Jeremiah 19:15

19:15 “The Lord God of Israel who rules over all 1  says, ‘I will soon bring on this city and all the towns surrounding it 2  all the disaster I threatened to do to it. I will do so because they have stubbornly refused 3  to pay any attention to what I have said!’”

Jeremiah 21:4-10

21:4 that the Lord, the God of Israel, says, 4  ‘The forces at your disposal 5  are now outside the walls fighting against King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and the Babylonians 6  who have you under siege. I will gather those forces back inside the city. 7  21:5 In anger, in fury, and in wrath I myself will fight against you with my mighty power and great strength! 8  21:6 I will kill everything living in Jerusalem, 9  people and animals alike! They will die from terrible diseases. 21:7 Then 10  I, the Lord, promise that 11  I will hand over King Zedekiah of Judah, his officials, and any of the people who survive the war, starvation, and disease. I will hand them over to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and to their enemies who want to kill them. He will slaughter them with the sword. He will not show them any mercy, compassion, or pity.’

21:8 “But 12  tell the people of Jerusalem 13  that the Lord says, ‘I will give you a choice between two courses of action. One will result in life; the other will result in death. 14  21:9 Those who stay in this city will die in battle or of starvation or disease. Those who leave the city and surrender to the Babylonians who are besieging it will live. They will escape with their lives. 15  21:10 For I, the Lord, say that 16  I am determined not to deliver this city but to bring disaster on it. 17  It will be handed over to the king of Babylon and he will destroy it with fire.’” 18 

Jeremiah 25:9

25:9 So I, the Lord, affirm that 19  I will send for all the peoples of the north 20  and my servant, 21  King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and all the nations that surround it. I will utterly destroy 22  this land, its inhabitants, and all the nations that surround it 23  and make them everlasting ruins. 24  I will make them objects of horror and hissing scorn. 25 

Jeremiah 32:27-31

32:27 “I am the Lord, the God of all humankind. There is, indeed, nothing too difficult for me. 26  32:28 Therefore I, the Lord, say: 27  ‘I will indeed hand 28  this city over to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and the Babylonian army. 29  They will capture it. 32:29 The Babylonian soldiers 30  that are attacking this city will break into it and set it on fire. They will burn it down along with the houses where people have made me angry by offering sacrifices to the god Baal and by pouring out drink offerings to other gods on their rooftops. 31  32:30 This will happen because the people of Israel and Judah have repeatedly done what displeases me 32  from their earliest history until now 33  and because they 34  have repeatedly made me angry by the things they have done. 35  I, the Lord, affirm it! 36  32:31 This will happen because 37  the people of this city have aroused my anger and my wrath since the time they built it until now. 38  They have made me so angry that I am determined to remove 39  it from my sight.

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

2 tn Heb “all its towns.”

3 tn Heb “They hardened [or made stiff] their neck so as not to.”

4 tn Heb “Tell Zedekiah, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel.’” Using the indirect quote eliminates one level of embedded quotation and makes it easier for the reader to follow.

5 tn Heb “the weapons which are in your hand.” Weapons stands here by substitution for the soldiers who wield them.

6 sn The Babylonians (Heb “the Chaldeans”). The Chaldeans were a group of people in the country south of Babylon from which Nebuchadnezzar came. The Chaldean dynasty his father established became the name by which the Babylonians are regularly referred to in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s contemporary Ezekiel uses both terms.

7 tn The structure of the Hebrew sentence of this verse is long and complex and has led to a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding. There are two primary points of confusion: 1) the relation of the phrase “outside the walls,” and 2) the antecedent of “them” in the last clause of the verse that reads in Hebrew: “I will gather them back into the midst of the city.” Most take the phrase “outside the walls” with “the Babylonians….” Some take it with “turn back/bring back” to mean “from outside….” However, the preposition “from” is part of the idiom for “outside….” The phrase goes with “fighting” as J. Bright (Jeremiah [AB], 215) notes and as NJPS suggests. The antecedent of “them” has sometimes been taken mistakenly to refer to the Babylonians. It refers rather to “the forces at your disposal” which is literally “the weapons which are in your hands.” This latter phrase is a figure involving substitution (called metonymy) as Bright also correctly notes. The whole sentence reads in Hebrew: “I will bring back the weapons of war which are in your hand with which you are fighting Nebuchadrezzar the King of Babylon and the Chaldeans who are besieging you outside your wall and I will gather them into the midst of the city.” The sentence has been restructured to better reflect the proper relationships and to make the sentence conform more to contemporary English style.

7 tn Heb “with outstretched hand and with strong arm.” These are, of course, figurative of God’s power and might. He does not literally have hands and arms.

10 map For location see Map5-B1; Map6-F3; Map7-E2; Map8-F2; Map10-B3; JP1-F4; JP2-F4; JP3-F4; JP4-F4.

13 tn Heb “And afterward.”

14 tn Heb “oracle of the Lord.”

16 tn Heb “And/But unto this people you shall say…” “But” is suggested here by the unusual word order which offsets what they are to say to Zedekiah (v. 3).

