1“Woe, negligent shepherds, who scatter the sheep of My flock, said the LORD. 2Therefore, said the LORD God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd My people, you have let my flocks scatter and dispersed them and did not attend to them. I am about to reckon with you for the evil of your acts, said the LORD. 3And I Myself will gather the remnant of My flock from the lands to which I dispersed them, and I will bring them back to their pasture, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4And I will raise up over them shepherds, and they shall shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear nor be frightened, and none shall be missing, said the LORD.”
5Look, days are coming, said the LORD, when I will raise up a righteous shoot for David,
and a king shall reign and prosper,
and do justice and righteousness in the land.
6In his days Judah shall be rescued,
and Israel shall dwell secure.
This is his name that they shall call him:
The-LORD-Is-Our-Righteousness.
7“Therefore, look, days are coming, said the LORD, when they shall no longer say, ‘As the LORD lives, Who brought up the Israelites from the land of Egypt,’ 8But ‘As the LORD lives, Who brought up and led the seed of the house of Israel from the land in the north and from all the lands to which I dispersed them,’ and they shall dwell on their soil.”
9Concerning the prophets:
My heart is broken within me,
All my bones flutter.
I have been like someone drunken,
like a man overcome by wine,
because of the LORD
and because of His holy words.
10For adulterers have filled the land,
because of these the land is bleak,
the desert pastures are dry.
And their running is for evil,
and their valor is not so.
11For prophet and priest, too, are tainted.
Even in My house I found their evil,
—said the LORD.
12Therefore their way shall become for them
like slippery ground in the dark.
They shall be thrust down and fall on it.
For I will bring upon them evil,
the year of their reckoning,
—said the LORD.
13And in the prophets of Samaria
I have seen a senseless thing—
they prophesied by Baal
and led astray My people Israel.
14And in the prophets of Jerusalem
I have seen a frightful thing—
adultery and walking in lies,
and they strengthened the hands of evildoers
so none turned back from his evil.
They all have become to me like Sodom,
and its dwellers like Gomorrah.
15Therefore thus said the LORD of Armies concerning the prophets:
I am about to feed you wormwood
and make you drink a poisoned draft,
for from the prophets of Jerusalem
a taint spreads out to all the land.
16Thus said the LORD of Armies:
Do not heed the word of the prophets
who prophesy to you.
Their own heart’s vision they speak,
not from the mouth of the LORD.
17They repeatedly say to those who despise the word of the LORD,
“It will go well with you,”
And to each who goes in the stubbornness of his heart,
“Evil will not come upon you.”
18For who has stood in the LORD’s council
and seen and heard His words?
Who has attended to My word and heard it?
19Look, the tempest of the LORD!
Wrath springs out and a whirling storm
on the heads of the wicked it whirls.
20The LORD’s anger shall not turn back
till it does and carries out
what His heart has plotted.
you shall surely grasp this.
21I did not send the prophets,
but they went running.
I did not speak to them,
but they prophesied.
22And had they stood in My council
and heard My words about My people,
they would have turned them back from their evil way
and from the evil of their acts.
23Am I not a nearby God, said the LORD,
and not a far-off God?
24If a man should hide in secret places,
would I not see him? said the LORD.
do not I fill? said the LORD.
25I have heard what the prophets said prophesying in My name with lies, saying, “I have dreamed a dream.” 26How long will there be in the heart of the prophets prophesying lies the deception of their heart? 27Who aim to make My people forget My name with their dreams that they recount to each other, and their fathers forgot My name through Baal. 28The prophet with whom there is a dream, let him recount the dream. And he with whom My word is, let him speak words of truth. What does straw have to do with grain? said the LORD. 29Is not My word like fire, said the LORD, and like a hammer splitting rock? 30Therefore here I am against the prophets, said the LORD, who steal My word from each other. 31Here I am against the prophets, said the LORD, who take up their tongues and deliver an oracle. 32Here I am against those who prophesy lying dreams, said the LORD, and recount them and lead My people astray with their lies and with their inconstancy when I did not send them nor charge them, and they surely will not avail for this people, said the LORD. 33And should the people, or the prophet or the priest ask you, saying, “What is the burden of the LORD?,” you shall say to them, “You are the burden,” and I will abandon you, said the LORD. 34As to the prophet or the priest or the people who will say “The burden of the LORD,” I will reckon with that man and with his household. 35Thus shall you say each man to his fellow and each man to his brother, “What has the LORD answered and what has the LORD spoken?” 36But “the burden of the LORD” you shall no longer mention, for “the burden” becomes each man’s own word, and you overturn the words of the living God, the LORD of Armies, our God. 37Thus shall you say to the people, “What has the LORD answered you, and what has the LORD spoken?” 38And if you all say “the burden of the LORD,” thus said the LORD, inasmuch as you have said this word, “the burden of the LORD” when I sent to you saying you shall not say “the burden of the LORD,” 39therefore, I will surely lift you as a burden and abandon you from My presence and the city that I gave to you and to your fathers, 40and I will give you everlasting shame and everlasting disgrace that will not be forgotten.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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1. negligent shepherds. The participle meʾabdim could mean “destroying,” but this verbal stem can signify either “to perish” or “to be lost,” and since it is the task of the shepherd to prevent any sheep in his flock from getting lost, the last meaning seems more likely. A shepherd who allows sheep to go astray is negligent. As elsewhere, the shepherds are the leaders of the people.
