1And the word of the LORD came to me saying: 2“You shall not take you a wife nor shall you have sons and daughters in this place. 3For thus said the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the daughters born in this place and concerning their mothers who bore them and concerning their fathers who begat them in this land. 4Deaths by illness shall they die. They shall not be lamented and shall not be buried. Manure on the face of the soil they shall become, and by the sword and by famine they shall come to an end, and their carcasses shall be food for the fowl of the heavens and the beasts of the earth. 5For thus said the LORD: Do not go to the house of a wake and do not go to lament and do not console them, for I have taken away My well-being from this people, said the LORD, the kindness and the mercy. 6And great and small shall die in this land. They shall not be buried and shall not be lamented, nor shall one gash himself or shave his head for them. 7They shall not break bread for them in mourning to console him for the dead, and they shall not give him the cup of consolation for his father or for his mother. 8Nor to the house of feasting shall you come to sit with them to eat and to drink. 9For thus said the LORD of Armies, God of Israel: I am about to stifle from this place before your eyes and in your days the sound of gladness and the sound of joy, the sound of the bridegroom and the sound of the bride. 10And it shall be when you tell this people all these things and they say to you, ‘For what did the LORD speak about us all this great evil, and what is our crime and what is our offense that we have offended against the LORD our God?’ 11You shall say to them, ‘Because your fathers forsook Me, said the LORD, and went after other gods and served them and bowed down to them, and Me did they forsake and My teaching they did not keep. 12As for you, you did more evil than your fathers, and here you are going each after the stubbornness of his evil heart so as not to heed me.’ 13And I will cast you from this land to a land you do not know, neither you nor your fathers, and you shall serve there other gods day and night, as I will show you no mercy. 14Therefore, look, days are coming, said the LORD, when it shall no longer be said, ‘As the LORD lives, Who brought up the Israelites from the land of Egypt.’ 15But rather, ‘As the LORD lives, Who brought up the Israelites from the land of the north and from all the lands into which He drove them,’ and I will bring them back to their country that I gave to their fathers. 16I am about to send many fishermen, said the LORD, and they shall fish them, and afterward I will send many hunters and they shall hunt them down from every mountain and from every hill and from the crevices in the rocks.
17For My eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from Me, and their crime is not concealed from My eyes. 18And I will first pay back double for their crime and their offense, for their profaning My land with the carcasses of their vile things. And their abominations have filled My estate.”
19The LORD is my strength and my stronghold,
and my refuge on a day of distress.
To You the nations shall come
from the ends of the earth and shall say:
But to lies our fathers were heir,
mere breath that cannot avail.
20Can a human make him a god,
when these are not gods?
21Therefore, I am about to show them,
this time will I show them,
My hand and my power,
and they shall know that My name is the LORD.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
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2. You shall not take you a wife. This is perhaps the most drastic of the symbolic-prophetic acts that Jeremiah is asked to perform: the future will be so bleak that he must refrain from marrying and begetting children, for all will perish.
4. illness . . . sword . . . famine. Death comes from all directions—from the plague, from warfare, and from starvation.
5. the house of a wake. There is evidence—from the Ugaritic, from the Septuagint rendering of this term, and from rabbinic literature—that the beyt marzeaḥ (etymology uncertain) was a place where mourners gathered to drink and revel in celebration of the life of the deceased. “Wake” seems the best modern English equivalent of this custom.
6. nor shall one gash himself or shave his head. These are actually pagan mourning practices forbidden in the Torah. Either they survive as an archaic gesture in poetry, or they were still widely practiced, despite the prohibition.
7. They shall not break bread for them. The reference is to a special meal for the mourner, what in rabbinic Hebrew would be designated seʿudat havraʾah.
him. In keeping with common usage in biblical Hebrew, the passage switches back and forth between singular and plural.
the cup of consolation. This looks very much like a ritual cup of wine offered to the mourner.
8. the house of feasting. This is an antithesis of “the house of a wake,” although drinking—for different purposes—characterized both. The Hebrew term for “feasting” in fact primarily suggests drinking, as in the Book of Esther.
13. I will cast you. Here Jeremiah, who writes at the end of the First Temple period, uses what amounts to a Late Biblical word, hitil, though in general his language is classical Hebrew.
14. it shall no longer be said. Commentators are divided as to whether the replacement of “Egypt” by “the land of the north” is a prophecy of consolation—which is to say, the redemption from exile will be even grander than the redemption from slavery in Egypt—or a threat: that is, you are doomed to go into exile, a more bitter fate even than slavery in Egypt. The prophet may well intend to suggest both these meanings.
16. many fishermen . . . many hunters. These are the troops of the invading army who will pursue and kill the Judahites.
they shall hunt them down . . . from every hill and from the crevices of the rocks. The metaphor of the hunt now becomes literal fact as we see the fleeing Judahites running off to the mountains and hills and, most vividly, hiding in crevices.
17. They are not hidden from Me. This picks up the hiding in crevices and caves: divine surveillance sees all of Israel’s crimes and all the places where they attempt to flee, and directs their pursuers to hunt them down.
18. the carcasses of their vile things. Again, the “vile things” are idols, and they are represented pejoratively as “carcasses” because there is no life in them.
19. The LORD is my strength and my stronghold. The chapter now concludes with a psalm celebrating God, here recognized as the true deity by the sundry nations. This poem could be either a composition by Jeremiah in the spirit of Psalms or a noncanonical psalm that has been inserted in the text.
21. Therefore, I am about to show them. The psalm incorporates three voices: first the speaker who proclaims that God is his stronghold; then the nations who confess the errors of their fathers and the futility of idol worship; and now at the end, God, announcing that he will manifest His power.