Bible Commentaries

Not the living only but the dead shall be exposed to the ruthless violence of the enemy, who will ransack the graves of the wealthier classes.

Loved ... served ... walked ... sought ... worshipped - There is great force in the piled-up verbs by which their worship of the heavenly bodies is described. The prophet beginning with the heart's "love" describes that worship) in the various stages of its development, and then contrasts its fulness with the miserable reward which ensues.

This evil family - The whole Jewish race.

Which remain - The words are omitted by the Septuagint and Syriac versions.

The prophet here resumes from Jeremiah 7:28 the main subject of his prophecy. He again invites the Jews to repentance.

Shall they fall? - The argument is that when men fall, they do not lie upon the ground, but endeavor to get up again: and when a man loses his way, he does not persist in going on, but turns round, and retraces his steps. Israel then will be only following the dictates of comnon sense in desisting from that which she now knows to be her ruin.

When men act as in Jeremiah 8:4, why is God's own people alone an exception?

Slidden back ... backsliding - The same words as "turn" and "return" in Jeremiah 8:4. They should be rendered, "Why doth this people of Jerusalem turn away with a perpetual turning?"

Deceit - i. e., idolatry; because men worship in it that which is false, and it is false to the worshippers.

Refuse - From a feeling of dislike.

I hearkened and heard - God, before passing sentence, carefully listens to the words of the people. Compare Genesis 11:5, where the divine judgment is preceded by the Almighty going down to see the tower.

Not aright - Or, "not-right;" which in the Hebrew idiom means that which is utterly wrong.

No man repented - The original phrase is very striking: No "man had pity upon his own wickedness." If men understood the true nature of sin, the sinner would repent out of very pity upon himself.

As the horse rusheth - literally, "overfloweth." It is a double metaphor; first, the persistence of the people in sin is compared to the fury which at the sound of the trumpet seizes upon the war-horse; and then its rush into the battle is likened to the overflowing of a torrent, which nothing can stop in its destructive course.

Jeremiah appeals to the obedience which migratory birds render to the law of their natures. The "stork" arrives in Palestine about March 21, and after a six weeks' halt departs for the north of Europe. It takes its flight by day, at a vast height in the air ("in the heaven"). The appearance of the "turtle-dove" is one of the pleasant signs of the approach of spring.

The crane and the swallow - Rather, "the swift and the crane."

The law of the Lord - The "Torah," or written law, the possession of which made the priests and prophets so boastfully exclaim, "We are wise."

Lo, certainly ... - Rather, Verily, lo! the lying pen "of the scribes" hath made it - the Law - into a lie. The mention of "scribes" in this place is a crucial point in the argument whether or not the Pentateuch or Torah is the old law-book of the Jews, or a fabrication which gradually grew up, but was not received as authoritative until after the return from the captivity. It is not until the time of Josiah 2 Chronicles 34:13 that "scribes" are mentioned except as political officers; here, however, they are students of the Torah. The Torah must have existed in writing before there could have been an order of men whose special business it was to study it; and therefore to explain this verse by saying that perhaps the scribes were writers of false prophecies written in imitation of the true, is to lose the whole gist of the passage. What the scribes turned into a lie was that Law of which they had just boasted that they were the possessors. Moreover, the scribes undeniably became possessed of preponderating influence during the exile: and on the return from Babylon were powerful enough to prevent the restoration of the kingly office. That there should be along with the priests and Levites men who devoted themselves to the study of the written Law, and who in the time of Josiah had acquired such influence as to be recognized as a distinct class - is just what we should expect from the rapid progress of learning, which began with Elisha's active management of the schools of the prophets, and culminated in the days of Hezekiah. Jeremiah's whole argument depends upon the fact that there were in his days men who claimed to be "wise" or "learned" men because of their study of the Pentateuch, and is entirely inconsistent with the assumptions that Jeremiah wrote the book of Deuteronomy, and that Ezra wrote parts of Exodus and the whole of Leviticus.