The Temple Is Not an Alibi

Chapter 26 tells what happened when Jeremiah preached this sermon. It is dated “in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim” (26:1), about 609 BC, and priests and prophets seized him, shouting “Thou shalt surely die” (26:8). Only the precedent of Micah and the protection of Ahikam saved his life.

“All ye of Judah, that enter in at these gates” suggests a pilgrim feast, when the country towns crowded into Jerusalem; 26:2 speaks of “all the cities of Judah, which come to worship”. The Greek version of Jeremiah is about an eighth shorter than the Hebrew, and here it drops most of these two opening verses.

“Amend” is heitiv, to make good, the verb of 2:33, “Why trimmest thou thy way to seek love?” Judah was skilled at improving its ways for lovers; now it is asked to do so for God. The Hebrew consonants can be read “I will cause you to dwell” or “I will dwell with you”, as the Latin Vulgate takes it.

The slogan rested on real history: in 701 BC Sennacherib’s army withdrew from Jerusalem after Isaiah’s promise, “I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake” (2 Kings 19:34). Psalms 46 and 48 sang Zion’s safety. A promise given in one crisis had hardened into a guarantee.

“Throughly” renders the Hebrew doubling of each verb, “if making good you make good... if doing you do”: half measures are excluded. “Judgment between a man and his neighbour” is the language of the courts, where elders at the gate settled disputes; justice here is a verdict given fairly between two parties.

The stranger, the fatherless and the widow are the Law’s standing trio of the unprotected, each without a landholding man to speak for them; Deuteronomy 27:19 curses anyone “that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow”. Jeremiah carries the same demand to the king’s palace in 22:3, adding “neither shed innocent blood”.

The promise of verse 3 is repeated with the conditions of verses 5 and 6 placed between the two statements, like goods between bookends. “For ever and ever” is literally “from everlasting to everlasting”, the phrase Psalm 90:2 uses of God himself: the tenancy could be as lasting as the landlord.

“That cannot profit” is lo hoil, the verb used in 2:8 and 2:11 of Baal and the “things that do not profit”. Jeremiah files the temple slogan in the same drawer as the idols: another trusted thing that gives nothing back. The verse repeats verse 4 almost exactly, now as an accusation.

The Hebrew fires off bare infinitives, “stealing, murdering, adulterating, swearing falsely”, the staccato Hosea 4:2 used a century earlier: “By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out.” “Gods whom ye know not” is Deuteronomy’s phrase (11:28) for gods with no history of rescuing Israel.

“We are delivered” is nitsalnu, the cry of people who have just escaped, from natsal, the verb God used in promising to deliver Jeremiah (1:8). The worshippers claim a rescue in advance, as though standing in the courts were a receipt. “Called by my name” is ownership language: the house bears God’s name as property bears its owner’s.

“Den” is mearah, a cave, the kind of hideout that dotted the Judean hills; David and his band lived in such caves (1 Samuel 22:1). “Robbers” is paritsim, violent men, from the root of perets, a breach: those who break in. “Even I have seen it” answers the assumption that no one was watching.

The Bible never narrates Shiloh’s destruction; it is remembered in Psalm 78:60, “he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh”, after the ark was captured in Eli’s day (1 Samuel 4). Excavations at the site, about twenty miles north of Jerusalem, suggest a burning around that time. If Jeremiah descended from Eli’s priestly line, this was his own family’s history.

“Rising up early and speaking” is Jeremiah’s own idiom, found in this book about a dozen times and elsewhere only in 2 Chronicles 36:15, which borrows it: God pictured as a man who starts work at dawn. “I called you, but ye answered not” is the charge Isaiah 65:12 also brings, almost word for word.

This is the sentence that nearly cost Jeremiah his life. At his trial the charge was framed in exactly these terms: “Why hast thou prophesied in the name of the LORD, saying, This house shall be like Shiloh?” (26:9). The list runs from “this house” to “the place”, the temple first and then the land.

Ephraim, the leading northern tribe, stands for the whole northern kingdom, deported by Assyria in 722 BC, and 2 Kings 17:20 says God “cast them out of his sight” in these very words. Shiloh itself lay in Ephraim’s territory, so the example comes from the same soil as the brethren already exiled.

The ban is repeated in 11:14 and 14:11, and 15:1 explains its weight: “Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people.” Both were remembered for praying Israel out of judgment. “Make intercession” is paga, to press in on someone’s behalf; three words for prayer are forbidden in a row.

The question echoes the visions of 1:11 and 1:13, “What seest thou?”, but now there is nothing symbolic to interpret; the sight is simply the streets. Ezekiel was shown the same thing inside the temple, where elders worshipped in secret saying, “The LORD seeth us not” (Ezekiel 8:12). Here it happens in the open.