17 tn Heb “these people.”

18 tn Heb “Behold I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death.”

19 tn Heb “his life will be to him for spoil.”

22 tn Heb “oracle of the Lord.”

23 tn Heb “I have set my face against this city for evil [i.e., disaster] and not for good [i.e., well-being].” For the use of the idiom “set one’s face against/toward” see, e.g., usage in 1 Kgs 2:15; 2 Kgs 2:17; Jer 42:15, 17 and note the interesting interplay of usage in Jer 44:11-12.

24 tn Heb “he will burn it with fire.”

25 tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

26 sn The many allusions to trouble coming from the north are now clarified: it is the armies of Babylon which included within it contingents from many nations. See 1:14, 15; 4:6; 6:1, 22; 10:22; 13:20 for earlier allusions.

27 sn Nebuchadnezzar is called the Lord’s servant also in Jer 27:6; 43:10. He was the Lord’s servant in that he was the agent used by the Lord to punish his disobedient people. Assyria was earlier referred to as the Lord’s “rod” (Isa 10:5-6) and Cyrus is called his “shepherd” and his “anointed” (Isa 44:28; 45:1). P. C. Craigie, P. H. Kelley, and J. F. Drinkard (Jeremiah 1-25 [WBC], 364) make the interesting observation that the terms here are very similar to the terms in v. 4. The people of Judah ignored the servants, the prophets, he sent to turn them away from evil. So he will send other servants whom they cannot ignore.

28 tn The word used here was used in the early years of Israel’s conquest for the action of killing all the men, women, and children in the cities of Canaan, destroying all their livestock, and burning their cities down. This policy was intended to prevent Israel from being corrupted by paganism (Deut 7:2; 20:17-18; Josh 6:18, 21). It was to be extended to any city that led Israel away from worshiping God (Deut 13:15) and any Israelite who brought an idol into his house (Deut 7:26). Here the policy is being directed against Judah as well as against her neighbors because of her persistent failure to heed God’s warnings through the prophets. For further usage of this term in application to foreign nations in the book of Jeremiah see 50:21, 26; 51:3.

29 tn Heb “will utterly destroy them.” The referent (this land, its inhabitants, and the nations surrounding it) has been specified in the translation for clarity, since the previous “them” referred to Nebuchadnezzar and his armies.

30 sn The Hebrew word translated “everlasting” is the word often translated “eternal.” However, it sometimes has a more limited time reference. For example it refers to the lifetime of a person who became a “lasting slave” to another person (see Exod 21:6; Deut 15:17). It is also used to refer to the long life wished for a king (1 Kgs 1:31; Neh 2:3). The time frame here is to be qualified at least with reference to Judah and Jerusalem as seventy years (see 29:10-14 and compare v. 12).

31 tn Heb “I will make them an object of horror and a hissing and everlasting ruins.” The sentence has been broken up to separate the last object from the first two which are of slightly different connotation, i.e., they denote the reaction to the latter.

28 tn Heb “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?” The question is rhetorical expecting an emphatic negative answer (cf. E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech, 949, citing the parallel in Gen 18:14). The Hebrew particle “Behold” (הִנֵּה, hinneh) introduces the grounds for this rhetorical negative (cf. T. O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, 170, §135 [3]), i.e., “Since I am the Lord, the God of all mankind, there is indeed nothing too hard for me [or is there anything too hard for me?].”

31 tn Heb “Thus says the Lord.” However, the speech has already been introduced as first person. So the first person style has been retained for smoother narrative style.

32 tn Heb “Behold, I will give this city into the hand of…”

33 tn Heb “The Chaldeans.” See the study note on 21:4 for further explanation.

34 tn Heb “The Chaldeans.” See the study note on 21:4 for further explanation.

35 sn Compare Jer 19:13.

37 tn Heb “that which is evil in my eyes.” For this idiom see BDB 744 s.v. עַיִן 3.c and compare usage in 18:10.

38 tn Heb “from their youth.”

39 tn Heb “the people of Israel.” However, since “people of Israel” has been used in the preceding line for the northern kingdom as opposed to the kingdom of Judah, it might lead to confusion to translate literally. Moreover, the pronoun “they” accomplishes the same purpose.

40 tn Heb “by the work of their hands.” See the translator’s note on 25:6 and the parallelism in 25:14 for this rendering rather than referring it to the making of idols as in 1:16; 10:3.

41 tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

40 tn The statements in vv. 28-29 regarding the certain destruction of the city are motivated by three parallel causal clauses in vv. 30a, b, 31, the last of which extends through subordinate and coordinate clauses until the end of v. 35. An attempt has been made to bring out this structure by repeating the idea “This/it will happen” in front of each of these causal clauses in the English translation.

41 tn Heb “from the day they built it until this day.”

42 tn Heb “For this city has been to me for a source of my anger and my wrath from the day they built it until this day so as remove it.” The preposition ְל (lamed) with the infinitive (Heb “so as to remove it”; לַהֲסִירָהּ, lahasirah) expresses degree (cf. R. J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax, 37, §199, and compare usage in 2 Sam 13:2).