Sometimes God used the events in the lives of His prophets to speak to the people as well as their messages.
"Hosea's unhappy marriage (Hos. 1-3), Isaiah's family (Isa. 7-8), the death of Ezekiel's wife (Ezek. 24:15-27), and Jeremiah's call to remain unmarried are all examples of the proclamation of the word through family events."254
16:1-2 The Lord commanded His prophet never (Heb. lo') to marry and rear children.255The Israelites and ancient Near Easterners in general regarded the unmarried state and childlessness as divine curses (cf. Matt. 24:19; 1 Cor. 7:26), but here God overruled what was normal (cf. Gen. 1:28; 2:18; Deut. 7:14) for a special reason. Bachelors were so rare in Israel that there is no word for bachelor in the Old Testament. As an unmarried man, Jeremiah would have been the object of much derision and scorn.
16:3-4 The reason for this command was that the people living in Judah then were soon going to die horrible deaths; the exile was imminent.
"Jeremiah married no one, signifying the end of the relationship between the people and the Lord, and had no children, signifying the resulting destitution."256
Perhaps the Lord also wanted to spare Jeremiah the sorrow of seeing his wife and children die this way. The sorrow connected with the Babylonian invasion would be much greater than the joys of family life if he were to marry and father children.
16:5 The Lord also instructed Jeremiah not to visit those who were mourning over the death of a loved one.257He was not to comfort them because the Lord had withdrawn his lovingkindness and compassion from His people. Jeremiah's life was to remind the people of God's withdrawal from them.
"Not to show grief was abnormal and was cause for criticism."258
16:6-7 In the coming invasion, all classes of people would die and no one would bury them or lament their passing in traditional ways.259One of these ways was the meal that friends of the mourners provided after the funeral (cf. 2 Sam. 3:35; Ezek. 24:17; Hos. 9:4).260
"A consoling cup in later Judaism was a special cup of wine drunk by the chief mourner. This practice is not mentioned elsewhere in Scripture."261
16:8 Neither was Jeremiah to attend joyful celebrations or eat and drink with merrymakers. This is probably a reference to participating in wedding celebrations (cf. 7:34; 25:10; 33:11). Jeremiah's failure to fulfill social obligations, such as attending weddings and funerals, would have made him even more an object of social disgrace.
16:9 The reason for this antisocial behavior, Almighty Yahweh, Israel's God explained, was that He would soon end all rejoicing in the land. Jeremiah was to reflect the attitudes of His God in all these situations. His withdrawal from village life pictured Yahweh's withdrawal from His people.
"It is one thing to grow eloquent over a dire prospect for a wicked nation; quite another thing to taste the medicine itself. To ask this of Jeremiah, denying him the cherished gift of wife and children (an almost unthinkable vocation at the time), and then to isolate him from sharing the occasions of sorrow and joy around him (5, 8), was the measure of God's intense concern to get the message across."262
16:10 The Lord prepared Jeremiah for questions that the people would ask him. They would wonder what they had done to deserve the great calamity that the prophet predicted. They had become blind to the sinfulness of their ways (cf. Mal. 1:6-7; 2:17; 3:7-8, 13).
16:11 He was to explain that the coming judgment was due to the accumulated sins of their forefathers in forsaking the Lord and His covenant and in practicing idolatry. Sin has a cumulative effect in that it results in conditions that affect the behavior of others, including later generations.
16:12 The punishment was also for their own sins, which were worse than those of their forefathers. They had been stubborn in their hearts and had not responded to the Lord's Word.
16:13 Therefore the Lord would hurl (Heb. tul) them out of the land and into a land that they and their forefathers had not known before.263There they would have their fill of idolatry, and the Lord would show them no mercy.