“Cakes” is kavvanim, a word borrowed from Akkadian kamanu, a sweet cake used in Mesopotamian worship; in 44:19 the women say they made them “to worship her”, perhaps stamped with her image. In Egypt they would defend the practice, claiming that while they baked for her “we had plenty of victuals” (44:17).

“Provoke me to anger” is the verb of the Song of Moses, “they have provoked me to anger with their vanities” (Deuteronomy 32:21). God answers his own question by redirecting it: the real injury falls on them. “The confusion of their own faces” is the phrase Daniel’s confession uses in exile, “unto us confusion of faces” (Daniel 9:7).

The sentence echoes the prophetess Huldah’s word to Josiah when the book of the law was found: “my wrath shall be poured out upon this place, and shall not be quenched” (2 Chronicles 34:25; 2 Kings 22:17). Jeremiah repeats a verdict already delivered in his youth. Beasts, trees and crops are named because the land’s whole life is included.

The sarcasm depends on a rule: a burnt offering, olah, went wholly up in smoke and no one ate it (Leviticus 1:9), while ordinary sacrifices, zevachim, were mostly eaten by the worshippers. God tells them to throw the one onto the other and eat the lot. Amos used the same bitter irony: “Come to Bethel, and transgress” (Amos 4:4).

The same comparison had been made before. Samuel told Saul, “to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22), and Hosea 6:6 has God say, “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice”; Jesus quotes Hosea’s line twice (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). The “not this but that” form is a way of setting priorities.

The words come from the preface to the Sinai covenant, “if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant” (Exodus 19:5), spoken before any sacrificial law was given. “I will be your God, and ye shall be my people” is the covenant formula of Leviticus 26:12, and it returns in the new covenant of 31:33.

“Went backward, and not forward” is literally “were to the back and not to the face”, the idiom of 2:27, where they “turned their back unto me, and not their face”. A people told to walk after God walks backward, facing the wrong way. “Inclined their ear” means leaning the head toward a speaker so as to catch every word.

“My servants the prophets” is the phrase 2 Kings 17:13 uses when explaining why the northern kingdom fell: God had warned it “by all the prophets, and by all the seers”. The span runs from the exodus “unto this day”, the whole length of Israel’s history, and the sending is daily, a constant stream.

“Hardened their neck” is an ox refusing the yoke, and the phrase goes back to the golden calf, where God first calls Israel “a stiffnecked people” (Exodus 32:9). “They did worse than their fathers” is repeated in 16:12, where each generation’s record is measured against the last and found lower.

Ezekiel is given the same bleak forecast at his call: “the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee; for they will not hearken unto me” (Ezekiel 3:7). Jeremiah is told the outcome before he speaks, so success cannot be measured by the audience. “Call” and “answer” recall verse 13, where God himself called and was not answered.

“This is a nation” uses goy, the ordinary word for a foreign people, rather than am, “my people”: Judah is spoken of as an outsider. “Truth” is emunah, faithfulness, which has not merely weakened but “perished”, the verb for something lost or dead. It is gone even from their mouths, where oaths still invoke the LORD.

“Thine hair” is nezer, the word for the Nazirite’s uncut, consecrated hair (Numbers 6:5); to cut it and throw it away is to end a consecration. Shaving the head was also a mourning rite, as Micah 1:16 tells Judah, “Make thee bald, and poll thee for thy delicate children.” “On high places” means the bare heights, shephayim, where the sins began.

Manasseh had set “a graven image of the grove” in the temple itself (2 Kings 21:7), and though Josiah removed such things (2 Kings 23:6), the charge is renewed here; 32:34 repeats it word for word. Ezekiel 8 later tours the temple and finds images painted on its walls. “To pollute it” names the intent, not a side effect.

Tophet probably means a hearth or fire-pit, and the valley of the son of Hinnom runs along Jerusalem’s south-west side; its Hebrew name, Ge-hinnom, became Gehenna. Kings Ahaz and Manasseh had each “made his son pass through the fire” (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6), and Josiah defiled Tophet (2 Kings 23:10), yet the practice returned.

“Behold, the days come” is one of Jeremiah’s signature openings, used here for judgment and for hope in 23:5 and 31:31. The valley becomes a cemetery in earnest, filled with bones as Josiah filled the high places “with the bones of men” to end their worship (2 Kings 23:14). Chapter 19 repeats the renaming with a smashed jar.

The verse is a covenant curse fulfilled word for word: “thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away” (Deuteronomy 28:26). “Fray” is old English for frighten. Rizpah did it for her sons, driving off birds by day and beasts by night (2 Samuel 21:10).

The four voices, mirth, gladness, bridegroom and bride, return as a threat in 16:9 and 25:10, and then as a promise in 33:11, where they “shall be heard again” in the ruined streets. The seventh of the Jewish wedding blessings quotes 33:11, so these words are still sung under the wedding canopy.