Jeremiah 1:17

1:17 “But you, Jeremiah, ¹  get yourself ready! ²  Go and tell these people everything I instruct you to say. Do not be terrified of them, or I will give you good reason to be terrified of them. ³ 

Jeremiah 4:1

4:1 “If you, Israel, want to come back,” says the Lord,

“if you want to come back to me ⁴ 

you must get those disgusting idols ⁵  out of my sight

and must no longer go astray. ⁶ 

Jeremiah 4:6

4:6 Raise a signal flag that tells people to go to Zion. ⁷ 

Run for safety! Do not delay!

For I am about to bring disaster out of the north.

It will bring great destruction. ⁸ 

Jeremiah 6:4

6:4 They will say, ⁹  ‘Prepare to do battle ¹⁰  against it!

Come on! Let’s attack it at noon!’

But later they will say, ¹¹  ‘Oh, oh! Too bad! ¹² 

The day is almost over

and the shadows of evening are getting long.

Jeremiah 25:32

25:32 The Lord who rules over all ¹³  says,

‘Disaster will soon come on one nation after another. ¹⁴ 

A mighty storm of military destruction ¹⁵  is rising up

from the distant parts of the earth.’

Jeremiah 31:22

31:22 How long will you vacillate, ¹⁶ 

you who were once like an unfaithful daughter? ¹⁷ 

For I, the Lord, promise ¹⁸  to bring about something new ¹⁹  on the earth,

something as unique as a woman protecting a man!’” ²⁰ 

Jeremiah 34:9

34:9 Everyone was supposed to free their male and female Hebrew slaves. No one was supposed to keep a fellow Judean enslaved. ²¹ 

Jeremiah 34:11

34:11 But later ²²  they had changed their minds. They had taken back their male and female slaves that they had freed and forced them to be slaves again. ²³ 

Jeremiah 46:19

46:19 Pack your bags for exile,

you inhabitants of poor dear Egypt. ²⁴ 

For Memphis will be laid waste.

It will lie in ruins ²⁵  and be uninhabited.

Jeremiah 46:22

46:22 Egypt will run away, hissing like a snake, ²⁶ 

as the enemy comes marching up in force.

They will come against her with axes

as if they were woodsmen chopping down trees.

[1:17]  ¹ tn The name “Jeremiah” is not in the text. The use of the personal pronoun followed by the proper name is an attempt to reflect the correlative emphasis between Jeremiah’s responsibility noted here and the Lord’s promise noted in the next verse. The emphasis in the Hebrew text is marked by the presence of the subject pronouns at the beginning of each of the two verses.

[1:17]  ² tn Heb “gird up your loins.” For the literal use of this idiom to refer to preparation for action see 2 Kgs 4:29; 9:1. For the idiomatic use to refer to spiritual and emotional preparation as here, see Job 38:3, 40:7, and 1 Pet 1:13 in the NT.

[1:17]  ³ tn Heb “I will make you terrified in front of them.” There is a play on words here involving two different forms of the same Hebrew verb and two different but related prepositional phrases, “from before/of,” a preposition introducing the object of a verb of fearing, and “before, in front of,” a preposition introducing a spatial location.

[4:1]  ⁴ tn Or “If you, Israel, want to turn [away from your shameful ways (those described in 3:23-25)]…then you must turn back to me.” Or perhaps, “Israel, you must turn back…Yes, you must turn back to me.”

[4:1]  ⁵ tn Heb “disgusting things.”

[4:1]  ⁶ tn Or possibly, “If you get those disgusting idols out of my sight, you will not need to flee.” This is less probable because the normal meaning of the last verb is “to wander,” “ to stray.”

[4:6]  ⁷ tn Heb “Raise up a signal toward Zion.”

[4:6]  ⁸ tn Heb “out of the north, even great destruction.”

[6:4]  ¹⁰ tn These words are not in the text but are implicit in the connection. They are supplied in the translation for clarity.

[6:4]  ¹¹ tn Heb “Sanctify war.” This is probably an idiom from early Israel’s holy wars in which religious rites were to precede the battle.

[6:4]  ¹² tn These words are not in the text but are supplied in the translation for clarity. Some commentaries and English versions see these not as the words of the enemy but as those of the Israelites expressing their fear that the enemy will launch a night attack against them and further destroy them. The connection with the next verse, however, fits better with them if they are the words of the enemy.

[6:4]  ¹³ tn Heb “Woe to us!” For the usage of this phrase see the translator’s note on 4:13. The usage of this particle here is a little exaggerated. They have lost the most advantageous time for attack but they are scarcely in a hopeless or doomed situation. The equivalent in English slang is “Bad news!”

