Jeremiah 18:18

Jeremiah Petitions the Lord to Punish Those Who Attack Him

18:18 Then some people ¹  said, “Come on! Let us consider how to deal with Jeremiah! ²  There will still be priests to instruct us, wise men to give us advice, and prophets to declare God’s word. ³  Come on! Let’s bring charges against him and get rid of him! ⁴  Then we will not need to pay attention to anything he says.”

James 3:5-6

3:5 So too the tongue is a small part of the body, ⁵  yet it has great pretensions. ⁶  Think ⁷  how small a flame sets a huge forest ablaze. 3:6 And the tongue is a fire! The tongue represents ⁸  the world of wrongdoing among the parts of our bodies. It ⁹  pollutes the entire body and sets fire to the course of human existence – and is set on fire by hell. ¹⁰ 

[18:18]  ¹ tn Heb “They.” The referent is unidentified; “some people” has been used in the translation.

[18:18]  ² tn Heb “Let us make plans against Jeremiah.” See 18:18 where this has sinister overtones as it does here.

[18:18]  ³ tn Heb “Instruction will not perish from priest, counsel from the wise, word from the prophet.”

[18:18]  ⁴ tn Heb “Let us smite him with our tongues.” It is clear from the context that this involved plots to kill him.

[3:5]  ⁵ tn Grk “a small member.”

[3:5]  ⁶ tn Grk “boasts of great things.”

[3:5]  ⁷ tn Grk “Behold.”

[3:6]  ⁸ tn Grk “makes itself,” “is made.”

[3:6]  ⁹ tn Because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, a new sentence was started here in the translation.

[3:6]  ¹⁰ sn The word translated hell is “Gehenna” (γέεννα, geenna), a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew words ge hinnom (“Valley of Hinnom”). This was the valley along the south side of Jerusalem. In OT times it was used for human sacrifices to the pagan god Molech (cf. Jer 7:31; 19:5-6; 32:35), and it came to be used as a place where human excrement and rubbish were disposed of and burned. In the intertestamental period, it came to be used symbolically as the place of divine punishment (cf. 1 En. 27:2, 90:26; 4 Ezra 7:36).