Jeremiah 2:11

2:11 Has a nation ever changed its gods

(even though they are not really gods at all)?

But my people have exchanged me, their glorious God, ¹ 

for a god that cannot help them at all! ² 

Jeremiah 7:8

7:8 “‘But just look at you! ³  You are putting your confidence in a false belief ⁴  that will not deliver you. ⁵ 

Jeremiah 12:13

12:13 My people will sow wheat, but will harvest weeds. ⁶ 

They will work until they are exhausted, but will get nothing from it.

They will be disappointed in their harvests ⁷ 

because the Lord will take them away in his fierce anger. ⁸ 

Jeremiah 23:32

23:32 I, the Lord, affirm ⁹  that I am opposed to those prophets who dream up lies and report them. They are misleading my people with their reckless lies. ¹⁰  I did not send them. I did not commission them. They are not helping these people at all. ¹¹  I, the Lord, affirm it!” ¹² 

[2:11]  ¹ tn Heb “have exchanged their glory [i.e., the God in whom they glory].” This is a case of a figure of speech where the attribute of a person or thing is put for the person or thing. Compare the common phrase in Isaiah, the Holy One of Israel, obviously referring to the Lord, the God of Israel.

[2:11]  ² tn Heb “what cannot profit.” The verb is singular and the allusion is likely to Baal. See the translator’s note on 2:8 for the likely pun or wordplay.

[7:8]  ³ tn Heb “Behold!”

[7:8]  ⁴ tn Heb “You are trusting in lying words.” See the similar phrase in v. 4 and the note there.

[7:8]  ⁵ tn Heb “not profit [you].”

[12:13]  ⁵ sn Invading armies lived off the land, using up all the produce and destroying everything they could not consume.

[12:13]  ⁶ tn The pronouns here are actually second plural: Heb “Be ashamed/disconcerted because of your harvests.” Because the verb form (וּבֹשׁוּ, uvoshu) can either be Qal perfect third plural or Qal imperative masculine plural many emend the pronoun on the noun to third plural (see, e.g., BHS). However, this is the easier reading and is not supported by either the Latin or the Greek which have second plural. This is probably another case of the shift from description to direct address that has been met with several times already in Jeremiah (the figure of speech called apostrophe; for other examples see, e.g., 9:4; 11:13). As in other cases the translation has been leveled to third plural to avoid confusion for the contemporary English reader. For the meaning of the verb here see BDB 101 s.v. בּוֹשׁ Qal.2 and compare the usage in Jer 48:13.

[12:13]  ⁷ tn Heb “be disappointed in their harvests from the fierce anger of the Lord.” The translation makes explicit what is implicit in the elliptical poetry of the Hebrew original.

[23:32]  ⁷ tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

[23:32]  ⁸ tn Heb “with their lies and their recklessness.” This is an example of hendiadys where two nouns (in this case a concrete and an abstract one) are joined by “and” but one is intended to be the adjectival modifier of the other.

[23:32]  ⁹ sn In the light of what has been said this is a rhetorical understatement; they are not only “not helping,” they are leading them to their doom (cf. vv. 19-22). This figure of speech is known as litotes.

[23:32]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”