Commentary on Jeremiah 2.36–2.69

[36] “And now, because you have done all these works, says the Lord, and I spoke to you, rising early and speaking, and you did not hear, and I called you, and you did not answer, I will do to this house, in which my name is called upon and in which you trust, and to the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh; and I will cast you out from my face, as I cast out all your brothers, the whole seed of Ephraim.” What we put, “rising early and speaking”, is not in the Septuagint. God rises early, not because any time is for him without dawn, but because after the rest of the night, with the strength of the body restored, the soul of men is livelier and, not occupied with pleasures and the desire for food, is able to hear and do what is said. Hence we read in the psalm too, “In the morning you will hear my voice; in the morning I will stand before you and see”, and in Isaiah, “By night (or: at dawn) my spirit rises to you, O God, for your commands are light upon the earth.” Hence the apostle Paul too calls them sons of light and not of night or of darkness, nor sleeping, as the others sleep, who do not perceive God's commands. Because, then, God called them, rising by night, so as to free them too from darkness, he threatens to do to the temple in Jerusalem what he did to the place Shiloh, where the tabernacle first was, so that like sins might be struck with a like sentence. And as the Lord cast out the seed of Ephraim, that is, the ten tribes, which were called Israel and had princes because of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, of the tribe of Ephraim, which was also called the tribe of Joseph, so he testifies that he will cast out Jerusalem and the tribe of Judah with Benjamin. He cast away Shiloh, he will cast away the temple too; he cast away the ten tribes, he will cast away the two too. Whatever is said to that people, let us understand it of ourselves too, if we do the like.

[37] “You, therefore, do not pray for this people, nor lift up praise and prayer for them (or: ask that they may obtain mercy), and do not withstand me, for I will not hear you.” So that the prophet may not seem to ask and fail to obtain what he requests, God commands him not to intercede for a sinful people that does no penance. And when he says, “and do not withstand me”, he shows that the prayers of the saints can withstand the anger of God. Hence the Lord also says to Moses: “Let me alone, that I may strike this people, and I will make you a great nation”; and in the Psalms it is written: “And Phinehas stood up and appeased him, and the plague ceased, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Aaron too, taking the censer, stood between the fire and the people about to burn, and God's anger ceased. And lest we think God cruel in not even allowing himself to be entreated, he gives the reasons why he will not hear, saying:

[38] “Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The sons gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the fat to make cakes (or: chavvonim) for the queen (or: the host) of heaven, and they pour libations to other gods to provoke me to anger. Is it I whom they provoke to anger? says the Lord. Is it not themselves, to the confusion of their own faces?” “Do you wish to hear, prophet,” he says, “why I told you, Do not pray for this people? They do the things that follow: inside and outside, in the streets and at the gates of Jerusalem, the sons carry wood, the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead fat with flour to make chavvonim” (which we interpreted “cakes”, or “preparations”, to show every kind of sacrifice) “for the queen of heaven”, which we should take to be the moon, or certainly “the host of heaven”, so that we understand all the stars; “and after this they pour libations to other gods, not that they are gods, but because they burn incense to demons under their names, and by doing these things they provoke me to anger. Nor do the wretches understand that this contention does not hurt me, whom anger never changes, but themselves, to the confusion of their faces and to everlasting disgrace.” Whatever we do, then, we do not hurt God, who can never be hurt, but prepare destruction for ourselves, treasuring up wrath for the day of wrath. And he set down the different tasks of sons, fathers and mothers or wives, so that there might be no age which dissented from impiety.

[39] “Therefore thus says the Lord God: Behold, my fury and my indignation are kindled (or: drip) upon this place, upon men and upon beasts and upon the trees of the field and upon the fruits of the earth, and it will burn and not be quenched.” He who had said above, “Is it I whom they provoke to anger?”, how does he now say, “Behold, my fury and my indignation drip upon this place”? And the sense is: “I indeed by nature am not angry, but they act so as to provoke me to anger, and I seem to change my nature. Let them then feel me angry, as far as they try to make me so.” And fittingly he does not say, “my fury has been poured out upon this place”, but “drips”, to signify a moderate punishment. But if in a drop of fury there is such hardness, what will happen if the whole shower is poured out? And “kindling” too can be understood thus: that what he long refused to do he is compelled to do by the multitude of sins. And when God is angry, both men and what belongs to men will suffer a like destruction. “And it will burn”, he says (no doubt the fury of the Lord), “and will not be quenched, because the people does nothing by which it could be quenched.”

