Jeremiah 17:27

17:27 But you must obey me and set the Sabbath day apart to me. You must not carry any loads in through ¹  the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. If you disobey, I will set the gates of Jerusalem on fire. It will burn down all the fortified dwellings in Jerusalem and no one will be able to put it out.’”

Jeremiah 23:16

23:16 The Lord who rules over all ²  says to the people of Jerusalem: ³ 

“Do not listen to what

those prophets are saying to you.

They are filling you with false hopes.

They are reporting visions of their own imaginations,

not something the Lord has given them to say. ⁴ 

Jeremiah 27:9

27:9 So do not listen to your prophets or to those who claim to predict the future by divination, ⁵  by dreams, by consulting the dead, ⁶  or by practicing magic. They keep telling you, ‘You do not need to be ⁷  subject to the king of Babylon.’

Jeremiah 29:8

29:8 “For the Lord God of Israel who rules over all ⁸  says, ‘Do not let the prophets or those among you who claim to be able to predict the future by divination ⁹  deceive you. And do not pay any attention to the dreams that you are encouraging them to dream.

¹ tn Heb “carry loads on the Sabbath and bring [them] in through.” The translation treats the two verbs “carry” and “bring in” are an example of hendiadys (see the note on “through” in 17:21).

² tn Heb “Yahweh of armies.”

³ tn The words “to the people of Jerusalem” are not in the Hebrew text but are supplied in the translation to reflect the masculine plural form of the imperative and the second masculine plural form of the pronoun. These words have been supplied in the translation for clarity.

⁴ tn Heb “They tell of a vision of their own heart [= mind] not from the mouth of the Lord.”

³ sn Various means of divination are alluded to in the OT. For example, Ezek 21:26-27 alludes to throwing down arrows to see which way they fall and consulting the shape of the liver of slaughtered animals. Gen 44:5 alludes to reading the future through pouring liquid in a cup. The means alluded to in this verse were all classified as pagan and prohibited as illegitimate in Deut 18:10-14. The Lord had promised that he would speak to them through prophets like Moses (Deut 18:15, 18). But even prophets could lie. Hence, the Lord told them that the test of a true prophet was whether what he said came true or not (Deut 18:20-22). An example of false prophesying and the vindication of the true as opposed to the false will be given in the chapter that follows this.

⁴ sn An example of this is seen in 1 Sam 28.

⁵ tn The verb in this context is best taken as a negative obligatory imperfect. See IBHS 508-9 §31.4g for discussion and examples. See Exod 4:15 as an example of positive obligation.

⁴ tn Heb “Yahweh of armies, the God of Israel.”

⁵ sn See the study notes on 27:9 for this term.