The City Will Have Voices Again

“The second time” counts from chapter 32, where the first word in the court of the prison was the order to buy the field at Anathoth. Same place, same siege, Zedekiah’s tenth year. “Shut up” is the verb Jeremiah will use of himself in 36:5, when he cannot go into the temple.

The Hebrew says the LORD makes “it” and forms “it” without ever naming what “it” is; the Greek translators supplied “the earth”. “Formed” is the potter’s verb from the visit to the potter’s house in chapter 18. The closing “the LORD is his name” is a hymn line, heard in Amos 5:8 and 9:6.

“Mighty things” translates betsurot, a word used for fortified, walled-off cities. A man penned inside a walled city is promised knowledge that is itself walled off. A few Hebrew manuscripts read netsurot, “hidden things”, as in Isaiah 48:6, which is how some later versions render it.

The “mounts” are siege ramps of packed earth, already reported against the city in 32:24. The houses are being pulled down by the defenders themselves, most likely for stone and timber to shore up the wall against those ramps, as Isaiah 22:10 describes in an earlier crisis: “the houses have ye broken down to fortify the wall.”

The line is compressed in Hebrew and hard to parse: the men go out to fight, and the gaps left by the demolished houses end up holding corpses. “Hid my face” is the covenant threat of Deuteronomy 31:17, the withdrawal of attention that leaves a people to what they have chosen.

“Health” is arukah, the new flesh that grows over a wound. It answers Jeremiah’s own question in 8:22, “why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?” The “peace and truth” promised is shalom and emet, the very pair the false prophets offered in 14:13 as “assured peace”, now granted only after the judgment they denied.

Israel is named beside Judah. The northern kingdom had been in exile since 722 BC, more than a century before this siege, yet the promise refuses to write it off. “As at the first” reaches back past the failed kings to the beginnings of the nation.

Three different Hebrew words for wrongdoing are stacked in one sentence: iniquity (avon, the bent thing), sinned (chata, missing the mark) and transgressed (pasha, rebellion). The promise is built to cover every category the people could name.

The nations “fear and tremble”, but at goodness, not at an army. The Hebrew words, pachad and ragaz, are the vocabulary of panic. In 13:11 Israel was meant to be God’s “name, and for a praise, and for a glory”; the same set of words returns here as a restored city.

“Which ye say” quotes the people back to themselves, repeating their line from 32:43, “It is desolate without man or beast.” The verse piles up the emptiness, without man, without inhabitant, without beast, before the sentence is allowed to reach what will be heard there.

Jeremiah had announced the silencing of exactly these voices three times (7:34, 16:9, 25:10). The refrain “for the LORD is good; for his mercy endureth for ever” is the temple’s song of Psalm 136, and Ezra 3:11 has it sung when the foundation of the second temple is laid.

“Habitation” here is naveh, a word for pasture or grazing ground. Empty Judah was to be “a den of dragons” (9:11, 10:22), jackals in the Hebrew, animals that haunt ruins. Here the animals are flocks with shepherds, and their resting is the sign that people live there again.

The list of regions, hill country, lowland, Negev, Benjamin, the villages around Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, is the same survey used in 17:26 and in 32:44, where men would buy fields again. The deed Jeremiah signed in prison is being extended across the whole map.

From this verse to the end of the chapter, the Greek Old Testament has nothing; it is the longest passage in Jeremiah absent from the Septuagint. “That good thing” is literally “the good word”, the phrase of 29:10, where the return after seventy years was “my good word”.

The Branch, tsemach, is a sprout from a stump, the word of 23:5. There God would “raise” it; here he will “cause” it “to grow up”, a gardener’s verb. Zechariah later takes the word as a title, “my servant the BRANCH” (Zechariah 3:8), for a returned community without a king.

In 23:6 the name belonged to the king; here it passes to the city. In Hebrew it is YHWH tsidqenu, and it plays on Zedekiah, Tsidqiyahu, “the LORD is my righteousness”, the reigning king who is holding Jeremiah prisoner as the words are spoken.

The wording is lifted from the promise to David quoted in 1 Kings 2:4 and 8:25, “there shall not fail thee a man on the throne”. It is spoken while the last Davidic king in Jerusalem is not far from being blinded and led to Babylon in chains (39:7).

“The priests the Levites” is Deuteronomy’s way of naming the priesthood (Deuteronomy 18:1). Jeremiah was himself of a priestly family, from Anathoth (1:1), the village to which Solomon had banished the priest Abiathar (1 Kings 2:26).

A fresh heading, the second of three in this chapter (verses 1 and 23 have the others). The Book of Jeremiah marks each oracle, so the reader knows the argument that follows was given on its own and set here beside the promises.

Day and night were given a “covenant” in Genesis 8:22, “day and night shall not cease”. The challenge is framed as an impossible condition, the same kind of argument used in 31:35–36, where the sun, moon and roaring sea guarantee Israel’s survival.

“David my servant” recalls 2 Samuel 7:5, where the dynastic promise began. The same book twice calls Nebuchadnezzar “my servant” (25:9, 27:6), so the title marks usefulness to God, not virtue. The Levites are called “my ministers”, the word for attendants who stand in a king’s presence.

Stars and sand are Abraham’s promise, word for word from Genesis 22:17, now narrowed to two households. Earlier in Jeremiah, “the host of heaven” was something Judah worshipped on its rooftops (8:2, 19:13); here the stars are only a measure of something too great to count.

The heading comes again, marking the last oracle of the chapter. This one begins not with a promise but with a question about what people are saying, as if the prophet has been overhearing the talk of the city.

Which “two families”? Most read them as Israel and Judah, the two kingdoms; others take them as the royal house and the Levites, since those were named just before. The “people” who say it may be foreign observers or Judeans in despair; the Hebrew allows both.

The “ordinances of heaven and earth” are the fixed statutes, chuqqot, the same word used of the moon and stars in 31:35. The argument turns creation’s regularity into a legal guarantee: the rules of the sky are as binding as any covenant clause.

This is the only verse in the Book of Jeremiah that names Abraham and Isaac. “Rulers” is plural, moshlim, a word for governors rather than kings. The chapter ends where Jeremiah’s promises so often end, with the phrase shuv shevut, to turn back the captivity or restore the fortunes.