[40] “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat the flesh. For I did not speak with your fathers, nor command them on the day when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this word I commanded them, saying: Hear my voice, and I will be your God, and you will be my people; and walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you.” He rejects the sacrifices of those whose temple he rejected, and obliquely reproves them for offering victims not out of reverence for him but from desire for feasting. And when he says, “I did not speak with your fathers nor command them on the day when I brought them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offering and sacrifices”, it is clearly understood that he first gave the Decalogue, written on tablets of stone by the finger of God, and that after the offence of idolatry and the head of the calf he afterwards ordered sacrifices to be made to himself rather than to demons, taking away the pure religion of God's commandments and granting the blood of victims and the desire for flesh.

[41] “And they did not hear nor incline their ear, but went away in their own wills (or: desires) and the depravity of their evil heart, and they went backward and not forward, from the day when their fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day.” “When I said, Hear my voice and I will be your God, and so on, they did not hear nor incline their ear, but did the desires of their own heart; and against the saying of the apostle, who forgot what lay behind and stretched forward to what lay ahead, they did the contrary, desiring the past and despising the future.” And when he says, “from the day when their fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day”, he says that they spent all the time in between offending the Lord. Hence the grace of the gospel was necessary, which preserved them not by their own merit but by the Lord's mercy.

[42] “And I sent to you my servants the prophets, day by day rising early and sending; and they did not hear me nor incline their ear, but hardened their neck and did worse than their fathers.” Just, then, is the anger of the Lord, which was kindled and dripped upon a people that was contemptuous, stiff-necked and unwilling to hear God's words. How God sends prophets by night or at dawn and by day we have said above.

[43] “And you will speak all these words to them, and they will not hear you; and you will call them, and they will not answer you. And you will say to them: This is the nation that has not heard the voice of the Lord its God nor received discipline; faith has perished and been taken away from their mouth.” “Do not doubt”, he says, “that they have hardened their neck and done worse than their fathers. See, I give room for repentance; nor do I speak in order that these things may happen, but I foretell them because they are going to happen. At least now speak to them with my words; and yet they will not hear you, and you will call them and they will not answer you; for they will be of such pride that when you call them to hear, no one will deign to answer. And you will say to them: This is the nation that has not heard the voice of the Lord its God nor received discipline.” Fittingly, as I said before, he calls them not his people but a nation. And although this was partly done in the time of the prophets and went before in shadow and image, yet it is more fully fulfilled in Christ, when they would not receive discipline and despised the voice of their Lord. Hence it is elegantly added: “faith has perished”, the faith which belongs properly to Christians, “and has been taken away from their mouth”, namely every confession of the Son of God and of faith.

[44] “Cut off your hair and cast it away, and take up a lament on the heights (or: on the lips), for the Lord has rejected and forsaken the generation of his fury.” We read that Job too, when he heard of the death of his sons and daughters, cut off his hair; and among the ancients it was the custom of all who mourned to cut their hair; but now, on the contrary, to let the hair grow is the sign of mourning. All the prophetic lamenting and wailing is taken up for this reason, that the Lord has rejected and forsaken the generation of his fury: no doubt he means the people of the Jews. And this is properly to be referred to the times of Christ, when faith perished and was taken away from the mouth of a people that blasphemed the Lord. [45] “For the sons of Judah have done evil in my sight, says the Lord; they have set their abominations in the house in which my name is called upon, to defile it; and they have built the high places (or: the altar) of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command nor think of in my heart.” That the sons of Judah set up a statue of Baal in God's temple we learn at the beginning of Ezekiel. The “high places”, which in Hebrew are called “bamoth”, or the “altar” of Topheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, signify that place which is watered by the springs of Siloam and is pleasant and wooded, and today still offers the delights of gardens. This error of the Gentiles had taken hold of all the provinces: to sacrifice victims at the heads of springs and in the most pleasant groves, and to keep up every religion of depraved superstition. “Topheth” in the Hebrew language is interpreted “breadth”; and it is said to be written in the book of Joshua son of Nun concerning this place, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom and in Hebrew is called “gehennom”: for “ge” means pharanx, that is, “valley”, and “hennom” sounds either a man's name or “grace”. And the Hebrews relate that “Gehenna” was named from this place, because the whole people of the Jews perished there by offending God; in this place they also consecrated their sons in the fire to idols, or offered them as a burnt offering, which he did not command them nor order by any sanction of the law. And if Jephthah offered his virgin daughter to God, it is not the sacrifice that pleases, but the mind of the offerer; for otherwise, if a dog or an ass or any unclean animal had first met the father as he returned from slaying the enemy, he would have had to offer that to God. [46] “Therefore, behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when it will no longer be called Topheth and the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter; and they will bury in Topheth, because there is no other place. And the corpses of this people will be food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth, and there will be none to drive them away.” He signifies the time of the siege, which they endured from the ninth year of King Zedekiah to the eleventh. And the valley itself will no longer be called “gehennom”, that is, “valley of Hinnom” or “of the sons of Hinnom”, but, because of the slaughter of very many, “valley of killing”. So great will the slaughter be that in the place of the former religion there will be countless tombs, and those whom they could not bury will be torn by birds and devoured by beasts, and there will be no one to drive them away, fearing the like and overcome by the duties of burial. We pass over what is plain, so as to linger in obscure places wherever there is occasion; for the very size of the book can cause weariness to readers, how much more if it were discussed by us at greater length!

