Yeremia 15:7

15:7 The Lord continued, ¹ 

“In every town in the land I will purge them

like straw blown away by the wind. ² 

I will destroy my people.

I will kill off their children.

I will do so because they did not change their behavior. ³ 

Yeremia 25:31

25:31 The sounds of battle ⁴  will resound to the ends of the earth.

For the Lord will bring charges against the nations. ⁵ 

He will pass judgment on all humankind

and will hand the wicked over to be killed in war.’ ⁶ 

The Lord so affirms it! ⁷ 

Yeremia 29:3

29:3 He sent it with Elasah son of Shaphan ⁸  and Gemariah son of Hilkiah. ⁹  King Zedekiah of Judah had sent these men to Babylon to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. ¹⁰  The letter said:

Yeremia 32:25

32:25 The city is sure to fall into the hands of the Babylonians. ¹¹  Yet, in spite of this, ¹²  you, Lord God, ¹³  have said to me, “Buy that field with silver and have the transaction legally witnessed.”’” ¹⁴ 

Yeremia 35:2

35:2 “Go to the Rechabite community. ¹⁵  Invite them to come into one of the side rooms ¹⁶  of the Lord’s temple and offer them some wine to drink.”

Yeremia 49:31

49:31 The Lord says, ¹⁷  “Army of Babylon, ¹⁸  go and attack

a nation that lives in peace and security.

They have no gates or walls to protect them. ¹⁹ 

They live all alone.

[15:7]  ¹ tn The words “The Lord continued” are not in the text. They have been supplied in the translation to show the shift back to talking about the people instead of addressing them. The obvious speaker is the Lord; the likely listener is Jeremiah as in vv. 1-4.

[15:7]  ² tn Heb “I have winnowed them with a winnowing fork in the gates of the land.” The word “gates” is here being used figuratively for the cities, the part for the whole. See 14:2 and the notes there.

[15:7]  sn Like straw blown away by the wind. A figurative use of the process of winnowing is referred to here. Winnowing was the process whereby a mixture of grain and straw was thrown up into the wind to separate the grain from the straw and the husks. The best description of the major steps in threshing and winnowing grain in the Bible is seen in another figurative passage in Isa 41:15-16.

[15:7]  ³ tn Or “did not repent of their wicked ways”; Heb “They did not turn back from their ways.” There is no casual particle here (either כִּי [ki], which is more formally casual, or וְ [vÿ], which sometimes introduces casual circumstantial clauses). The causal idea is furnished by the connection of ideas. If the verbs throughout this section are treated as pasts and this section seen as a lament, then the clause could be sequential: “but they still did not turn…”

[25:31]  ⁴ tn For the use of this word see Amos 2:2; Hos 10:14; Ps 74:23. See also the usage in Isa 66:6 which is very similar to the metaphorical usage here.

[25:31]  ⁵ tn Heb “the Lord has a lawsuit against the nations.” For usage of the term see Hos 4:1; Mic 6:2, and compare the usage of the related verb in Jer 2:9; 12:1.

[25:31]  ⁶ tn Heb “give the wicked over to the sword.”

[25:31]  sn There is undoubtedly a deliberate allusion here to the reference to the “wars” (Heb “sword”) that the Lord had said he would send raging through the nations (vv. 16, 27) and the “war” (Heb “sword”) that he is proclaiming against them (v. 29).

[25:31]  ⁷ tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

[29:3]  ⁸ sn Elasah son of Shaphan may have been the brother of Ahikam, who supported Jeremiah when the priests and the prophets in Jerusalem sought to kill Jeremiah for preaching that the temple and the city would be destroyed (cf. 26:24).

[29:3]  ⁹ sn This individual is not the same as the Gemariah mentioned in 36:10, 11, 12, 25 who was one of the officials who sought to have the first scroll of Jeremiah’s prophecies preserved. He may, however, have been a son or grandson of the High Priest who discovered the book of the law during the reign of Josiah (cf., e.g., 2 Kgs 22:8, 10) which was so instrumental in Josiah’s reforms.

[29:3]  ¹⁰ sn It is unclear whether this incident preceded or followed those in the preceding chapter. It is known from 52:59 that Zedekiah himself had made a trip to Babylon in the same year mentioned in 28:1 and that Jeremiah had used that occasion to address a prophecy of disaster to Babylon. It is not impossible that Jeremiah sent two such disparate messages at the same time (see Jer 25:8-11, 12-14, 17-18, 26).

[32:25]  ¹¹ tn Heb “The Chaldeans.” See the study note on 21:4 for further explanation.

[32:25]  ¹² tn Heb “And you, Lord Yahweh, have said to me, ‘Buy the field for…’ even though the city will be given into the hands of the Babylonians.” The sentence has been broken up and the order reversed for English stylistic purposes. For the rendering “is sure to fall into the hands of” see the translator’s note on the preceding verse.

[32:25]  ¹³ tn Heb “Lord God.” For the rendering of this title see the study note on 1:6.

[32:25]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “call in witnesses to witness.”

[35:2]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “the house of the Rechabites.” “House” is used here in terms of “household” or “family” (cf. BDB 109 s.v. בַּיִת 5.a, b).

[35:2]  sn Nothing is known about the Rechabite community other than what is said about them in this chapter. From vv. 7-8 it appears that they were a nomadic tribe that had resisted settling down and taking up farming. They had also agreed to abstain from drinking wine. Most scholars agree in equating the Jonadab son of Rechab mentioned as the leader who had instituted these strictures as the same Jonadab who assisted Jehu in his religious purge of Baalism following the reign of Ahab (2 Kgs 10:15, 23-24). If this is the case, the Rechabites followed these same rules for almost 250 years because Jehu’s purge of Baalism and the beginning of his reign was in 841 b.c. and the incident here took place some time after Jehoiakim’s rebellion in 603 b.c. (see the study note on v. 1).

[35:2]  ¹⁶ sn This refers to one of the rooms built on the outside of the temple that were used as living quarters for the priests and for storage rooms (cf. Neh 13:4-5; 1 Kgs 6:5; 1 Chr 28:12; 2 Chr 31:11 and compare Ezek 41:1-14).

[49:31]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

[49:31]  ¹⁸ tn The words “Army of Babylon” are not in the text but are implicit from the context. They are supplied in the translation for clarity.

[49:31]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “no gates and no bar,” i.e., “that lives securely without gates or bars.” The phrase is used by the figure of species for genus (synecdoche) to refer to the fact that they have no defenses, i.e., no walls, gates, or bars on the gates. The figure has been interpreted in the translation for the benefit of the average reader.