A Search for Truth in a City of Denials

Abraham bargained God down to ten righteous men for Sodom (Genesis 18:32); here Jerusalem would be pardoned for one. “Run to and fro” is the verb used when the eyes of the LORD “run to and fro throughout the whole earth” (2 Chronicles 16:9). The searchers are sent to do on foot what God’s own eyes do.

The verse sets 4:2 beside its failure: there the oath was to be sworn “in truth”, here the same words are used “falsely”, lasheqer. Leviticus 19:12 forbids exactly this: “ye shall not swear by my name falsely, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God.” Using the name is not the offence; lying under it is.

“Truth” here is emunah, faithfulness, the steadiness God looks for rather than mere accuracy. Isaiah had seen the same numbness: “the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them” (Isaiah 9:13). God will answer faces “harder than a rock” by making Ezekiel’s forehead “as an adamant harder than flint” (Ezekiel 3:9).

“The judgment of their God” uses mishpat in the sense of custom or requirement, as in 2 Kings 17:26, where the foreigners settled in Samaria “know not the manner of the God of the land”. Jeremiah’s first guess is that the poor, dallim, the thin and powerless, have simply never been taught what God expects.

“Broken the yoke, and burst the bonds” repeats 2:20 exactly. The picture recalls the rebel kings of Psalm 2:3, “Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.” The great men are treated as draught animals that have snapped their harness, which leads straight to the wild beasts of the next verse.

“A wolf of the evenings” is the hunter that comes out at dusk, and Zephaniah, Jeremiah’s contemporary, called Jerusalem’s judges “evening wolves” (Zephaniah 3:3). The same Hebrew letters can be read “wolf of the deserts”. Transgressions and backslidings are both counted: many, and increasing.

The Hebrew for “fed them to the full”, from sava, is spelled like the verb shava, to swear, which has just been used of swearing by false gods, so the pun sets God’s feeding beside their oaths. “Assembled themselves by troops” can also mean “gashed themselves”, the verb used of Baal’s prophets cutting themselves on Carmel (1 Kings 18:28).

The two Hebrew words describing the horses are rare and uncertain; the King James guesses “fed” and “in the morning”, while others read “lusty” and “roaming”. The phrase “his neighbour’s wife” comes straight from the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:17), where the tenth commandment forbids even coveting her.

The same two questions close verse 29 and return word for word in 9:9, a refrain marking the sections of the indictment. “Visit” is paqad again, the verb that appointed Jeremiah in 1:10; here it means to call to account. God speaks of “my soul”, nefesh, his own self, as the party wronged.

The words behind “walls” and “battlements” are uncertain, and many read them as vineyard terms: “go up through her vine-rows... strip away her branches”. That fits 2:21, where Judah was the noble vine gone wild. “They are not the LORD’s” disowns what is cut away: these tendrils grew from another stock.

The Hebrew doubles the verb, “betraying they have betrayed”, which the King James renders “very treacherously”. Israel and Judah stand together here as they will in the promise of 31:31, a new covenant “with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah”: joined in treachery before being joined in restoration.

“It is not he” can mean “he will do nothing”, the shrug Zephaniah heard from men “settled on their lees”: “The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil” (Zephaniah 1:12). Sword and famine are two of Jeremiah’s dreaded trio; the third, pestilence, joins them in 14:12 and more than a dozen times after.

The jibe plays on ruach, which means both wind and spirit: the prophets claim the Spirit and are called windbags. Hosea had heard the same contempt, “the spiritual man is mad” (Hosea 9:7). “Thus shall it be done unto them” is the people wishing the prophets’ threats back on their own heads.

The address swings mid-verse from “ye”, the scoffers, to “thy mouth”, Jeremiah’s. The fire image comes back from the inside in 20:9, where the word is “as a burning fire shut up in my bones”, and again in 23:29: “Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD.”

Babylon was indeed “an ancient nation”: Genesis 10:10 already names Babel among the first cities. Its language, Akkadian, was closed to ordinary Judeans; even Aramaic, the diplomats’ tongue, was understood by Hezekiah’s officials but not by the people on the wall (2 Kings 18:26). Isaiah 28:11 had threatened “another tongue”.