[47] “And I will make to cease from the cities of Judah and from the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, and the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride; for the land will be a desolation.” When the place of idolatry has been turned into tombs, so that where they offended God their corpses lie unburied, all joy will be taken from the once great city of Jerusalem and from the other cities under its rule, and everything will be filled with sorrow, groaning and desolation. [48] “At that time, says the Lord, they will cast out of their tombs the bones of the king of Judah and the bones of his princes and the bones of the priests and the bones of the prophets and the bones of those who dwelt in Jerusalem, and they will spread them before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which they have loved and served, and after which they have walked, and which they have sought and worshipped. They will not be gathered or buried; they will be as dung on the face of the earth. And all who remain of this most evil family in all the places that are left, to which I have driven them, will choose death rather than life, says the Lord of hosts.” All that the prophetic word describes we have seen happen in our own time, not to Jerusalem alone, which suffered these things from the Chaldeans and the Romans, but to the whole world, so that tears have dried up and everything is full of the bones of the dead. And because, according to the ancient custom, they used to put gold and certain ornaments of women or men in tombs, avarice broke and dug up these too, to expose them to the sky and the light. And so the bones first of the kings of Judah and of its princes, of the priests too and of the prophets and of the whole people that had been in Jerusalem, were brought out of their graves, lying open to the sun and moon and to the sight of all the stars, so that they lay open to the gaze of those whom they had served after forsaking God, and, consumed, were dissolved into dung and ashes. And if anyone of the multitude could escape, to whatever places he came he would prefer death to life and think death the remedy of an unhappy soul.

[49] “And you shall say to them: Thus says the Lord: Shall he who falls not rise again? And he who has turned away, shall he not return (or: shall he not turn away)?” After such great evils he calls to repentance those who can remain; or, before the things he threatened come, he urges them to conversion and gives room for repentance. And what is written according to the Hebrew, “and he who has turned away, shall he not turn away?”, signifies that one who has turned away from God, if he is willing to be converted to better things, can also turn God's fury to better things, withstand what is coming, and escape the blows by prayers.

[50] “Why then has this people in Jerusalem turned away with a contentious turning away? They have laid hold of falsehood and refused to return.” “The more I called them to repentance,” he says, “the more they withdrew from me, not so much from zeal for sinning as from zeal for overcoming me. For they laid hold firmly of falsehood, either idols or any perverse things contrary to truth and justice, and refused to return”; he did not say “they could not”; “but with all zeal they pursued wicked things.” [51] “I listened and heard; no one speaks what is good; there is no one who does penance for his sin, saying: What have I done? They have all turned to their course like a horse rushing headlong into battle.” Called back to repentance, they scorn to hear; nor is it enough for them to have offended against the Lord and spoken blasphemy, but all, like horses rushing at full gallop into battle, do not reflect on their sin nor say, “What have I done?” By this we understand either that these things are said of the whole human race, which is prone to vices, or of the time of the Saviour, when all turned aside, together they became useless; there was none who did good, not even one. Hence he himself cries out mystically: “Save me, O Lord, for the holy one has failed!” But if these things are so, where are those who say that it is placed in our will to be without any sin? “No one”, he says, “speaks what is good”, because we shall render account even for an idle word on the day of judgment. [52] “The kite in the sky knows its time; the turtledove and the swallow and the stork have kept the time of their coming; but my people has not known the judgment of the Lord.” For “kite”, as Symmachus interpreted, the Septuagint and Theodotion put the Hebrew word itself, “asida”, Aquila “heron”. Again for “swallow” Symmachus translated “cicada”, which in Hebrew is called “sis”. For what we put as “stork”, Aquila and Symmachus translated “agur”, as it is written in the Hebrew, for which the Septuagint interpreted “field sparrows”. But the sense is one and the same, which is also set at the beginning of Isaiah: “The ox has known its owner and the ass its master's crib; but Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood”: that even little birds know their seasons and know when, hastening to warm places, they must avoid the rigour of winter, and again at the beginning of spring come to their usual regions. Here we should take “sky” for the air above us.

