Jeremiah 12:7-8

12:7 “I will abandon my nation. ¹ 

I will forsake the people I call my own. ² 

I will turn my beloved people ³ 

over to the power ⁴  of their enemies.

12:8 The people I call my own ⁵  have turned on me

like a lion ⁶  in the forest.

They have roared defiantly ⁷  at me.

So I will treat them as though I hate them. ⁸ 

[12:7]  ¹ tn Heb “my house.” Or “I have abandoned my nation.” The word “house” has been used throughout Jeremiah for both the temple (e.g., 7:2, 10), the nation or people of Israel or of Judah (e.g. 3:18, 20), or the descendants of Jacob (i.e., the Israelites, e.g., 2:4). Here the parallelism argues that it refers to the nation of Judah. The translation throughout vv. 5-17 assumes that the verb forms are prophetic perfects, the form that conceives of the action as being as good as done. It is possible that the forms are true perfects and refer to a past destruction of Judah. If so, it may have been connected with the assaults against Judah in 598/7 b.c. by the Babylonians and the nations surrounding Judah recorded in 2 Kgs 24:14. No other major recent English version reflects these as prophetic perfects besides NIV and NCV, which does not use the future until v. 10. Hence the translation is somewhat tentative. C. Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” EBC 6:459 takes them as prophetic perfects and H. Freedman (Jeremiah [SoBB], 88) mentions that as a possibility for explaining the presence of this passage here. For another example of an extended use of the prophetic perfect without imperfects interspersed see Isa 8:23-9:6. The translation assumes they are prophetic and are part of the Lord’s answer to the complaint about the prosperity of the wicked; both the wicked Judeans and the wicked nations God will use to punish them will be punished.

[12:7]  ² tn Heb “my inheritance.”

[12:7]  ³ tn Heb “the beloved of my soul.” Here “soul” stands for the person and is equivalent to “my.”

[12:7]  ⁴ tn Heb “will give…into the hands of.”

[12:8]  ⁵ tn See the note on the previous verse.

[12:8]  ⁶ tn Heb “have become to me like a lion.”

[12:8]  ⁷ tn Heb “have given against me with her voice.”

[12:8]  ⁸ tn Or “so I will reject her.” The word “hate” is sometimes used in a figurative way to refer to being neglected, i.e., treated as though unloved. In these contexts it does not have the same emotive connotations that a typical modern reader would associate with hate. See Gen 29:31, 33 and E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech, 556.