An open grave waits to be filled, and every arrow drawn from this quiver fills one. Psalm 5:9 uses the same figure of liars, “their throat is an open sepulchre”, which Paul quotes in Romans 3:13. “Mighty men” is gibborim, the title of David’s elite warriors in 2 Samuel 23.

The Hebrew says “eat up” four times, and the second time its object is “thy sons and thy daughters”; the King James softens this into the bread “which thy sons and thy daughters should eat”. The last verb, rendered “impoverish”, means to batter or shatter, and its object is the walled towns Judah fled to in 4:5.

After the exile, the Levites’ great prayer looked back and confirmed it in the same terms: “for thy great mercies’ sake thou didst not utterly consume them” (Nehemiah 9:31), where “utterly consume” is this verse’s “make a full end”. Verse 10 said it of the vine; here it is said to the people, “with you”.

The question-and-answer form follows Deuteronomy 29:24–25, where the nations ask, “Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land?” and are told, “Because they have forsaken the covenant.” Jeremiah hands the exiles a ready answer for their children, and 16:10–13 repeats the exercise.

The two herald’s verbs, declare and publish, are the ones that raised the alarm in 4:5. There the message was to flee to the walled towns; now it is a lesson about rain and sea. “The house of Jacob” names the whole people by the patriarch who wrestled and was renamed.

The description is taken from the idols of Psalm 115:5–6, which “eyes have they, but they see not: They have ears, but they hear not”; the psalm adds, “They that make them are like unto them.” “Without understanding” is literally “without heart”, the heart being the seat of thought in Hebrew.

“Perpetual decree” is chok olam, the same word as the “statutes” of the Law: the sea keeps its chok and Judah does not keep hers. God says much the same to Job out of the whirlwind: “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed” (Job 38:11).

“Revolting and rebellious” is sorer umoreh, the exact pair that describes the incorrigible son of Deuteronomy 21:18, whom his own parents must bring to the elders. The nation is cast as that son. “They are revolted and gone” means they have turned aside and walked off: the sea stays in place, and they leave.

The former rain, yoreh, comes in October and November and softens the baked ground for ploughing; the latter rain finishes the grain in spring. “The appointed weeks of the harvest” are the seven weeks counted from Passover to the feast of Weeks (Deuteronomy 16:9–10), from barley harvest to wheat, a season when rain would ruin the crop.

“Withholden” is mana, the verb of 3:3, where “the showers have been withholden”; there the fact was stated, here the cause. “Turned away” is literally “bent aside”, as a stream is diverted from a field. The pronouns shift from “they” in verse 24 to “your”, turning description into direct address.

“Setteth snares” describes a fowler crouching out of sight. “A trap” is mashchit, the same word as “the destroyer” of nations in 4:7: the ruin coming from outside is already at work inside Judah. Psalm 91:3 promises rescue “from the snare of the fowler”; here the fowlers are the neighbours.

“Cage” is kelub, a wicker basket, found elsewhere only in Amos 8:1–2 as the basket of summer fruit whose name punned on “the end”. A fowler kept his catch alive in one until market day. Here the houses are the baskets, and what is packed into them is deceit, mirmah, the word for false weights and crooked deals.

“Waxen fat” echoes the Song of Moses, “Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked” (Deuteronomy 32:15), where prosperity leads to forgetting God. “Shine” means sleek, glossy with good living. The failure to judge the fatherless repeats Isaiah 1:23’s charge against Jerusalem’s princes: “they judge not the fatherless.”

The refrain of verse 9 returns unchanged, but now it follows fraud against orphans where before it followed adultery: one verdict covers the bedroom and the marketplace. “Avenged” is naqam, vengeance that the Law reserves for God himself: “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence” (Deuteronomy 32:35).

“Horrible” is shaarurah, a word for something foul enough to make the flesh creep, used again of Jerusalem’s prophets in 23:14 and heard earlier in Hosea 6:10: “I have seen an horrible thing in the house of Israel.” The verse is a single line, an intake of breath before the charge.

“By their means” is literally “upon their hands”, which may mean the priests rule under the prophets’ direction or simply alongside them. Micah had drawn the same partnership a century earlier: “the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money” (Micah 3:11). “The end thereof” is acharit, what comes after, the reckoning.