[53] “How do you say: We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Truly the lying pen of the scribes has worked falsehood.” He speaks to the scribes and Pharisees, who boast of their knowledge of the law and, writing, write iniquity. And as for what he says:

[54] “The wise are put to shame, they are terrified and taken”: not that those who do these things are wise, but he calls them wise so that they may be condemned by their own judgment, and on the contrary their wisdom may be convicted of folly, as Paul says: “You who teach another, do you not teach yourself?” And because they have cast away the word of the Lord, there is therefore no wisdom in them. In vain, then, do they boast of knowledge of the law who destroy its teaching by their works. [55] “Therefore I will give their women (or: wives) to strangers, their fields to heirs; for from the least to the greatest all are given to avarice; from the prophet to the priest all practise falsehood (or: iniquity). And they healed the wound of the daughter of my people to disgrace, saying: Peace, peace, when there was no peace.” They received the wages of their works, so that those who cast away the word of the Lord were themselves cast away by him. “Their wives”, he says, “and their possessions I will hand over to the enemies. And lest my sentence be thought cruel, let the hearer recognize the causes: from the least to the greatest all are given to avarice” (for avarice is the root of all evils); “from the prophet to the priest, who ought to keep others from sinning, they are the first to be subject to crimes, and all either do wicked things, by plundering what belongs to others, or certainly falsehood, so that there is no truth in their mouth. And after this, like good physicians, they wished to heal others' wounds with words, though they themselves were pierced with the wounds of every outrage.” We see this daily among our own people too, as the apostle says: “You who preach that one must not steal, do you steal?”, and the rest. When they see sinners and rich men, they wish to heal the wound of the daughter of God's people, that is, of the church, to the disgrace either of those who are deceived or of those who deceive others, so as to say to those covered with every crime, “Peace, peace”, when there is no peace, and the war of sins hangs over them.

[56] “Were they ashamed because they committed abomination? Rather, they were not ashamed with shame, and they did not know how to blush.” This is to be read as a question, so that the sense is: “Did they blush at their crimes? Did they understand the abominations they had worked?” “By no means; but they burst out into such madness that they would neither amend their vices through shame nor confess their crimes in hope of pardon.”

[57] “Therefore they will fall among those who fall; in the time of their visitation they will collapse, says the Lord.” These are the rewards of those who did not know how to blush: that those whose dignity was higher than the people's should be mixed with the people's ruins. For from the least to the greatest all are given to avarice, and from the prophet to the priest all practise falsehood. The time of visitation is the approaching captivity.

[58] “Gathering I will gather them, says the Lord: there is no grape on the vines and there are no figs on the fig tree; the leaf has fallen, and I have given them things that have passed away.” He teaches more plainly what the time of visitation is, in which the sinners will fall, saying: “Gathering I will gather them” (no doubt into Jerusalem), “so that they may be besieged by the Chaldeans for a long time and suffer the evils of famine. When”, he says, “the seasons pass, and autumn follows summer, and in winter the leaves fall from the trees, you will see everything from afar and take no food from them. For there is no grape on the vines for you, who do not gather the fruit of the vines; and there are no figs on the fig tree for the besieged people, which sees the fruits of its trees seized by the enemies. The leaves”, he says, “will fall when summer and autumn have passed. For I have given them things which they would see pass away, so that with greater grief they would lose an abundance of all things which they were not allowed to touch.”

