1That which was the word of the LORD to Jeremiah concerning matters of the droughts.
2Judah moans,
they grow dark on the ground,
and the scream of Jerusalem rises.
3And their nobles sent their young ones for water.
They came to the hollows, found no water,
went back with empty vessels,
were shamed and disgraced and covered their heads.
4Because the soil cracked open,
for there was no rain in the land,
the farmers were shamed,
they covered their heads.
5For even the doe in the field gives birth then forsakes,
for there is no grass.
6And wild asses stand on the bare heights,
they sniff the wind like jackals,
for there is no herbage.
7If our crimes bear witness against us,
O LORD, act for the sake of Your name,
for our rebellions are many,
against You we offend.
8Hope of Israel,
its Rescuer in time of disasters,
why should You be like a stranger in the land,
like a wayfarer stopped for the night?
9Why should you be like a man overwhelmed,
like a warrior unable to rescue?
Yet you are in our midst, O LORD,
and Your name is called upon us.
Do not leave us.
10Thus said the LORD to this people: “So did they love to stray. They did not restrain their feet, and the LORD did not accept them with favor. Now shall He recall their crime and make account of their offense.” 11And the LORD said to me: “Do not pray for this people for good things. 12Should they fast, I will not listen to their chant of prayer, and should they offer up burnt offering and grain offering, I will not accept them with favor, for by the sword and by famine and by plague I will make an end of them.” 13And I said, “Alas, O Master, LORD, look, the prophets say to them, ‘You shall not see the sword, nor famine shall you have, but true well-being will I give you in this place.’” 14And the LORD said to me, “Lies do the prophets prophesy in My name. I did not send them nor did I charge them nor did I speak to them. A vision of lies and a groundless divination and their own heart’s deceit do they prophesy to you. 15Therefore, thus said the LORD concerning the prophets who prophesy in My name when I did not send them, and they say, ‘Sword and famine there shall not be in this land,’ by the sword and by famine these prophets shall perish. 16And the people to whom they prophesy, they shall be flung into the streets of Jerusalem because of the famine and the sword, and there will be no one to bury them—them, their wives and their sons and their daughters—and I will pour out upon them their own evil. 17And you shall say to them this word:
Let my eyes shed tears,
night and day let them not cease
for in a great disaster is the Virgin Daughter of My people broken,
a very grievous blow.
18If I go out to the field,
look, those slain by the sword,
and if I come to the town,
look, those sickened by famine.
For prophet and priest as well
go round the land and know not where.
19Have you wholly rejected Judah,
by Zion are You repelled?
Why have You struck us and we have no healing,
we hope for peace and there is no good,
for a time of healing, and, look, terror?
20We know, LORD, our wickedness,
the crime of our fathers, for we offended against You.
21Do not spurn, for the sake of Your name,
do not debase the throne of Your glory.
Recall, do not breach Your covenant with us.
22Can the empty breath of the nations yield rain,
and the heavens, can they give showers?
Are not You the one, O LORD,
our God, and we hope in You?
For it is You Who made all these.”
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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1. That which was the word. The wording of this introductory formula is somewhat different from the usual “the word of the LORD came to.”
2. her gates . . . / grow dark on the ground. “Gates” is a synecdoche for “towns.” The verb “grow dark” (or “be dark”), qadru, is associated with mourning, and one sits on the ground in mourning.
3. their nobles sent their young ones. The “nobles” (in other contexts, “mighty ones”) send their “young ones,” that is, their subalterns.
the hollows. These are natural concavities in rock where rainwater would collect, when there is rain.
covered their heads. This is a sign of grief. But the phrase is absent from the Septuagint, and it may be a scribal duplication of the phrase at the end of verse 4.
5. For even the doe in the field gives birth then forsakes. Lacking sustenance, the doe abandons her newborn faun.
6. their eyes go dead. More literally, “their eyes are finished.” Later Hebrew traditions made this an idiom for pining or longing, and that could conceivably be its meaning here. But the sense may rather be that the eyes of the wild asses, faint with hunger, go dead as part of their failing state. Lundbom proposes that the lack of vegetal nutrients in fact leads to blindness in such animals.
8. a stranger in the land / . . . a wayfarer stopped for the night. The land is imagined to be God’s land, His earthly abode, with the Jerusalem temple as God’s house, but He has now come to seem alienated from the land and its people.
9. Yet you are in our midst. In the face of the perception of God’s withdrawal, the prophet, on behalf of the people, asserts the traditional conviction that God dwells in the midst of His people.
13. Alas, O Master, LORD, look, the prophets say to them. Jeremiah reverts here to one of the central themes that preoccupies him, false prophecy. One may reasonably suppose that this is a reflection of autobiographical reality. People in this culture sought the guidance of prophets, and there appear to have been a good many such prophets in Jeremiah’s time who told their audiences what they wanted to hear.
18. If I go out to the field, / look, those slain by the sword. This entire verse reflects an arresting switch from the generalized symbolic image to concrete observation. First, we have the quasi-allegorical figure of the Virgin Daughter of my people who has been shattered by disaster. Then the meaning of the disaster is spelled out as the prophet goes out to the field and sees it strewn with corpses, then enters the town and sees all around people dying of famine.
and know not where. Prophet and priest are supposed to be guides for the people. Now, in the national catastrophe, they wander through the land, dazed, scarcely knowing where they are going.
21. Do not spurn . . . / do not debase. Both verbs have as their object “the throne of Your glory.” That throne would be Jerusalem, or, more specifically, the Temple, so this is an argument that God should not allow His own throne to be debased.
22. the empty breath. As elsewhere, this is a pejorative epithet for the idols or pseudo-gods of the nations.
yield rain. The reference reminds us that the entire prophecy addresses the disaster that has befallen the land through a drought.
the heavens, can they give showers? As a parallel to the first verset, this means: can the heavens on their own, without God’s action, produce showers?