1[And the word of the LORD came to me], saying:
Look, should a man send away his wife,
and she go from him and become another man’s,
Would not that land be wholly polluted?
And you, you have whored with many lovers,
and would you come back to Me? said the LORD.
2Lift up your eyes to the bare heights and see.
Where have they not lain with you?
On the roads you sat waiting for them
and you polluted the land
through your whoring and through your evil.
3And the showers were held back,
and the latter rains did not come,
and a whore-woman’s brow you had,
you refused to be shamed.
4Have you now not called Me, “My father,”
You are the guide of my youth.
5Will He bear a grudge forever,
will He keep it for all time?
Look, you spoke and did evil things, and will you prevail?
6And the LORD said to me in the days of King Josiah, “Have you seen what Rebel Israel has done? She goes on every high mountain and under every lush tree and plays the whore there. 7And I thought, after she has done all those, she will come back to Me, but she did not come back, and her sister, Judah the Treacherous, saw. 8And she saw that because Rebel Israel had committed adultery I sent her away and gave her a bill of divorce, yet Judah the Treacherous did not fear, and she, too, went and played the whore. 9And it happened that from all her whoring the land was polluted, and she committed adultery with stone and with tree. 10And yet, despite all this, Judah the Treacherous did not turn back to Me with a whole heart but falsely,” said the LORD. 11And the LORD said to me, “Rebel Israel has shown herself more in the right than Judah the Treacherous. 12Go and call out these words to the north and say, Turn back, Rebel Israel, said the LORD, and I will not set My face against you, for I am faithful, said the LORD. I will not bear a grudge forever. 13But know your crime, for against the LORD your God you have rebelled, and you have scattered your ways among strangers under every lush tree, and My voice you have not heeded, said the LORD. 14Turn back, rebellious sons, said the LORD, for I have claimed possession of you and have taken you, one from a town and two from a clan, and brought you to Zion. 15And I have given you shepherds after My own heart, and they have shepherded you with knowledge and discernment. 16And it shall happen when you multiply and are fruitful in those days, said the LORD, that they no longer shall say ‘the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant’ nor shall they bring it to mind nor shall they recall it nor seek it out, nor shall it again be made. 17At that time they shall call Jerusalem ‘Throne of the LORD,’ and all the nations shall gather in it in the name of the LORD, in Jerusalem, and they shall not go after the willfulness of their evil heart. 18In those days the house of Judah shall go with the house of Israel, and they shall come together from the land of the north to the land that I gave in estate to your fathers.”
19As for Me, I said,
How shall I place you among children?
I gave you a land of delight,
an estate of the greatest splendor of nations,
and I said, You shall call Me “my Father,”
and you shall not turn back from Me.
20Yet, as a woman betrays her companion,
you have betrayed Me, O house of Israel,
said the LORD.
21A voice is heard on the bare heights,
the weeping supplications of Israel’s children.
For they have made their way crooked,
forgotten the LORD their God.
22Turn back, rebellious children—
“Here we are, we have come to you,
for You are the LORD and God.
Indeed, falsehood is from the hills,
the clamor of the mountains.
Indeed, in the LORD our God
is Israel’s rescue.
23And the shameful thing consumed
the toil of our fathers from our youth,
their sheep and their cattle,
their sons and their daughters.
24Let us lie down in our shame,
and our disgrace be our cover,
for the LORD our God we have offended,
we and our fathers from our youth
to this very day,
and we did not heed the voice of the LORD our God.”
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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1. saying. This single word begins the Hebrew text of this chapter. Either it should be deleted, or, more likely, the introductory formula here presented in brackets was inadvertently omitted in scribal transmission.
send away. This is the set term for divorce.
can he go back to her again? According to the law in Deuteronomy 24:1–4, a man is not permitted to remarry his divorced wife.
lovers. Though the Hebrew reʿim usually means “companions,” as it clearly does below in verse 20, the immediate context suggests the sense of “lovers,” the same association for this noun clearly indicated in Hosea 3:1.
2. to the bare heights. These are probably the same locations as “the high hills” where fertility rites were conducted.
Where have they not lain with you? The passive Hebrew verb in the consonantal text, shugalt, is evidently a ruder term, euphemistically corrected in the Masoretic marginal note to the verb that means “to lie.” Lundbom gets the flavor of the rudeness by translating the phrase as “where have you not been laid,” but that expression sounds too colloquially modern.
