Two Explanations for the Same Ruins

The places run from north to south. Migdol and Tahpanhes were frontier posts in the eastern Delta; Israel had camped “between Migdol and the sea” in Exodus 14:2. Noph is Memphis, near modern Cairo. Pathros is Upper Egypt, from an Egyptian phrase meaning “the southern land”. Judeans were spread along the whole length of the Nile.

“No man dwelleth therein” was made literally true by the listeners themselves. Gedaliah’s settlement had kept people in Judah; their flight to Egypt finished emptying it. The ruins they are asked to remember include the land they left behind a few months earlier.

“Whom they knew not” means gods with no history with them, gods who had done nothing for Israel. The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 32:17, “to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up”. The list, neither they, ye, nor your fathers, spans three generations of strangers.

“Oh” renders na, the Hebrew particle of pleading, please. The prophets’ whole message is put in God’s mouth as a plea: please, do not do this abominable thing that I hate. The word for abomination, to’evah, is the one Deuteronomy uses of practices the nations did.

The verb “burn incense” is the chapter’s keyword; the word occurs ten times in its thirty verses in the King James. Here it is what the prophets begged them to stop doing, and the next verses show it is exactly what they have gone on doing in Egypt.

Anger is “poured forth” and “kindled”: liquid and fire. The worship under discussion consists of drink offerings poured out and incense set alight, so the judgment is described in the same two elements as the offerings that provoked it.

“Against your souls” means to your own harm. The list runs down from adults to “child and suckling”, the pair used in Lamentations 2:11 of infants fainting in Jerusalem’s streets. The remnant had fled to save these very children.

“That ye might cut yourselves off” states the result as though it were the purpose, a form of prophetic irony: they are behaving as if extinction were their aim. “The works of your hands” can mean idols, or here perhaps the cakes and offerings they made with their own hands.

“Wickedness” is said five times. “The wickedness of their wives” is literally “of his wives”, the wives of each king: Solomon’s foreign wives who turned his heart (1 Kings 11:4), Maachah and her Asherah image (1 Kings 15:13). The women are named because verse 19 will show them leading this worship.

“Humbled” is dukke’u, crushed or contrite, the root of Psalm 51:17’s “a broken and a contrite heart”. Not even the fall of Jerusalem has broken them. “Unto this day” means after everything: the siege, the fire, the murder at Mizpah.

“I will set my face against… and cut off” is the formula of the priestly law, where God sets his face against the one who eats blood or gives children to Molech and cuts him off (Leviticus 17:10, 20:3). The verdict is phrased as a sentence under Israel’s own statutes.

The verse turns the conditional of 42:15–18 into a statement. There it was “if ye wholly set your faces”; now they are the ones “that have set their faces”. The consequences, and the four words of disgrace, are carried over almost clause for clause.

“Punish” is paqad, to visit. The same verb meant a visit for good in 29:10, “I will visit you, and perform my good word”. Everything depends on which visit comes; for this community in Egypt, it will be the kind that came to Jerusalem.

“They have a desire to return” is literally “they lift up their soul”, an idiom of longing. The refugees long for the home they chose to leave. The final clause sounds circular, but it states that the only ones to return will be those who escape.

The crowd is a qahal gadol, a great assembly, perhaps gathered for a festival. Pathros lay far to the south, and at Elephantine in Upper Egypt papyri of the fifth century BC show a Jewish garrison with its own temple of YHW, whose documents mention other deities alongside him.

“The word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the LORD”: they accept that Jeremiah speaks in the LORD’s name and still refuse to listen. It is the most direct refusal of a prophet in the book, spoken to his face.

In 7:18 the whole family served the queen of heaven: children gathered wood, fathers lit the fire, women kneaded dough. Most scholars identify her with Ishtar or Astarte, the goddess linked with the planet Venus, though the Book of Jeremiah uses only the title. “Plenty of victuals” is literally “we were filled with bread”.

The time “since we left off” most likely points to Josiah’s reform of 622 BC, when such cults were purged (2 Kings 23:4–14). After it came Josiah’s death at Megiddo, vassalage and siege. It is a reading of their chronology: the people date their disasters from the reform.

“Cakes to worship her” may mean cakes “to make her image”, shaped like the goddess; moulds of that kind have been excavated at Mari on the Euphrates. “Without our men” invokes the law of Numbers 30, under which a wife’s vow stood only if her husband did not annul it. Their husbands had consented.

In chapter 42 the answer took ten days. Here Jeremiah replies at once, to “all the people which had given him that answer”. There is nothing new to ask God; this answer has been given many times over forty years.

“Came it not into his mind” is literally “did it not come up upon his heart”. The same idiom was used of child sacrifice in 7:31 and 19:5: “neither came it into my heart”. Their incense did come up into God’s heart, but as something remembered against them.

“Could no longer bear” uses nasa, to carry, the same verb that forms the Hebrew for forgiving, “bearing iniquity” (Exodus 34:7). The long patience of God is pictured as a load carried until it could be carried no longer.

Law, statutes, testimonies: torah, chuqqot, edot, the triad of Deuteronomy (4:45). This is the only place the Book of Jeremiah uses the word “testimonies”. “Because” comes twice and “therefore” once, as if the argument had been set out on a line.

“And to all the women”: the women are singled out as the leaders of this worship. This is the last speech Jeremiah is recorded as giving to his people. The book’s remaining chapters are either dated earlier or are oracles on the nations.

Some of the Hebrew verbs addressed here are feminine plural, spoken to the women in particular. “Ye will surely accomplish your vows” is heavy irony: carry on, then. The word vow appears four times in the verse, with every form of the verb for keeping it.

God swears by his own name, as in Genesis 22:16. “The Lord GOD liveth” is the oath formula Jeremiah had required in 4:2, to be sworn “in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness”, and had heard sworn falsely in 5:2. In Egypt it will no longer be sworn at all.

“Watch over” is shoqed, the verb of the almond rod at Jeremiah’s call: “I will hasten my word” (1:11–12), where the almond tree, shaqed, puns on the watching. In 31:28 God promised to watch over Israel to build; here the watch is set against the Judeans in Egypt.

“A small number” is literally “men of number”, few enough to be counted. Deuteronomy 4:27 had warned that Israel would be “left few in number among the heathen”. The contest of words is phrased as a court verdict: whose word will stand, mine or theirs.

A sign given in advance, to be checked later, the way Jeremiah’s death sentence on Hananiah was checked in 28:16–17. “In this place” has been Jeremiah’s phrase for Jerusalem throughout the book; now it means Egypt.

Pharaoh Hophra, the Egyptian Wahibre and Herodotus’s Apries, lost his throne after a failed campaign in Libya around 570 BC, when his own army made Amasis king. Herodotus (2.169) says the Egyptians later strangled him. Zedekiah’s ally and the Judeans’ refuge fell to his own people.