A Scroll Sinks in the Euphrates

“Them that rise up against me” renders the Hebrew leb qamai, which is a cipher: swap each letter for its mirror in the alphabet and it spells Kasdim, Chaldeans, which is what the Greek prints. The “destroying wind” can also be read “the spirit of a destroyer”, preparing for the spirit stirred in the kings of the Medes (verse 11).

“Fanners” are winnowers, who toss grain into the wind so the chaff blows off. The Hebrew consonants can also be read zarim, strangers, and both senses fit: foreigners will come and winnow Babylon. The picture of the chapter’s opening is harvest, and it returns at the threshing floor of verse 33.

The Hebrew of the first clause is confused, and as written it seems to say “let not the archer bend his bow”; most translations follow the marginal reading or emend it. The King James makes sense of it as archer against archer, bowman against armoured man.

“Thrust through” is meduqqarim, the pierced, the same word as the wounded men lying in their tents in 37:10. There Jeremiah said even pierced Babylonians would rise and burn Jerusalem. Here the pierced lie in Babylon’s own streets.

“Hath not been forsaken” translates alman, widowed: Israel has not been left a widow by its God. Isaiah 54:4–6 uses the same picture, a wife called back. The verse admits the land was full of guilt and still refuses to call the marriage over.

“Deliver every man his soul” means save your life, the urgency of the angels to Lot, “Escape for thy life” (Genesis 19:17). Babylon has already been compared to Sodom (50:40). Those who stay risk being “cut off in her iniquity”, caught in a punishment not meant for them.

In 25:15–26 Jeremiah handed the cup of wrath to the nations, and the king of Sheshach, Babylon, was to drink last. Here Babylon is both the cup in God’s hand and, in the verses that follow, a drinker made drunk. Gold makes the cup splendid; it does nothing to change what is in it.

“Suddenly fallen” matches the cry of Isaiah 21:9, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen”. The balm offered here has been offered before, to Judah in 8:22 and to Egypt in 46:11, and it has failed each time.

“Her judgment reacheth unto heaven” recalls the first Babel, whose builders wanted a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4). What reaches the sky this time is the city’s guilt. The healers give up and go home, “every one into his own country”.

“Our righteousness” is plural in Hebrew, tsidqotenu, our vindications: God has shown publicly that his people’s cause was just. It echoes the name “The LORD our righteousness” of 23:6 and 33:16. The first thing the vindicated do is go and tell it in Zion.

“Make bright the arrows” means polish or sharpen them. “Shields” renders shelatim, whose exact meaning is disputed; some think quivers. Cyrus the Persian had absorbed Media by 550 BC, and Isaiah 13:17 also names the Medes against Babylon. Babylon knew its northern enemy by that name.

The commands to the defenders are irony: raise the standard, double the watch, post the sentries, set ambushes, all of it useless. “Devised” is zamam, to plan with intent. The LORD has planned and carried out; Babylon can only take up positions.

“Many waters” are the Euphrates and its web of canals, “the rivers of Babylon” of Psalm 137:1. “The measure of thy covetousness” is literally “the cubit of thy cutting off”, the weaver’s moment when the thread is cut at its length, as in Isaiah 38:12, “I have cut off like a weaver my life”.

“Sworn by himself” is literally “by his soul”, as in Amos 6:8. The “caterpillers” are yeleq, locusts in the hopping stage (Joel 1:4). “A shout” is hedad, the grape treaders’ cry that fell silent over Moab in 48:33; now the treaders are coming to Babylon.

Verses 15 to 19 repeat 10:12–16 almost word for word, a hymn Jeremiah first set against the idols of the nations. Power, wisdom and understanding are the triad of Proverbs 3:19, “The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth”. Placed here, the hymn stands against Babylon’s own gods.

“Vapours from the ends of the earth” are clouds rising from the horizon, and Psalm 135:7 has the same line. “Wind” is ruach, and so is “breath” in the next verse: God brings ruach out of his storehouses, while the idols have no ruach in them at all.

“Brutish” is niv’ar, as stupid as cattle, from the word for beast. The “founder” is the metalworker who casts the image, put to shame by his own product. “No breath in them” was the charge of 10:14, and the next verse gives the idols the name hevel, vapour.

“Vanity” is hevel, breath or vapour, the word of Ecclesiastes. “The work of errors” is literally a work of mockeries, objects to be laughed at. “In the time of their visitation” means when they are called to account, and there will be nothing there to answer.

“The portion of Jacob” recalls Deuteronomy 32:9, “the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.” The Hebrew here lacks the word “Israel”, which the parallel in 10:16 has; the King James supplies it from there, so the tribe itself becomes the rod.

The “battle axe” is mappets, a shatterer, a war club, from the verb naphats, to break in pieces, which follows in the same verse. The noun and the verb are the same word. The word of God in 23:29 was a hammer that “breaketh the rock in pieces” with this same verb.

“The horse and his rider” is the phrase of the Song of the Sea, “the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:1). The chariot and its driver follow. The drill of “break in pieces” is Israel’s oldest victory song put to new use.

