Jeremiah 3:22

3:22 Come back to me, you wayward people.

I want to cure your waywardness. ¹ 

Say, ²  ‘Here we are. We come to you

because you are the Lord our God.

Jeremiah 16:3

16:3 For I, the Lord, tell you what will happen to ³  the children who are born here in this land and to the men and women who are their mothers and fathers. ⁴ 

[3:22]  ¹ tn Or “I will forgive your apostasies.” Heb “I will [or want to] heal your apostasies.” For the use of the verb “heal” (רָפָא, rafa’) to refer to spiritual healing and forgiveness see Hos 14:4.

[3:22]  ² tn Or “They say.” There is an obvious ellipsis of a verb of saying here since the preceding words are those of the Lord and the following are those of the people. However, there is debate about whether these are the response of the people to the Lord’s invitation, a response which is said to be inadequate according to the continuation in 4:1-4, or whether these are the Lord’s model for Israel’s confession of repentance to which he adds further instructions about the proper heart attitude that should accompany it in 4:1-4. The former implies a dialogue with an unmarked twofold shift in speaker between 3:22b-25 and 4:1-4:4 while the latter assumes the same main speaker throughout with an unmarked instruction only in 3:22b-25. This disrupts the flow of the passage less and appears more likely.

[16:3]  ³ tn Heb “For thus says the Lord concerning…”

[16:3]  ⁴ tn Heb “Thus says the Lord concerning the sons and daughters who are born in the place and concerning their mothers who give them birth and their fathers who fathered them in this land.”