[25:32]  ¹³ tn Heb “Yahweh of armies.”

[25:32]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “will go forth from nation to nation.”

[25:32]  ¹⁵ tn The words “of military destruction” have been supplied in the translation to make the metaphor clear. The metaphor has shifted from that of God as a lion, to God as a warrior, to God as a judge, to God as the author of the storm winds of destruction.

[31:22]  ¹⁶ tn The translation “dilly-dally” is suggested by J. Bright, Jeremiah (AB), 276. The verb occurs only here in this stem (the Hitpael) and only one other time in any other stem (the Qal in Song 5:6). The dictionaries define it as “to turn this way and that” (cf., e.g., BDB 330 s.v. חָמַק Hithp.). In the context it refers to turning this way and that looking for the way back.

[31:22]  ¹⁷ sn Israel’s backsliding is forgotten and forgiven. They had once been characterized as an apostate people (3:14, 22; the word “apostate” and “unfaithful” are the same in Hebrew) and figuratively depicted as an adulterous wife (3:20). Now they are viewed as having responded to his invitation (compare 31:18-19 with 3:22-25). Hence they are no longer depicted as an unfaithful daughter but as an unsullied virgin (see the literal translation of “my dear children” in vv. 4, 21 and the study note on v. 4.)

[31:22]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “For the Lord will create.” The person has been shifted to avoid the possible confusion for some readers of a third person reference to the Lord in what has otherwise been a first person address. The verb “will create” is another one of the many examples of the prophetic perfect that have been seen in the book of Jeremiah. For the significance of the verb “create” here see the study note on “bring about something new.”

[31:22]  ¹⁹ sn Heb “create.” This word is always used with God as the subject and refers to the production of something new or unique, like the creation of the world and the first man and woman (Gen 1:1; 2:3; 1:27; 5:1) or the creation of a new heavens and a new earth in a new age (Isa 65:17), or the bringing about of new and unique circumstances (Num 16:30). Here reference is made contextually to the new exodus, that marvelous deliverance which will be so great that the old will pale in comparison (see the first note on v. 9).

[31:22]  ²⁰ tn The meaning of this last line is uncertain. The translation has taken it as proverbial for something new and unique. For a fairly complete discussion of most of the options see C. Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” EBC 6:571. For the nuance of “protecting” for the verb here see BDB 686 s.v. סָבַב Po‘ 1 and compare the usage in Deut 32:10.

[34:9]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “after King Zedekiah made a covenant…to proclaim liberty to them [the slaves mentioned in the next verse] so that each would send away free his male slave and his female slave, the Hebrew man and the Hebrew woman, so that a man would not hold them in bondage, namely a Judean, his brother [this latter phrase is explicative of “them” because it repeats the preposition in front of “them”].” The complex Hebrew syntax has been broken down into shorter English sentences but an attempt has been made to retain the proper subordinations.

[34:11]  ²² sn Most commentators are agreed that the incident referred to here occurred during the period of relief from the siege provided by the Babylonians going off to fight against the Egyptians who were apparently coming to Zedekiah’s aid (compare vv. 21-22 with 37:5, 7). The freeing of the slaves had occurred earlier, under the crisis of the siege while the people were more responsive to the Lord due to the threat of destruction (cf. v. 15).

[34:11]  ²³ tn Heb “they had brought them into subjection for male and female slaves.” However, the qualification of “male and female” is already clear from the preceding and is unnecessary to the English sentence.

[46:19]  ²⁵ tn Heb “inhabitants of daughter Egypt.” Like the phrase “daughter Zion,” “daughter Egypt” is a poetic personification of the land, here perhaps to stress the idea of defenselessness.

[46:19]  ²⁶ tn For the verb here see HALOT 675 s.v. II נָצָה Nif and compare the usage in Jer 4:7; 9:11 and 2 Kgs 19:25. BDB derives the verb from יָצַת (so BDB 428 s.v. יָצַת Niph meaning “kindle, burn”) but still give it the meaning “desolate” here and in 2:15 and 9:11.

[46:22]  ²⁸ tn Or “Egypt will rustle away like a snake”; Heb “her sound goes like the snake,” or “her sound [is] like the snake [when] it goes.” The meaning of the simile is debated. Some see a reference to the impotent hiss of a fleeing serpent (F. B. Huey, Jeremiah, Lamentations [NAC], 382), others the sound of a serpent stealthily crawling away when it is disturbed (H. Freedman, Jeremiah [SoBB], 297-98). The translation follows the former interpretation because of the irony involved.