3. And I Myself will gather the remnant of My flock. This language casts God as a shepherd, now stepping in to take up the task of the negligent shepherds who acted in such a way through their misguided leadership that the people were “scattered” into lands of exile.
they shall be fruitful and multiply. This phraseology borrowed from the beginning of Genesis suggests that the return to Zion will be a kind of second creation.
4. none shall be missing. The multipurpose verb paqad is here pointedly used in the sense of no sheep missing from the flock.
5. a righteous shoot. This phrase has currency as an epithet for the legitimate monarch not only in the Bible but in the Ugaritic literature before it.
6. This is his name that they shall call him. The prophet is surely playing on the common ancient Near Eastern practice of assigning a new name to the king when he assumed the throne.
9. I have been like someone drunken, / . . . because of the LORD. Through the simile of a man staggering from the effects of wine, Jeremiah takes up a recurrent theme that God’s word within him is so powerful and so dire that it shakes him to the core.
10. adulterers. It is not entirely clear whether the prophet is inveighing against sexual license or whether the adultery in view is whoring after alien gods.
11. Even in My house. The house is the Temple, so the reference must be to corruption of the cult of YHWH by pagan practices.
14. a frightful thing. This sounds more extreme than the “senseless thing” of the previous verse, and hence many commentators have inferred that the prophets of Jerusalem are condemned more sharply than the prophets of Samaria (which is to say, the now vanished northern kingdom). Jeremiah, regularly reviled by his fellow Judahites, is constantly outraged by the false prophets he sees around him, and this whole long passage to the end of the chapter is devoted to that theme.
16. They deal emptiness to you. The unusual verb, mehablim, is patently derived from hevel, “mere breath,” “emptiness.”
17. to those who despise the word of the LORD. The received text reads, improbably, “to those who despise Me the LORD has spoken.” The translation here follows the reading reflected in the Septuagint and in the Targum Yonatan, which involves no consonantal changes, only a revocalization of two words.
18. who has stood in the LORD’s council. Biblical poetry (as well as the frame-story of Job) repeatedly assumes the existence of a celestial council presided over by YHWH. The rhetorical question clearly conveys the idea that none of these false prophets could possibly have had access to the LORD’s council.
20. In future days / you shall surely grasp this. When God’s devastating retribution descends, you will have no choice but to finally understand His judgment.
22. they would have turned them back from their evil way. The fact that the people persisted in its wrongful actions while listening to these prophets is, as it were, empirical proof that these prophets could not have stood in the LORD’s council.
23. a nearby God. In the present context, this designation is ominous rather than reassuring: God follows the people up close; they have no way of hiding from Him, as the next verse spells out.
24. The heavens and the earth / do I not fill? God’s presence is everywhere—in the faraway sky but also throughout the earth, so there is no hiding from Him.
25. I have dreamed a dream. Dream interpretation would have been a common vehicle for these popular prophets. Although dreams sometimes figure in the Bible as an instrument of authentic revelation of future events (as in the Joseph story), the classical prophets, depending on “the word of the LORD” that they repeatedly hear, do not have recourse to dreams.
28. What does straw have to do with grain? This sounds very much like a proverbial saying, to the effect: what does something worthless have to do with good edible stuff? The referents of the saying have already been spelled out—lying prophets and prophets who speak the truth.
29. Is not My word like fire . . . and like a hammer splitting rock? Jeremiah had previously likened God’s word to fire that shut up in his bones, an image that expressed his own tormented experiential sense of the divine message within him. Now he focuses on the outward effect of God’s word, which is fearsome and devastating. There may be an associative link between the fire and the hammer because of the spark that would leap out from the struck rock, or perhaps even because of hammers in the forge.
30. who steal My word from each other. Not only do they speak lies but they also steal from each other the lying words. “My word” is virtually sarcastic—what they claim to be My word.
31. who take up their tongues. More literally, “who take their tongues.” It is an odd but actually pointed use of the verb: this delivery of purely manufactured oracles involves forced effort, a kind of heavy lifting performed with the tongue.
33. What is the burden of the LORD? The Hebrew masa’, “burden” has two meanings—burden, portent, or content of a prophecy, and a load to be carried. The passage will play these two meanings against the other, but it is clear that in the question posed in this verse, “burden” is used in its prophetic sense.
You are the burden. The Masoretic Text reads ʾet-mah-masa’, which yields something unintelligibile: accusative-particle-what-burden. A simple redistribution of consonants produces ʾatem hamasa’, “you are the burden,” and this reading is confirmed by the Septuagint and the Vulgate. The question about the burden of prophecy, then, in the mouths of the followers of false prophets is turned back against them in a response that stigmatizes them as the real burden.
36. But “the burden of the LORD” you shall no longer mention. The mouthing of this phrase about prophetic revelation when there is no revelation is an odious act and the very phrase should be banned. There is no real prophetic burden, only “each man’s word” that he has invented as pseudo-prophecy.
38. if you all say. “All” has been added in the translation to indicate what the Hebrew verb makes clear, that a group is being addressed.
39. I will surely lift you as a burden. The Masoretic Text has nashiti nasho’, which would mean “I will surely forget you.” But some Hebrew manuscripts as well as two versions of the Septuagint and the Vulgate read nasa’ti naso’, “I will surely lift you.” It is definitely in accord with Jeremiah’s style to insist on this already repeated verbal stem inscribed in the word for “burden,” here turning it into an expression of measure-for-measure justice.
40. I will give you everlasting shame. It is worth keeping the Hebrew repetition of the verb used at the end of the previous sentence because the repetition makes a point: Once I gave you this city in an act of generosity; now I will give you instead shame and disgrace.