The pairs, man and woman, old and young, young man and maid, are a way of saying everyone. Across verses 20 to 23 the verb “break in pieces” sounds nine times, one hammer stroke to each group, a chant built on repetition.

The shepherd with his flock and the ploughman with his yoke of oxen are the working countryside. “Captains and rulers” are pachot and seganim, both borrowed from Babylonian administrative titles, governors and prefects. The sequence runs from pasture to palace.

“In your sight” switches the address to the exiles, in the plural: they will watch the repayment. The measure is specific, “all their evil that they have done in Zion”, the burning of the city and the temple, which some of the listeners had witnessed.

“Destroying mountain” is har hammashchit, the same phrase the King James renders “mount of corruption” in 2 Kings 23:13, where Solomon’s shrines to foreign gods stood facing Jerusalem. Babylon’s temple tower was a man-made mountain of brick; God will make it a burnt-out cone.

Babylonian kings took pride in rebuilding temples on their old foundations; Nabonidus records digging for the foundation inscriptions of earlier kings. The verse denies Babylon even that: not a corner stone, not a foundation stone, will be reused.

Ararat is Urartu, around Lake Van; Minni the Mannaeans south of Lake Urmia; Ashchenaz the Scythians, called Ishkuza in Assyrian texts and listed among Japheth’s descendants (Genesis 10:3). “Rough caterpillers” are bristly young locusts, with spines, massed and advancing.

“The land of his dominion” is singular, the realm of the Median king. By the early sixth century the Medes had brought Urartu and the Mannaeans into their orbit, so the list of verse 27 names Media’s own subject peoples: one coalition under one crown.

“Tremble and sorrow” uses a verb for writhing in labour. “Every purpose… shall be performed” is literally “shall stand”, the same verb as the challenge in 44:28, “whose words shall stand, mine, or theirs”. Babylon’s own plans are not mentioned.

“Her bars are broken” echoes the promise to Cyrus in Isaiah 45:2, “I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron.” “Forborn to fight” is a striking detail: soldiers sitting in their strongholds while the city goes up in flames around them.

A “post” is a runner, the royal courier (2 Chronicles 30:6, Esther 3:13). Runners coming from opposite directions meet on the way to the palace, each with the same news. “At one end” means the city is taken from its edge; Babylon was so vast that one quarter could fall while another had not heard.

“The passages” are the fords and ferry crossings of the river. “The reeds” translates agammim, marshes or reed beds; burning the reed thickets was a way to flush out anyone hiding. Every exit from the city is shut or on fire.

“It is time to thresh her” is literally “time to tread her”, the stamping that hardened a threshing floor before the harvest was brought in. Micah 4:12–13 pictures nations gathered “as the sheaves into the floor”. Babylon is being flattened ready for the grain.

Now Zion speaks. “Swallowed me up like a dragon” uses tannin, a sea monster. “He hath cast me out” is literally “he hath rinsed me out”, like a bowl emptied and rinsed, matching “an empty vessel”. The Hebrew text wavers between “me” and “us” in these verbs.

“Be upon Babylon” is the formula of blood-guilt, as David said to the Amalekite, “Thy blood be upon thy head” (2 Samuel 1:16). “My flesh” may mean my kin. Zion and Jerusalem each bring a charge, the way a plaintiff states a case in court.

“Dry up her sea” may point to the great river or the lake and reservoir works around the city. Isaiah 44:27–28 sets side by side the God who says “to the deep, Be dry” and the one who says of Cyrus, “He is my shepherd”.

In 9:11 God said, “I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons.” The same two words, heaps and dragons, jackals in the Hebrew, are now applied to Babylon. The sentence passed on Jerusalem is passed on the city that carried it out.

In 2:15 the young lions “roared upon” Israel and “yelled”, laying the land waste. The same verbs return: Babylon’s men roar and growl like young lions, but, as the next verses show, they are lions about to be fed a meal that kills them.

“In their heat” means inflamed with wine and appetite, as Hosea 7:4–7 describes drunken courtiers “hot as an oven”. “That they may rejoice” reads in the Greek “that they may be stupefied”. The “perpetual sleep” is death, a sleep with no morning.

Lambs, rams and he-goats are sacrificial animals, as in the great sacrifice at Bozrah in Isaiah 34:6, “the blood of lambs and goats… the fat of the kidneys of rams”. The lions of verse 38 end as sheep.

Sheshach appeared first in 25:26, where “the king of Sheshach shall drink after them”, the last to take the cup. It uses the same letter cipher as verse 1: B-B-L, Babel, becomes Sh-Sh-K. Here the code and the plain name stand side by side.

“The sea” is the invading army, roaring like the sea as in 6:23 and 50:42. A city built on rivers and canals, defended by water, is pictured going under water of another kind.

“A dry land, and a wilderness” uses tsiyyah and aravah, the words of 2:6 for the wilderness through which God led Israel out of Egypt, “a land of deserts… a land of drought”. The captor’s land becomes the desert of the exodus.

