Jeremiah 11:17

11:17 For though I, the Lord who rules over all, ¹  planted you in the land, ² 

I now decree that disaster will come on you ³ 

because the nations of Israel and Judah have done evil

and have made me angry by offering sacrifices to the god Baal.” ⁴ 

Jeremiah 25:15

Judah and the Nations Will Experience God’s Wrath

25:15 So ⁵  the Lord, the God of Israel, spoke to me in a vision. ⁶  “Take this cup from my hand. It is filled with the wine of my wrath. ⁷  Take it and make the nations to whom I send you drink it.

[11:17]  ¹ tn Heb “Yahweh of armies.”

[11:17]  ² tn The words “in the land” are not in the text but are supplied in the translation to clarify the meaning of the metaphor.

[11:17]  ³ tn Heb “For Yahweh of armies who planted you speaks disaster upon you.” Because of the way the term Lord of armies has been rendered this sentence has been restructured to avoid confusion in English style.

[11:17]  ⁴ tn Heb “pronounced disaster…on account of the evil of the house of Israel and the house of Judah which they have done to make me angry [or thus making me angry] by sacrificing to Baal.” The lines have been broken up in conformity with contemporary English style.

[25:15]  ⁵ tn This is an attempt to render the Hebrew particle כִּי (ki) which is probably being used in the sense that BDB 473-74 s.v. כִּי 3.c notes, i.e., the causal connection is somewhat loose, related here to the prophecies against the nations. “So” seems to be the most appropriate way to represent this.

[25:15]  ⁶ tn Heb “Thus said the Lord, the God of Israel, to me.” It is generally understood that the communication is visionary. God does not have a “hand” and the action of going to the nations and making them drink of the cup are scarcely literal. The words are supplied in the translation to show the figurative nature of this passage.

[25:15]  ⁷ sn “Drinking from the cup of wrath” is a common figure to represent being punished by God. Isaiah had used it earlier to refer to the punishment which Judah was to suffer and from which God would deliver her (Isa 51:17, 22) and Jeremiah’s contemporary Habakkuk uses it of Babylon “pouring out its wrath” on the nations and in turn being forced to drink the bitter cup herself (Hab 2:15-16). In Jer 51:7 the Lord will identify Babylon as the cup which makes the nations stagger. In v. 16 drinking from the cup will be identified with the sword (i.e., wars) that the Lord will send against the nations. Babylon is also to be identified as the sword (cf. Jer 51:20-23). What is being alluded to here in highly figurative language is the judgment that the Lord will wreak on the nations listed here through the Babylonians. The prophecy given here in symbolical form is thus an expansion of the one in vv. 9-11.