1Thus said the LORD: “Go and buy a potter’s earthenware flask, and [take] of the elders of the people and of the elders of the priests, 2and go out to the Valley of Ben-Hinnom which is in the Gate of the Potsherd, and call out there the words that I shall speak to you. 3And you shall say: ‘Hear the word of the LORD, kings of Judah and dwellers of Jerusalem. Thus said the LORD of Armies, God of Israel. I am about to bring such evil upon this place that whoever hears of it, his ears will ring. 4Inasmuch as they have forsaken Me and made this place foreign and burned incense in it to other gods which neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. 5And they have built high places to Baal to burn their sons in the fire of burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not charge and of which I did not speak and which never came to My mind, 6therefore, look, days are coming, said the LORD, when this place shall not be called Topheth and the Valley of Ben-Hinnom but the Valley of the Killing. 7And I will confound the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place and will bring them down by the sword before their enemies and by the hand of those who seek their life, and I will give their carcasses as food for the fowl of the heavens and the beasts of the earth. 8And I will make this city a desolation and a hissing. Whoever passes by it shall be devastated and hiss over all its blows. 9And I will feed them the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and each man shall eat the flesh of his fellow man in the siege and in the straits that their enemies and those who seek their life shall press upon them. 10And you shall break the flask before the eyes of the men who go with you. 11And you shall say to them, Thus said the LORD of Armies: So will I break this people and this city as the potter’s vessel is broken and can no longer be made whole. And in Topheth they shall bury till there is no room left to bury. 12Thus will I do to this place, said the LORD, and to its dwellers, to make this city like Topheth. 13And the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah like the place of Topheth shall be unclean, all the houses on the roofs on which they burned incense to all the array of the heavens and poured libations to other gods.’” 14And Jeremiah came from Topheth where the LORD had sent him to prophesy, and he stood in the court of the house of the LORD and said to all the people, 15“Thus said the LORD of Armies. God of Israel: I am about to bring upon this city and on all its towns the evil of which I spoke concerning it, for they have made their neck stiff not to heed my words.”
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. [take]. There definitely seems to be a verb missing in the Masoretic Text (hence the brackets in the translation). “Take” appears in the Septuagint.
4. made this place foreign. The clear implication of the context is that they have made it foreign by worshipping foreign gods there.
they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. As a rule, this phrase refers to murder, and perhaps occasionally to murderous exploitation, but given the location in the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, the “innocent” may well be the children sacrificed in this place.
5. burnt offerings to Baal. The linkage between Baal and human sacrifice is exceptional. Elsewhere, and especially in reference to the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, it is to Moloch that children are sacrificed.
6. the Valley of the Killing. As what follows makes clear, the killing is not the sacrificed children but the general slaughter that will be perpetrated here in retribution for this unspeakable crime.
7. confound. The literal sense of the Hebrew verb is “empty out.”
9. And I will feed them the flesh of their sons and . . . their daughters. Although cannibalism under the duress of starvation in sieges is often invoked in the Bible, and evidently actually sometimes occurred, in this instance it is measure-for-measure justice: the paganizers murdered their own children in a macabre ritual; now they will be driven by extremity to eat their children.
10. And you shall break the flask. The fashioning of humankind in Genesis 2 was strongly analogized to the potter’s artifact. Now, the patent frangibility of an earthenware flask becomes a vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of the people to destruction.
13. the roofs on which they burned incense to all the array of the heavens. The roofs were flat, making them readily appropriate settings for worship of astral deities.
14. He stood in the court of the house of the LORD. The temple court would have been an ideal place to address a large crowd. Moreover, by moving from the Valley of Ben-Hinnom to the temple precincts, Jeremiah makes clear that the prophesied destruction is not just for the Moloch worshippers but for all of Jerusalem, “the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah like the place of Topheth.”