1Thus said the LORD to me, “Go and buy yourself a loincloth of linen and put it round your loins, and do not enter water.” 2And I bought the loincloth according to the word of the LORD and put it round my loins. 3And the word of the LORD came to me a second time, saying, 4“Take the loincloth that you bought, which is round your loins, and rise, go to Perath and hide it there in a crevice of the rock.” 5And I went and hid it in Perath as the LORD has charged me. 6And it happened at the end of many days that the LORD said to me, “Rise, go to Perath and take from there the loincloth that I charged you to hide there.” 7And I went to Perath and dug out and took the loincloth from the place where I had buried it, and, look, the loincloth was ruined, it was not good for anything. 8And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 9“Thus said the LORD: So will I ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. 10This evil people who refuse to heed My words, who go after the stubbornness of their heart and go after other gods to serve them to bow down to them, they shall be like the loincloth that is not good for anything. 11For as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins, so have I made all the house of Israel and all the house of Judah cling to Me, to be a people for Me, and for fame and for praise and for splendor, but they did not heed. 12Thus said the LORD God of Israel, Every jar will fill with wine. And they shall say to you, ‘Do we not know that every jar will fill with wine?’13And you shall say to them, ‘Thus said the LORD: I am about to fill all the dwellers of this land and the kings sitting on the throne of David and the priests and the prophets and all Jerusalem’s dwellers with drunkenness. 14And I will smash them, each man against his brother and the fathers and the sons together, said the LORD. I will not spare and will not have pity and will show no mercy in ruining them.’”
15Listen and give ear, do not be haughty,
for the LORD has spoken:
16Give glory to the LORD your God
before He brings dark down
and before your feet are bruised
And you shall hope for light, and He shall make it death’s darkness,
He shall turn it into thick gloom.
17And if you do not heed it,
my inmost self will secretly weep,
because of pride, will constantly shed tears,
and my eyes will run with tears,
for the LORD’s flock is taken captive.
18Say to the king and to the queen mother,
for the diadem of your splendor
has came down from round your heads.
19The Negeb towns are shut,
and there is none to open.
Judah is exiled, all of it,
is exiled utterly.
20Raise your eyes and see
the ones coming from the north.
Where is the flock that was given to you,
your splendid sheep?
21What will you say when he appoints over you—
and it was you who taught them—
leaders to be a head?
Will not pangs seize you
like a woman in labor?
22And should you say in your heart,
“Why do these things befall me?”
Through your many crimes your skirts were stripped,
23Can a Nubian change his skin,
a leopard its spots?
Then you, too, might be able to do good,
you who are learned in doing evil.
24And I will scatter them like floating chaff
to the desert wind.
25This is your lot, your measured portion from Me,
said the LORD,
since you forgot Me,
and put your trust in the lie.
26And I, too, stripped back your skirts over your face
and your shame was seen,
27Your adulteries and your neighings,
the depravity of your whoring,
I have seen your vile things.
Woe, to you, Jerusalem, you are not clean.
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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1. Go and buy yourself a loincloth of linen. Jeremiah is now enjoined to carry out a symbolic performative act, following the precedent of Hosea and to be continued by Ezekiel. These might be regarded as dramatic visual illustrations of the prophecies. A loincloth that has fallen apart, as this one will do, exposes the genitals, and in the poetic prophecy that follows this prose prophecy, the skirts of the personified people will be hitched up to expose her shame.
and do not enter water. This slightly puzzling item in the instructions may be to ensure that nothing in the fabric of the loincloth is in any way damaged before it is hidden in the crevice.
4. Perath. This is a wadi located about two miles northeast of Anathoth.
9. pride. There is a certain disparity between the symbol and its referent because a loincloth is scarcely a person’s “pride.” The prophet may be thinking of the antithesis of pride, shame, which is what a person suffers without a loincloth to cover his nakedness. In the next verse, the disintegrated loincloth becomes the metaphor of the people itself, and the body to which it once clung but no longer clings is God’s.
12. Every jar will fill with wine. This bit of the prophecy is presented as a kind of riddle. The people responds by saying that, of course, jars are made to be filled. God’s rejoinder (verse 13) is to explain the jar as a riddling symbolic reference to the people, who will be filled with drunkenness—which is to say, a condition of mental confusion and physical tottering that is a prelude to collapse.
14. I will smash them. This verse carries forward the metaphor of the jar, since the jar would be earthenware and easily smashed.
15. Listen and give ear. Exhortations to listen are a conventional beginning of Prophetic and other kinds of biblical poems.
16. the twilight mountains. This beautiful phrase continues the idea of darkness falling: as the mountains are enveloped in the shadows of evening, one runs the danger of colliding with rocks or stumbling into pitfalls in the mountainous terrain.
17. because of pride. The Hebrew geiwah is obscure. Though this translation links it with gaʾawah, “pride,” that is no more than a guess. Others connect it with a rare word in Job that might possibly mean “community.”
18. sit down low. That is, descend from your exalted thrones.
20. the ones coming from the north. As elsewhere, these are the invading armies.
Where is the flock that was given to you. The “you” throughout this passage is feminine singular and so refers to the nation personified as a woman.
21. What will you say when he appoints over you. The reference is ambiguous. Rashi understood the appointer as God; Kimchi thought “he” refers to the enemy who, having conquered Jerusalem, chooses local governors for his own purposes, and that may be more likely.
and it was you who taught them. The most plausible meaning of this opaque clause is that if you resent these disagreeable leaders with whom you are saddled, you have only yourself to thank for fastening the administration of your society on morally dubious figures who can now be exploited by your conquerors.
22. your heels ripped back. The focus on the heels may seem puzzling. Women would have worn long robes, everything covered all the way down to the heels. The exposure of the heels then becomes a synecdoche for the exposure of the legs and most of the body. It should be noted that the verb here, neḥmesu, indicates a violent act or the perpetration of an outrage.
23. Can a Nubian change his skin, / a leopard its spots? This formulation—in traditional translations, kushi is rendered as “Ethiopian”—expresses a profound moral pessimism: just as these bodily features are ineradicable, your propensity for evil will never change, and so a national catastrophe is inevitable.
24. like floating chaff. Although qash usually means “straw,” straw is not easily windblown, and so there seems to be a semantic slide from “straw” to “chaff.” The image is akin to that of Psalms 1:4, where a different Hebrew word, mots, is used.
25. the lie. This may be, as some scholars have proposed, a pejorative epithet for Baal.
26. stripped back your skirts over your face. The relatively elliptical image of a woman stripped in verse 22 now becomes brutally explicit: her face covered by her own hitched up skirts, her entire naked body is exposed, and this looks like the sad condition of a woman about to be raped.
27. your adulteries and your neighings. While the latter term is often used for the noises made in revelry, it is also the word for a horse’s neighing, and that is a metaphor adopted by Jeremiah to represent unbridled lust (see 5:8).
the depravity. The Hebrew zimah is strongly associated with sexual depravity.
on the hills in the field / I have seen your vile things. As elsewhere, the sexual imagery mingles literal and figurative senses. Idolatry is conceived as adultery, the betrayal by Israel of her divine Spouse, and the “vile things” are a fixed epithet for idols. But this pagan activity on the hilltops often involved a fertility cult with orgiastic rites.
How much longer will it be? Though this is the evident sense of the final clause of the prophecy, the Hebrew syntax is rather crabbed. A literal rendering of the three Hebrew words would be: “after when still.”