[59] “Why do we sit still? Assemble, and let us go into the fortified city (or: cities) and be silent there (or: be cast away there), for the Lord our God has silenced us (or: cast us away) and given us water of gall to drink; for we have sinned against the Lord. We looked for peace, and there was no good; for a time of healing, and behold, terror.” The voice of the people is brought in, answering, confessing its vices and urging one another to enter the walled cities, or the one city of Jerusalem, for the others had already been taken. “And let us be silent there,” they say, “because our Lord has made us silent (for we have no confidence to entreat), or let us be cast away there, or thrown out like dung. He himself gave us waters of gall to drink, because we turned the sweet God to bitterness. And the reason why we drank such waters is plain: for we sinned against the Lord and looked for peace, we who had done no good work; and we thought the time of healing had come for us, when everything was filled with dread and terror.” A change of persons, especially in the prophets, makes understanding difficult; if these are assigned to their proper places, causes and times, what seemed obscure will become plain.

[60] “From Dan the snorting of his horses is heard; at the sound of the neighing of his fighters (or: horsemen) the whole land shook; and they came and devoured (or: they will come and devour) the land and its fullness, the city and its inhabitants.” So the people did not say, as the Septuagint translated above, “let us go into the fortified cities”, but “into the fortified city”, to signify Jerusalem; in short, he now adds, “the city and its inhabitants”. The army of Nebuchadnezzar is described as coming from Dan through Phoenicia, in which place the river Jordan rises. And what the Septuagint puts as future, the Hebrew records as already done, for the certainty of the event.

[61] “For behold, I will send among you serpents, basilisks (or: most evil ones, or, as the Septuagint translated, deadly ones), against which there is no charm; and they will bite you, says the Lord, incurably, with the pain of your fainting heart.” Who those are who come from Dan, whose snorting was heard and who reduced the whole land to a wilderness, the prophetic word shows under another figure, calling them “serpents”, “most evil” or “deadly”, and, as Aquila translated, “basilisks”, which in Hebrew are called “sapphonim”; for which I do not understand what his second edition meant in saying “watchmen”, unless perhaps because of the likeness of the word. “Against which”, he says, “there is no charm”: for in vain do those pour out prayers to God against the ancient serpent, the twisting snake, who have despised God's commands. Let us use this place against those who, despising the Saviour's words, are handed over to the hostile powers. [62] “My pain is above pain; my heart within me grieves.” For this, as we said above, the Septuagint joined these words to the preceding sentence, so as to put: “and they will bite you, says the Lord, incurably, with the pain of your fainting heart.” In the Hebrew it is not so much “pain”, which in Greek is called odynē, as …, which we can interpret as the “grimace” of a mouth contracted by pain, and the likeness of one weeping. These words are to be read pathetically, in the person of God lamenting the overthrow of Jerusalem and unable to bear its miseries.

[63] “Behold, the voice of the crying of the daughter of my people from a far land!” He describes the weeping and wailing of the city of Jerusalem when the enemies have entered.

[64] “Is the Lord not in Zion, or is her king not in her?” Either the Lord himself is the king, or certainly “Lord” refers to the Father and “king” to the Son, according to what is written under the name of Solomon: “O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son.” And the reason why there is a voice of crying in Jerusalem, and the crying itself comes from a far land, is plain: because the Lord is not in her and her king has withdrawn from her.

[65] “Why then have they provoked me to anger with their carved images and with foreign vanities?” “The Lord has withdrawn from them”, he says, “because by the worship of idols they provoked me, who was their Lord and King, to anger.”

[66] “The harvest has passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Again the people speaks, shut in Jerusalem by a long siege: that the seasons have changed and the circle of the year has rolled round, and all their hope has been made void and has passed away.

[67] “For the wound of the daughter of my people I am crushed and saddened; astonishment has seized me.” God answers that in the affliction of Jerusalem he himself seems afflicted, and in human likeness is crushed with astonishment.

[68] “Is there no balm in Gilead, or is there no physician there? Why then has the scar of the daughter of my people not closed over?” Not only in the present place but in many other testimonies of the Scriptures we find the balm of Gilead put for repentance and medicine; and God now marvels why the wounds of Jerusalem have not been healed and the scars have not yet closed over the skin, because there are no prophets or priests by whose medicine they ought to be healed.

[69] “Who will give water to my head and a fountain of tears to my eyes? And I will weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.” “If”, he says, “I were wholly turned to weeping, and there were not drops of tears but the abundance of a river, still I could not fittingly weep for the slain of the daughter of my people. For the evils are so great that by their size they surpass every grief.” This can be understood either in the person of the prophet or in that of the Lord.