On the roads you sat waiting for them. “Waiting for” is elliptically implied in the Hebrew, as Rashi notes. The story of Tamar and Judah in Genesis 38 leads one to infer that prostitutes often stationed themselves by the roadside to ply their trade.
like an Arab in the desert. The Arab is perhaps imagined sitting in his tent waiting for passing caravans in order to conduct commerce. Others see a reference to Arab marauders waiting to attack travelers.
4. Have you not called Me, “My father.” These are the self-deluded words of Judah (still imagined in the second-person feminine singular as a woman), who has not truly turned back to God yet fancies that she has an intimate relationship with Him and that He will bear her no grudge.
5. will you prevail? The received text seems to say “And she will prevail,” which does not make much sense. This translation emends the verb to a second-person feminine singular, like the two preceding verbs in this sentence, and construes it as a rhetorical question.
8. And she saw. The Masoretic Text has “And I saw,” but both the Septuagint and the Peshitta show this more plausible reading, “And she saw.”
I sent her away and gave her a bill of divorce. The prophet, continuing his favored metaphor of the turn to pagan worship as sexual betrayal, represents the exile of the northern kingdom as God’s divorcing Israel.
9. from all her whoring. The received text seems to say “from the voice of her whoring,” miqol zenutah. Many scholars emend this to miqal zenutah, claiming it means “from her casual [or easy] whoring,” but qal is an adjective that does not make syntactical sense as a construct form with zenutah. This translation reads instead mikol zenutah.
11. Rebel Israel has shown itself more in the right than Judah the Treacherous. In this continuing allegory of the two sister-kingdoms, Judah is even worse than Israel—either because she has the monitory example of exiled Israel before her eyes yet does not pay heed, or because Jeremiah represents her as actually exceeding Israel in her paganizing promiscuity.
12. call out these words to the north. The likely location is not the kingdom of Israel, long destroyed and its population largely replaced by people brought in from elsewhere in the Assyrian sphere, but the northern reaches of the Assyrian empire, to which the inhabitants of Israel have been exiled. This prophecy, enunciated a century after the destruction of the northern kingdom, surely expresses what is no more than a utopian hope, for by Jeremiah’s time the exiles would have been assimilated into the surrounding peoples and would have lost their national identity.
Turn back, Rebel Israel. The Hebrew, shuvah meshuvah yisraʾel, exhibits sound-play (roughly like “turn back, backsliding Israel” in English). Verses 14 and 22 show a related sound-play, shuvu banim shovavim, “Turn back, rebellious sons.”
13. you have scattered your ways. The phrasing sounds a little odd, but the probable reference, as the medieval Hebrew commentator David Kimchi proposes, is to the many different gods that promiscuous Israel chose to worship.
14. one from a town and two from a clan. This looks like a version of the notion of the saving remnant articulated by Isaiah. Only a small minority will be saved and brought back to Zion.
15. shepherds. As before, these are the rulers of the people.
16. they no longer shall say “the Ark of the LORD’s covenant.” The Ark Narrative in 1 Samuel 5–7 suggests that a fetishistic conception of the Ark as a magical object had currency among the people.
nor shall it again be made. These words may indicate that the supposed original Ark had been removed from the Temple and lost, which one may infer from some biblical texts but not from others.
17. they shall call Jerusalem “Throne of the LORD.” The Ark, crowned with carved cherubim, was in fact conceived as God’s throne. In the new age, however, all Jerusalem will be a manifestation of God’s presence, and hence there will be no need for a material cult-object like the Ark.
18. the house of Judah shall go with the house of Israel. This culminates the utopian fantasy that the northern kingdom will be restored—“from the land of the north,” which is to say Assyrian exile—and will live in harmony with the southern kingdom.
21. the weeping supplications of Israel’s children. They have realized the dire straits into which their actions have brought them.
22. I will heal your rebellion. This is best understood as an ellipsis: I will heal the terrible consequences of your rebellion. What follows is a confession of wrongdoing by the penitent rebels.
falsehood is from the hills, / the clamor of the mountains. The hills are where the pagan gods were worshipped. The clamor would refer to the throng of celebrants on the heights, raising their voices in the performance of their rites.
23. the shameful thing. The noun boshet, “shame” or “shameful thing,” is regularly used as a pejorative substitution for “Baal.” One sees this in theophoric names, where the baal suffix has been editorially changed to boshet, as in “Mephibosheth,” originally “Mephibaal.”
consumed / the toil of our fathers. As the next line makes clear, the wealth of the fathers, their sheep and their cattle, has been eaten up in sacrifices to Baal, and, what is worse, their sons and daughters have been offered in sacrifice as well.