Jeremiah 3:11

3:11 Then the Lord said to me, “Under the circumstances, wayward Israel could even be considered less guilty than unfaithful Judah. ¹ 

Jeremiah 6:8

6:8 So ²  take warning, Jerusalem,

or I will abandon you in disgust ³ 

and make you desolate,

a place where no one can live.”

Jeremiah 12:7

12:7 “I will abandon my nation. ⁴ 

I will forsake the people I call my own. ⁵ 

I will turn my beloved people ⁶ 

over to the power ⁷  of their enemies.

Jeremiah 20:13

20:13 Sing to the Lord! Praise the Lord!

For he rescues the oppressed from the clutches of evildoers. ⁸ 

Jeremiah 22:27

22:27 You will never come back to this land to which you will long to return!” ⁹ 

Jeremiah 31:14

31:14 I will provide the priests with abundant provisions. ¹⁰ 

My people will be filled to the full with the good things I provide.”

Jeremiah 32:41

32:41 I will take delight in doing good to them. I will faithfully and wholeheartedly plant them ¹¹  firmly in the land.’

Jeremiah 51:14

51:14 The Lord who rules over all ¹²  has solemnly sworn, ¹³ 

‘I will fill your land with enemy soldiers.

They will swarm over it like locusts. ¹⁴ 

They will raise up shouts of victory over it.’

Jeremiah 51:45

51:45 “Get out of Babylon, my people!

Flee to save your lives

from the fierce anger of the Lord! ¹⁵ 

Jeremiah 52:29

52:29 in Nebuchadnezzar’s eighteenth year, ¹⁶  832 people from Jerusalem;

[3:11]  ¹ tn Heb “Wayward Israel has proven herself to be more righteous than unfaithful Judah.”

[6:8]  ² tn This word is not in the text but is supplied in the translation. Jeremiah uses a figure of speech (enallage) where the speaker turns from talking about someone to address him/her directly.

[6:8]  ³ tn Heb “lest my soul [= I] becomes disgusted with you.”

[12:7]  ³ 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]  ⁴ tn Heb “my inheritance.”

[12:7]  ⁵ tn Heb “the beloved of my soul.” Here “soul” stands for the person and is equivalent to “my.”

[12:7]  ⁶ tn Heb “will give…into the hands of.”

[20:13]  ⁴ sn While it may be a little confusing to modern readers to see the fluctuation in moods and the shifts in addressee in a prayer and complaint like this, it was not at all unusual for Israel where these were often offered in the temple in the conscious presence of God before fellow worshipers. For another example of these same shifts see Ps 22 which is a prayer of David in a time of deep distress.

[22:27]  ⁵ tn Heb “And unto the land to which they lift up their souls to return there, there they will not return.” Once again there is a sudden shift in person from the second plural to the third plural. As before the translation levels the pronouns to avoid confusion. For the idiom “to lift up the soul to” = “to long/yearn to/for” see BDB 670 s.v. נָשָׂא 1.b(9).

[31:14]  ⁶ tn Heb “I will satiate the priests with fat.” However, the word translated “fat” refers literally to the fat ashes of the sacrifices (see Lev 1:16; 4:2 and cf. BDB 206 s.v. דֶּשֶׁן 2. The word is used more abstractly for “abundance” or “rich food” (see Job 36:16 and BDB 206 s.v. דֶּשֶׁן 1). The people and the priests were prohibited from eating the fat (Lev 7:23-24).

[32:41]  ⁷ tn Heb “will plant them in the land with faithfulness with all my heart and with all my soul.” The latter expressions are, of course, anthropomorphisms (see Deut 6:5).

[51:14]  ⁸ tn Heb “Yahweh of armies.” For an explanation of this rendering see the study note on 2:19.

[51:14]  ⁹ tn Heb “has sworn by himself.” See the study note on 22:5 for background.

[51:14]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “I will fill you with men like locusts.” The “you” refers to Babylon (Babylon is both the city and the land it ruled, Babylonia) which has been alluded to in the preceding verses under descriptive titles. The words “your land” have been used because of the way the preceding verse has been rendered, alluding to people rather than to the land or city. The allusion of “men” is, of course, to enemy soldiers and they are here compared to locusts both for their quantity and their destructiveness (see Joel 1:4). For the use of the particles כִּי אִם (ki ’im) to introduce an oath see BDB 475 s.v. כִּי אִם 2.c and compare usage in 2 Kgs 5:20; one would normally expect אִם לֹא (cf. BDB 50 s.v. אִם 1.b[2]).

[51:45]  ⁹ tn Heb “Go out from her [Babylon’s] midst, my people. Save each man his life from the fierce anger of the Lord.” The verb has been paraphrased to prevent gender specific terms.

[52:29]  ¹⁰ sn This would be 586 b.c.