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Jeremiah’s Celibacy and Message

The word of the L ord came to me: ²You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place. ³For thus says the L ord concerning the sons and daughters who are born in this place, and concerning the mothers who bear them and the fathers who beget them in this land: ⁴They shall die of deadly diseases. They shall not be lamented, nor shall they be buried; they shall become like dung on the surface of the ground. They shall perish by the sword and by famine, and their dead bodies shall become food for the birds of the air and for the wild animals of the earth.

⁵ For thus says the L ord: Do not enter the house of mourning, or go to lament, or bemoan them; for I have taken away my peace from this people, says the L ord, my steadfast love and mercy. ⁶Both great and small shall die in this land; they shall not be buried, and no one shall lament for them; there shall be no gashing, no shaving of the head for them. ⁷No one shall break bread for the mourner, to offer comfort for the dead; nor shall anyone give them the cup of consolation to drink for their fathers or their mothers. ⁸You shall not go into the house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and drink. ⁹For thus says the L ord of hosts, the God of Israel: I am going to banish from this place, in your days and before your eyes, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.

¹⁰ And when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, “Why has the L ord pronounced all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin that we have committed against the L ord our God?” ¹¹then you shall say to them: It is because your ancestors have forsaken me, says the L ord, and have gone after other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and have not kept my law; ¹²and because you have behaved worse than your ancestors, for here you are, every one of you, following your stubborn evil will, refusing to listen to me. ¹³Therefore I will hurl you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your ancestors have known, and there you shall serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.

God Will Restore Israel

¹⁴ Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the L ord, when it shall no longer be said, “As the L ord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,” ¹⁵but “As the L ord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them.” For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their ancestors.

¹⁶ I am now sending for many fishermen, says the L ord, and they shall catch them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. ¹⁷For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight. ¹⁸And I will doubly repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations.

O L ord, my strength and my stronghold,

my refuge in the day of trouble,

to you shall the nations come

from the ends of the earth and say:

Our ancestors have inherited nothing but lies,

worthless things in which there is no profit.

Can mortals make for themselves gods?

Such are no gods!

²¹ “Therefore I am surely going to teach them, this time I am going to teach them my power and my might, and they shall know that my name is the L ord.”

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Jeremiah seems here to promise a return to the Jews; and so the passage is commonly expounded, as though a consolation is interposed, in which the faithful alone are concerned. But I consider the passage as mixed, that the Prophet, in part, speaks in severe terms of the dreadful exile which he foretells, and that he in part blends some consolation; but the latter subject seems to me to he indirectly referred to by the Prophet. I therefore think this to be an amplification of what he had said. This is to be kept in mind. He had said, “I will expel you from this land, and will send you to a land unknown to you and to your fathers.” Now follows a circumstance which increased the grievousness of exile: they knew how cruel was that servitude from which God had delivered their fathers. Their condition was worse than hundred deaths, when they were driven to their servile works; and also, when all justice was denied them, and when their offspring were from the womb put to death. As then they knew how cruelly their fathers had been treated by the Egyptians, the comparison he states more fully shewed what a dreadful punishment awaited them, for their redemption would be much more incredible.

We now perceive what the Prophet meant, as though he had said, “Ye know from what your fathers came forth, even from a brazen furnace, as it is said elsewhere, and as it were from the depth of death, so that that redemption ought to be remembered to the end of the world; but God will now cast you into an abyss deeper than that of Egypt from which your fathers were delivered; and when from thence he will redeem you, it will be a miracle far more wonderful to your posterity, so that it will almost extinguish, or at least obscure the memory of the first redemption: It will not then be said any more, Live does Jehovah, who brought the children of Israel from Egypt, for that Egyptian captivity was far more endurable than what this latter shall be; for ye shall be plunged as it were into the infernal regions; and when God shall rescue you from thence, it will be a work far more wonderful.” This I consider to be the real meaning of the Prophet. ¹⁶⁵¹⁶⁵ No particular notice is taken of לכן rendered “therefore,” at the beginning of the verse. Gataker renders it “notwithstanding;” Lowth, “nevertheless,” and Blayney, “after this.” What suits the passage best is “nevertheless.” The verse appears to be parenthetic, introduced for the purpose of keeping the people from despair under their sufferings. — Ed.

Yet his object was at the same time indirectly to give them some hope of their future redemption; but this he did not do avowedly. We ought then to regard what the Prophet had in view, even to strike the Jews, as I have said, with terror, so that they might know that there was an evil nigh at hand more grievous than what their fathers suffered in Egypt, who yet had been most cruelly oppressed. Then their former liberation would be rendered obscure and not celebrated as before, though it was nevertheless an evidence of the wonderful power of God.

¹⁶⁵ No particular notice is taken of לכן rendered “therefore,” at the beginning of the verse. Gataker renders it “notwithstanding;” Lowth, “nevertheless,” and Blayney, “after this.” What suits the passage best is “nevertheless.” The verse appears to be parenthetic, introduced for the purpose of keeping the people from despair under their sufferings. — Ed.