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This message to the people involved another symbolic act (cf. 13:1-11). This incident may have occurred between 609 and 605 B.C.
19:1 Yahweh told Jeremiah to take some of Judah's elders and senior priests and to go and purchase a potter's earthenware water jar (Heb. baqbuq).284These jars, which archaeologists have found in abundance, range in size from four to 10 inches in height, and they have very slim necks.285Perhaps these leaders were willing to accompany Jeremiah, even though he was very unpopular (cf. 20:1-2, 10; et al.), because they wanted to gather incriminating evidence against him.
19:2 The prophet was then to go to the section of the Hinnom Valley just south of Jerusalem that was near the Potsherd Gate and deliver the message that the Lord would give him. The Potsherd Gate seems to have been another name for the Dung Gate, which was one of the southern gates to the city leading into the Hinnom Valley below (cf. Neh. 2:13; 3:13-14; 12:31). Evidently people disposed of their broken pottery and other refuse outside this gate.
19:3 The prophet was to call everyone in Jerusalem to hear the Lord's message, from the kings to the ordinary citizens. Israel's God, Almighty Yahweh, was about to bring a calamity of unheard of severity on Jerusalem (cf. 1 Sam. 3:11; 2 Kings 21:12).
19:4-5 The calamity would come because the people had forsaken Yahweh and had turned the valley of Hinnom, and all Jerusalem (cf. 2 Kings 21:12), into a place of heathen worship, including child sacrifice (cf. 7:31). Their forefathers did not do this, and Yahweh had never commanded these atrocities.
19:6 Because of these sins, the Lord predicted that the place would receive a new name: the valley of Slaughter. It's previous names were the valley of the Son of Hinnom and Topheth (lit. fireplace or hearth; cf. 7:31-32; Isa. 30:33). A change of name in the Old Testament frequently signified a change of function (cf. Gen. 17:5, 15; et al.).
19:7 The Lord would also turn the wise advice of the people of Judah and Jerusalem into foolishness. As they had worshipped nothings there, so their wisdom would come to nothing. Their enemy would also defeat and slaughter them there, as they had slaughtered their innocent children. No one would bury their dead bodies, but they would become food for carrion birds and wild beasts since they had slain similar animals to worship the idols (cf. 7:33; 16:4; 34:20; Deut. 28:26).
19:8 Yahweh would also destroy Jerusalem so that everyone who passed its ruins would whistle in amazement because of the devastation (cf. 18:16; 1 Kings 9:8; Lam. 2:15-16; Ezek. 27:36; Zeph. 2:15).
19:9 The siege of Jerusalem would be so bad that the residents would eat their own children and one another rather than die of starvation (cf. 11:1-8; Lev. 26:29; Deut. 28:53-57; 2 Kings 6:26-29; Lam. 2:20; 4:10). This was compensation for their having taken human life to worship pagan idols. Being consumed by cannibals was a typical curse for treaty-breakers in the ancient Near East, as was lack of burial (v. 7).286
19:10-11 Jeremiah was to break his jar in the sight of his hearers as a symbolic act and was to announce that just so the Lord would destroy the people and the city. They would not be able to recover from this catastrophe any more than one could repair a shattered earthenware jar. The only burial places would be in Topheth. The "fireplace"would become a cemetery.
Earlier the Lord implied that He would reshape the nation if the people repented, as a potter reshapes a vessel under construction on the wheel (18:1-2). But now Judah was a hardened vessel incapable of changing. All the Lord could do with it now was break it.
"If there is nothing so workable as a clay pot in the making, there is nothing so unalterable as the finished article."287
19:12-13 Yahweh would make Jerusalem a place of fire and its people a sacrifice, too, because all the people, from the ordinary citizens to the kings, had turned their houses into altars to pagan gods. The presence of corpses would make the city unclean. The people had offered burnt offerings and poured out drink offerings on their flat rooftops to astral deities and other idols (cf. 7:16-20; 32:29; Zeph. 1:5). Archaeologists have discovered cuneiform texts at Ras Shamra (east of Cyprus near the west coast of Syria) that contain instructions for offering sacrifices to astral gods on flat rooftops.288
19:14-15 Jeremiah then returned from Topheth in the valley of Hinnom to the temple courtyard. There he preached to the people that the Lord was about to bring this calamity on Jerusalem and the towns of Judah because they had stubbornly refused to repent (cf. Acts 7:51).
20:1-2 When Pashhur, who was the leading priest responsible for the oversight of the temple, heard Jeremiah's words, he ordered him beaten and imprisoned in stocks that stood near the Benjamin Gate. This gate was evidently the new gate into the inner temple courtyard that King Jotham had constructed (cf. 2 Kings 15:35). It provided an entrance from the north, in which direction lay the tribal territory of Benjamin. Consequently many people would have seen Jeremiah there.
"The stocks,' where the prophet was confined, were intended not only for restraint but also for torture. The stocks, which were used for false prophets (cf. 2 Chron 16:10), held the feet, hands, and neck so that the body was almost doubled up (cf. 29:26). The Hebrew word for stocks' (mahpeketh) means causing distortion.'"289
Ironically, this overseer in God's temple, evidently the man in charge of preserving order in the courtyard, was taking action against God's overseer of the nations, Jeremiah (cf. 1:10). This is the first recorded act of violence done to Jeremiah. It reminds us of the captain of the temple guard who, years later, similarly imprisoned Peter and John (Acts 4:1-3).
20:3 Jeremiah's confinement only lasted one day. Following his release, the prophet gave Pashhur a new name that had prophetic significance: Magomassabib, meaning "terror on every side"(cf. 6:25; Ps. 31:13).290
20:4 The Lord announced through Jeremiah that Pashhur would become a terror to others, his friends, and even himself, and he would feel terror when he saw the coming invader slaughter his loved ones. The Lord promised to deliver all Judah over to the Babylonian king who would take many of the people captive to Babylon and slay them with the sword. This is the first explicit reference to the place of exile in the book (cf. 1:13; 15:14).
20:5 Likewise the enemy would take all the wealth and even the royal treasures of Jerusalem to Babylon. In other words, the enemy would plunder the temple and the royal palaces.
20:6 Pashhur himself, as well as his loved ones, would end up in Babylon as exiles. Evidently he went into captivity in 597 B.C. since another man, Zephaniah, occupied his office after that date (cf. 29:24, 26, 29). He and all who had gathered around him as his disciples would die and be buried there because he had prophesied falsely concerning the coming invasion. Like Jeremiah, Pashhur was both a priest and a prophet.291
"Pashhur, who would terrorize Jeremiah for the message he proclaimed, will be terrorized and will become a terror for all to witness, as will all Judah (vv 4-5). Just as the people of Jerusalem and Judah would die at the hands of their enemies (19:7), so Pashhur would die. Only he would die and be buried in a foreign land."292
