Tears for a People Practiced in Deceit

In Hebrew Bibles this verse closes chapter 8, so every later verse of chapter 9 is numbered one lower there. It is a large part of why Jeremiah is remembered as the weeping prophet, and Lamentations, long ascribed to him, uses the same image: “Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people” (Lamentations 3:48).

A “lodging place” is malon, a bare caravan stop at a well, the kind of place where Joseph’s brothers opened a sack and found their money (Genesis 42:27). “An assembly” is atseret, the word for a solemn festival gathering, as in Isaiah 1:13, “the solemn meeting”: treachery has its own holy convocation.

The same picture appears in Psalm 64:3, “who whet their tongue like a sword, and bend their bows to shoot their arrows, even bitter words”. “Valiant” is gavar, the root of gibbor, a warrior: they are strong in the land, but their strength serves lies. “From evil to evil” is a march from one stage to the next.

“Utterly supplant” is akov yaqov, a pun on the name Jacob, Yaaqov: Esau’s complaint was “is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times” (Genesis 27:36). Every brother now plays Jacob to every other. Micah 7:5–6 had given the same advice: “Trust ye not in a friend.”

“Deceive” is hatal, the verb Jacob used of Laban: “your father hath deceived me, and changed my wages ten times” (Genesis 31:7). The Jacob history of verse 4 continues, with every neighbour now a Laban. “Taught their tongue” uses lamad, the verb of schooling; lying has become a learned skill, practised until fluent.

The Hebrew is terse and repetitive, “thy dwelling in the midst of deceit; in deceit they refuse to know me”, the word mirmah said twice. The Greek translators read the same consonants differently and produced “interest upon interest, deceit upon deceit”, turning the line into a charge of usury. Either way deceit is both home and method.

“Melt” is tsaraph, to smelt, the silversmith’s work; after the failed refining of 6:29, God proposes to try again. The question, “how shall I do for the daughter of my people?”, has the helplessness of Hosea 6:4, “O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee?”, the dilemma of a parent with no good options left.

The written Hebrew calls the arrow shochet, “slaughtering”, the verb for killing a sacrificial animal; the marginal reading has “sharpened”. The two-faced greeting is exactly the type Psalm 28:3 prays to be kept apart from: those “which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts”. “Layeth his wait” means sets an ambush.

This is the third time the refrain has sounded, and each time it follows a different kind of wrong: adultery in 5:9, fraud against orphans in 5:29, and now lies. “Be avenged” is a reflexive form, literally “take vengeance for itself”, the verb Isaiah 1:24 gives God against his own people: “I will avenge me of mine enemies.”

“Habitations of the wilderness” are pastures, the open grazing land of the steppe, not towns. “Lamentation” is qinah, the formal funeral dirge, the kind David sang over Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:17). The Hebrew has God himself raise the lament; the Greek reads “take ye up”, making it a command to the people.

“Dragons” is tannim, jackals, the scavengers that howl among ruins; the King James took the word for a mythical beast. “Heaps” echoes Micah 3:12, “Jerusalem shall become heaps”, the very line the elders quoted at Jeremiah’s trial to prove that a prophet could threaten the city and live (26:18).

The question echoes the last verse of Hosea, “Who is wise, and he shall understand these things?” (Hosea 14:9). Two kinds of interpreter are sought, a sage and one “to whom the mouth of the LORD hath spoken”, a prophet. “Burned up like a wilderness” uses a verb that can mean either set alight or laid waste.

“My law which I set before them” is Moses’ phrase: “what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?” (Deuteronomy 4:8). The law was laid in front of them like a road, and the verse ends by saying they did not walk in it.

The Shema told every father to teach God’s words “diligently unto thy children” (Deuteronomy 6:7). The same verb of teaching, limmed, is used here of fathers who taught their sons the Baals. “Baalim” is plural again, the local lords of each hill and spring, not one national rival.

Wormwood, laanah, is a bitter desert shrub of the Artemisia family. Lamentations remembers the meal as served: “Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall” (Lamentations 3:19). “Feed” implies a table set by God himself. Revelation 8:11 gives the name Wormwood to a falling star that turns a third of the waters bitter.

The sentence is stitched from the covenant curses: “I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you” (Leviticus 26:33), and “among all people... which neither thou nor thy fathers have known” (Deuteronomy 28:64). “Till I have consumed them” is kalah again, set against the promise of 4:27 that there would be no full end.

Professional mourners were hired for funerals, as Amos 5:16 calls for “such as are skilful of lamentation”. Jeremiah himself composed a lament for Josiah, and “all the singing men and the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamentations to this day” (2 Chronicles 35:25). “Cunning” is chakamot, wise women, trained in the craft.

The hired mourners’ skill was to start the crowd weeping: they wail “for us”, so that “our eyes” run. “Eyelids” is aphappayim, a word Job uses poetically for the first rays of dawn, “the eyelids of the morning” (Job 3:9). The wish of verse 1 for eyes like a fountain is being answered by professionals.

“How” is ekh, the opening word of a funeral dirge; its longer form, ekhah, begins the book of Lamentations and gives it its Hebrew name. “Our dwellings have cast us out” recalls the warning of Leviticus 18:28, “that the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you”.

“Every one her neighbour” answers the “every one his neighbour” of verses 4 and 5: men taught neighbours to lie, and women must now teach neighbours to lament. This is one of the few places where a prophet addresses women directly as a group, and what they receive as “the word of his mouth” is a dirge.

Death enters like a burglar through the window, as the locusts do in Joel 2:9, “they shall enter in at the windows like a thief”. Some scholars hear an allusion to the Canaanite god Mot, “Death”, since in the Ugaritic poems Baal at first refuses to have a window in his palace. The Hebrew for death here is mavet, the same word.

“The handful after the harvestman” is the loose sheaf a reaper drops behind him; Boaz told his men to “let fall also some of the handfuls of purpose” so that Ruth could gather them (Ruth 2:16). Here the fallen are that dropped grain, and no Ruth comes. The abrupt “Speak” in the Hebrew is missing from the Greek.

The three boasts cover the three great sources of standing in the ancient world: learning, military power and wealth, the gifts of sage, warrior and merchant. The Greek translators liked these lines enough to set them into Hannah’s song as well, so the Greek of 1 Samuel 2:10 contains a version of this verse and the next.

The book supplies its own example of this knowledge in 22:15–16, speaking of King Josiah: “He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well with him: was not this to know me? saith the LORD.” The three nouns, chesed, mishpat and tsedaqah, are the covenant words with which God betroths Israel in Hosea 2:19.

The Hebrew phrase is a paradox: “circumcised in foreskin”, people who carry the mark in the flesh and are still, before God, uncircumcised. “Punish” is paqad again, the verb of reckoning. Judah is about to be listed among its neighbours as one case in a category, not as the exception to it.

Egypt, Edom, Ammon and Moab all practised circumcision, as Herodotus later reported of the Egyptians, so the list is of circumcised peoples. “In the utmost corners” means those who clip the hair at the temples, a desert Arab custom that Leviticus 19:27 forbade Israel: “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads.” Judah stands in the middle of the list.