In Isaiah 2:2 “all nations shall flow unto” the mountain of the LORD’s house; the verb nahar is related to the word for river. Here the nations stop flowing to Bel. Bel, Marduk, is made to cough up what he swallowed: the plunder, the captives, the temple vessels.

The Greek translation lacks verses 45 to 48, one of its longest omissions in these chapters. The call “My people, go ye out” repeats the summons of verse 6 and 50:8, framing the oracle with the same command given three times.

“Ruler against ruler” fits Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar: his son Evil-merodach was murdered in 560 BC by Neriglissar, whose own son was deposed within months, and Nabonidus spent ten years away in Arabia. Whether the verse has these in view is an inference; it says only that rumours will come year after year.

Babylon gathered gods from other cities into itself. Cyrus’s cylinder inscription boasts that he sent the gods Nabonidus had brought into Babylon back to their own shrines. “Judgment upon the graven images” describes a capital full of idols collected from elsewhere.

Heaven and earth singing at Babylon’s fall is the picture of Isaiah 14:7–8, where at the fall of the king of Babylon “the whole earth is at rest… they break forth into singing: yea, the fir trees rejoice”. Creation, not only Israel, is glad to see the oppressor go.

The Hebrew is compact and can be read “Babylon must fall for the slain of Israel”, which many modern translations follow. Either way the balance is exact: Babylon made Israel’s slain fall, and at Babylon the slain of every land will fall.

Solomon’s prayer foresaw exiles praying “toward their land… and the city which thou hast chosen” (1 Kings 8:48), and Daniel prays with his windows open toward Jerusalem (Daniel 6:10). “Stand not still” means do not linger, and those addressed are survivors, “ye that have escaped the sword”.

Lamentations 1:10 makes the same complaint: “the heathen entered into her sanctuary, whom thou didst command that they should not enter into thy congregation.” “Sanctuaries” is plural, the holy places of the temple. The exiles’ shame is spoken in their own voice, in the first person plural.

“The days come… judgment upon her graven images” repeats the opening of verse 47 almost exactly. The two sentences stand on either side of the exiles’ memory and lament, so that their shame over the temple is enclosed by the promised judgment on Babylon’s gods.

Isaiah 14:13–14 gives the king of Babylon the boast, “I will ascend into heaven… I will be like the most High.” “Fortify the height of her strength” fits the city’s immense walls and temple tower. Neither height nor walls will keep God’s spoilers out.

The line answers 50:22, “A sound of battle is in the land, and of great destruction”, so the long oracle is bracketed by the same sound. “Great destruction”, shever gadol, is again the phrase Jeremiah first used of Judah’s ruin from the north (4:6).

“Her waves” are the attackers, crashing like the sea of verse 42 and roaring as in 50:42. The city’s “great voice”, the noise of a capital with its markets, festivals and processions, is silenced, while the enemy’s roar grows louder.

“The LORD God of recompences” is El gemulot, a title found only here, the God of repayments. “Shall surely requite” doubles the verb shallem, the root of shalom: to pay in full, to settle an account completely.

The drunken sleep of verse 39 returns, now naming the whole government: princes, wise men, governors, prefects, warriors. Job 14:12 describes death in the same words: “man lieth down, and riseth not… they shall not awake.” The King who pronounces it is the one who, in Psalm 121:4, “shall neither slumber nor sleep”.

Herodotus (1.178–179) describes Babylon’s walls as broad enough for a four-horse chariot to turn on top, with a hundred bronze gates. The last lines repeat Habakkuk 2:13, “the people shall labour in the very fire, and the people shall weary themselves for very vanity”.

Seraiah is Baruch’s brother: both are sons of Neriah son of Maaseiah (32:12). “A quiet prince” is sar menuchah, “officer of the resting place”, the quartermaster who arranged the king’s halts on a journey. Zedekiah’s fourth year, about 594 BC, is the year Hananiah broke the yoke from Jeremiah’s neck (28:1).

Jeremiah writes this scroll himself; no scribe is named, though Baruch took his dictation in chapter 36. “All these words” refers to the oracle of 50:1 to 51:58. The book that told the exiles to seek Babylon’s peace (29:7) also contained this sentence on Babylon.

“Shalt see” comes before “shalt read”: Seraiah is first to look at the city, then read the oracle in its presence. A sentence read aloud before its subject had legal weight, like a verdict pronounced in the hearing of the condemned.

Seraiah is to turn the oracle into a prayer, speaking it back to God: “O LORD, thou hast spoken”. “Neither man nor beast” is the formula of desolation used over Judah and promised to be reversed in 33:10–12. Now it falls on Babylon.

A scroll alone would float; the stone makes it sink. Jeremiah had once performed another sign at the Euphrates, burying a linen girdle there until it was ruined (13:1–7), a picture of Judah’s pride spoiled. Now the river is used against Babylon itself.

“And they shall be weary” repeats the last words of verse 58, as though marking where the oracle ended. “Thus far are the words of Jeremiah” is an editor’s note, like 48:47: the next chapter is an appendix drawn largely from 2 Kings 24 and 25, not Jeremiah’s own words.