Jeremiah 4:7

4:7 Like a lion that has come up from its lair ¹ 

the one who destroys nations has set out from his home base. ² 

He is coming out to lay your land waste.

Your cities will become ruins and lie uninhabited.

Jeremiah 10:22

10:22 Listen! News is coming even now. ³ 

The rumble of a great army is heard approaching ⁴  from a land in the north. ⁵ 

It is coming to turn the towns of Judah into rubble,

places where only jackals live.

Jeremiah 51:29

51:29 The earth will tremble and writhe in agony. ⁶ 

For the Lord will carry out his plan.

He plans to make the land of Babylonia ⁷ 

a wasteland where no one lives. ⁸ 

[4:7]  ¹ tn Heb “A lion has left its lair.” The metaphor is turned into a simile for clarification. The word translated “lair” has also been understood to refer to a hiding place. However, it appears to be cognate in meaning to the word translated “lair” in Ps 10:9; Jer 25:38, a word which also refers to the abode of the Lord in Ps 76:3.

[4:7]  ² tn Heb “his place.”

[10:22]  ³ tn Heb “The sound of a report, behold, it is coming.”

[10:22]  ⁴ tn Heb “ coming, even a great quaking.”

[10:22]  ⁵ sn Compare Jer 6:22.

[51:29]  ⁵ sn The figure here is common in the poetic tradition of the Lord going forth to do battle against his foes and the earth’s reaction to it is compared to a person trembling with fear and writhing in agony, agony like that of a woman in labor (cf. Judg 5:4; Nah 1:2-5; Hab 3:1-15 [especially v. 6]).

[51:29]  ⁶ tn Heb “For the plans of the Lord have been carried out to make the land of Babylon…” The passive has been turned into an active and the sentence broken up to better conform with contemporary English style. For the meaning of the verb קוּם (qum) in the sense used here see BDB 878 s.v. קוּם 7.g and compare the usage in Prov 19:21 and Isa 46:10.

[51:29]  ⁷ tn The verbs in this verse and v. 30 are all in the past tense in Hebrew, in the tense that views the action as already as good as done (the Hebrew prophetic perfect). The verb in v. 31a, however, is imperfect, viewing the action as future; the perfects that follow are all dependent on that future. Verse 33 looks forward to a time when Babylon will be harvested and trampled like grain on the threshing floor and the imperatives imply a time in the future. Hence the present translation has rendered all the verbs in vv. 29-30 as future.