7:29 The people were to cut off their hair as a sign of grief.
"The command to cut off the hair' (lit., crown' . . .) is in the feminine in Hebrew, showing that the city (cf. 6:23--'O Daughter of Zion') is meant. The charge stems from the fact that the Nazirite's hair was the mark of his separation to God (Num 6:5). When he was ceremonially defiled, he had to shave his head. So Jerusalem because of her corruption must do likewise. Her mourning is because the Lord has cast her off. Because of her sin, the chief mark of her beauty must be cast away as polluted and no longer consecrated to the Lord."176
They were to go up to a bare hilltop and lament their fate because the Lord had rejected and forsaken the generation of the Judahites on whom He would pour out His wrath (cf. v. 20).
7:30 The reason for this strange behavior was that the Judeans had done evil in the Lord's sight. Specifically, they had brought things into the temple that were detestable to the Lord and that defiled it. These were idols and other objects associated with idolatry (cf. 2 Kings 21:5; 23:4-7; Ezek. 8).
7:31 The people had also built a shrine at a site called "Topheth"in the Valley of Hinnom just south of Jerusalem.177They had offered their children as human sacrifices at this shrine during the reigns of Ahaz and Manasseh (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6), something that Yahweh never commanded nor even entertained in His thinking (cf. Lev. 18:21; 20:2-5; 2 Kings 23:10; Mic. 6:7). King Josiah had attempted to wipe out this horrible practice (2 Kings 23:10), but the people revived it after he died in 609 B.C. (Ezek. 20:25-26).178What the Judahites were doing in the Valley of Hinnom was not fundamentally different from some of the forms of abortion that characterize modern life.
7:32 Because of this gross sin, the Lord promised that in the future the site would have a new name: the Valley of Slaughter.179This would be appropriate because so many of the idolatrous Israelites would die there in the coming siege. The enemy would fill this valley with Israelite bodies because it would be an easy way to dispose of their corpses. In ancient Near Eastern culture, to die and remain unburied was an insult as well as a tragedy (14:16; Deut. 28:26; Ps. 79:3; Isa. 18:6). The law prescribed that even criminals should be buried (Deut. 21:23).
"All too appropriately, the place where parents tried to buy their own safety at their children's terrible expense, would become an open grave for their own remains (32-33)."180
7:33 This future mass grave would become a feeding ground for birds and beasts. No one would frighten the animals away because the Israelites who remained alive would be taken away as captives. Being left unburied was a terrible curse.181
7:34 At that future time the Lord would remove all the joy and gladness from Jerusalem and the other cities of Judah. The land would become a ruin due to the invader from the north.
"The joy of a wedding carries the happy anticipation of the birth of children, but a nation that sacrificed its children forfeited all right for such cheerful occasions."182
