Jeremiah 15:7

15:7 The Lord continued, ¹ 

“In every town in the land I will purge them

like straw blown away by the wind. ² 

I will destroy my people.

I will kill off their children.

I will do so because they did not change their behavior. ³ 

Isaiah 41:16

41:16 You will winnow them and the wind will blow them away;

the wind will scatter them.

You will rejoice in the Lord;

you will boast in the Holy One of Israel.

Ezekiel 5:12

5:12 A third of your people will die of plague or be overcome by the famine within you. ⁴  A third of your people will fall by the sword surrounding you, ⁵  and a third I will scatter to the winds. I will unleash a sword behind them.

Matthew 3:12

3:12 His winnowing fork ⁶  is in his hand, and he will clean out his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the storehouse, ⁷  but the chaff he will burn up with inextinguishable fire.” ⁸ 

¹ tn The words “The Lord continued” are not in the text. They have been supplied in the translation to show the shift back to talking about the people instead of addressing them. The obvious speaker is the Lord; the likely listener is Jeremiah as in vv. 1-4.

² tn Heb “I have winnowed them with a winnowing fork in the gates of the land.” The word “gates” is here being used figuratively for the cities, the part for the whole. See 14:2 and the notes there.

³ tn Or “did not repent of their wicked ways”; Heb “They did not turn back from their ways.” There is no casual particle here (either כִּי [ki], which is more formally casual, or וְ [vÿ], which sometimes introduces casual circumstantial clauses). The causal idea is furnished by the connection of ideas. If the verbs throughout this section are treated as pasts and this section seen as a lament, then the clause could be sequential: “but they still did not turn…”

⁴ sn The judgment of plague and famine comes from the covenant curse (Lev 26:25-26). As in v. 10, the city of Jerusalem is figuratively addressed here.

⁵ sn Judgment by plague, famine, and sword occurs in Jer 21:9; 27:13; Ezek 6:11, 12; 7:15.

⁶ sn A winnowing fork was a pitchfork-like tool used to toss threshed grain in the air so that the wind blew away the chaff, leaving the grain to fall to the ground. The note of purging is highlighted by the use of imagery involving sifting though threshed grain for the useful kernels.

⁷ tn Or “granary,” “barn” (referring to a building used to store a farm’s produce rather than a building to house livestock).

⁸ sn The image of fire that cannot be extinguished is from the OT: Job 20:26; Isa 34:8-10; 66:24.