringe.

Zimri is otherwise unknown, perhaps linked to Zimran, a son of Abraham by Keturah (Genesis 25:2). Elam lay east of Babylon with its capital at Susa. The Medes, in north-western Iran, would help bring Babylon down; 51:11 and 51:28 name “the kings of the Medes” against it.

“One with another” is literally each to his brother, as if the cup is passed along the table from one guest to the next. The list closes with “all the kingdoms of the world”, and only then with the one king held back to drink last.

Five imperatives in a row: drink, be drunken, spew, fall, rise no more. “Spue” is the 1611 spelling of spew, to vomit. Habakkuk, writing of the Chaldeans, uses the same picture in reverse: “drink thou also... the cup of the LORD’s right hand shall be turned unto thee” (Habakkuk 2:16).

The verb is doubled, “drinking ye shall drink”. The book applies it to Edom in 49:12: those whose judgment was not to drink “have assuredly drunken”, and Edom shall not go unpunished.

Ezekiel, in his vision of the executioners, is told “begin at my sanctuary” (Ezekiel 9:6). “Utterly unpunished” is a doubled legal verb, to be held clean or acquitted, the word of Exodus 34:7, that the LORD “will by no means clear the guilty”.

Amos 1:2 has the LORD roar “from Zion”; here he roars “from on high”, from heaven, because Zion itself is under judgment. The shout of grape treaders is hedad, the rhythmic cry of men crushing grapes underfoot, whose silence in Moab is mourned in 48:33.

Hosea 4:1 announced that “the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land”; the lawsuit now extends to the nations. “Plead with all flesh” means to enter into judgment with every living person, as a litigant does with a defendant.

Evil travels from nation to nation like a contagion. “From the coasts of the earth” is the phrase of 6:22, where “a great nation shall be raised from the sides of the earth” against Zion; the storm that once came for Jerusalem now rises for everyone.

“The slain of the LORD” recurs in Isaiah 66:16, “the slain of the LORD shall be many”. Three burial duties are refused in a row, lament, gathering and burial, the three things a family owed its dead.

“Wallow yourselves in the ashes” is the mourning of 6:26, once asked of the daughter of Judah, now demanded of the rulers of every nation. “Principal of the flock” means the leading rams, the strong animals that walk at the head of a herd.

The Hebrew is literally “flight shall perish from the shepherds”, the idiom of Amos 2:14, “the flight shall perish from the swift”. Being a leader gives no head start when the whole field is shut.

The voices of bridegroom and bride were silenced in verse 10; the only voice left to hear is the shepherds’ howling. Zechariah 11:3 takes the line up: “a voice of the howling of the shepherds; for their glory is spoiled”. The one who spoils the pasture is the LORD.

“Peaceable habitations” are pastures of peace, ne’ot hashalom. “Cut down” is a verb from damam, to be silent: the pastures are struck dumb. After the roar and the shouting of the chapter, it ends in quiet.

In 4:7 the lion come up from his thicket was the destroyer of nations; now the lion leaving its covert is the LORD himself. “Fierceness of the oppressor” is read by many manuscripts and the Septuagint as “the sword of the oppressor”, the phrase found in 46:16 and 50:16.