Jeremiah 7:7

7:7 If you stop doing these things, ¹  I will allow you to continue to live in this land ²  which I gave to your ancestors as a lasting possession. ³ 

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.

[7:7]  ¹ tn The translation uses imperatives in vv. 5-6 followed by the phrase, “If you do all this,” to avoid the long and complex sentence structure of the Hebrew sentence which has a series of conditional clauses in vv. 5-6 followed by a main clause in v. 7.

[7:7]  ² tn Heb “live in this place, in this land.”

[7:7]  ³ tn Heb “gave to your fathers [with reference to] from ancient times even unto forever.”

[12:7]  ⁴ 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]  ⁵ tn Heb “my inheritance.”

[12:7]  ⁶ tn Heb “the beloved of my soul.” Here “soul” stands for the person and is equivalent to “my.”

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