Yeremia 1:16

1:16 In this way ¹  I will pass sentence ²  on the people of Jerusalem and Judah ³  because of all their wickedness. For they rejected me and offered sacrifices to other gods, worshiping what they made with their own hands.” ⁴ 

Yeremia 2:13

2:13 “Do so because my people have committed a double wrong:

they have rejected me,

the fountain of life-giving water, ⁵ 

and they have dug cisterns for themselves,

cracked cisterns which cannot even hold water.”

Yeremia 3:21-22

3:21 “A noise is heard on the hilltops.

It is the sound of the people of Israel crying and pleading to their gods.

Indeed they have followed sinful ways; ⁶ 

they have forgotten to be true to the Lord their God. ⁷ 

3:22 Come back to me, you wayward people.

I want to cure your waywardness. ⁸ 

Say, ⁹  ‘Here we are. We come to you

because you are the Lord our God.

Yeremia 6:18

6:18 So the Lord said, ¹⁰ 

“Hear, you nations!

Be witnesses and take note of what will happen to these people. ¹¹ 

Yeremia 7:30

7:30 The Lord says, “I have rejected them because ¹²  the people of Judah have done what I consider evil. ¹³  They have set up their disgusting idols in the temple ¹⁴  which I have claimed for my own ¹⁵  and have defiled it.

Yeremia 21:14

21:14 But I will punish you as your deeds deserve,’

says the Lord. ¹⁶ 

‘I will set fire to your palace;

it will burn up everything around it.’” ¹⁷ 

Yeremia 23:12

23:12 So the paths they follow will be dark and slippery.

They will stumble and fall headlong.

For I will bring disaster on them.

A day of reckoning is coming for them.” ¹⁸ 

The Lord affirms it! ¹⁹ 

Yeremia 23:22

23:22 But if they had stood in my inner circle, ²⁰ 

they would have proclaimed my message to my people.

They would have caused my people to turn from their wicked ways

and stop doing the evil things they are doing.

Yeremia 26:13

26:13 But correct the way you have been living and do what is right. ²¹  Obey the Lord your God. If you do, the Lord will forgo destroying you as he threatened he would. ²² 

Yeremia 31:19

31:19 For after we turned away from you we repented.

After we came to our senses ²³  we beat our breasts in sorrow. ²⁴ 

We are ashamed and humiliated

because of the disgraceful things we did previously.’ ²⁵ 

Yeremia 31:37

31:37 The Lord says, “I will not reject all the descendants of Israel

because of all that they have done. ²⁶ 

That could only happen if the heavens above could be measured

or the foundations of the earth below could all be explored,” ²⁷ 

says the Lord. ²⁸ 

Yeremia 44:3

44:3 This happened because of the wickedness the people living there did. ²⁹  They made me angry ³⁰  by worshiping and offering sacrifice to ³¹  other gods whom neither they nor you nor your ancestors ³²  previously knew. ³³ 

[1:16]  ¹ tn The Hebrew particle (the vav [ו] consecutive), which is often rendered in some English versions as “and” and in others is simply left untranslated, is rendered here epexegetically, reflecting a summary statement.

[1:16]  ² sn The Hebrew idiom (literally “I will speak my judgments against”) is found three other times in Jeremiah (4:12; 39:5; 52:9), where it is followed by the carrying out of the sentence. Here the carrying out of the sentence precedes in v. 15.

[1:16]  ³ tn Heb “on them.” The antecedent goes back to Jerusalem and the cities of Judah (i.e., the people in them) in v. 15.

[1:16]  ⁴ tn I.e., idols.

[2:13]  ⁵ tn It is difficult to decide whether to translate “fresh, running water” which the Hebrew term for “living water” often refers to (e.g., Gen 26:19; Lev 14:5), or “life-giving water” which the idiom “fountain of life” as source of life and vitality often refers to (e.g., Ps 36:9; Prov 13:14; 14:27). The contrast with cisterns, which collected and held rain water, suggests “fresh, running water,” but the reality underlying the metaphor contrasts the Lord, the source of life, health, and vitality, with useless idols that cannot do anything.

[3:21]  ⁶ tn Heb “A sound is heard on the hilltops, the weeping of the supplication of the children of Israel because [or indeed] they have perverted their way.” At issue here is whether the supplication is made to Yahweh in repentance because of what they have done or whether it is supplication to the pagan gods which is evidence of their perverted ways. The reference in this verse to the hilltops where idolatry was practiced according to 3:2 and the reference to Israel’s unfaithfulness in the preceding verse make the latter more likely. For the asseverative use of the Hebrew particle (here rendered “indeed”) where the particle retains some of the explicative nuance; cf. BDB 472-73 s.v. כִּי 1.e and 3.c.

[3:21]  ⁷ tn Heb “have forgotten the Lord their God,” but in the view of the parallelism and the context, the word “forget” (like “know” and “remember”) involves more than mere intellectual activity.

[3:22]  ⁸ tn Or “I will forgive your apostasies.” Heb “I will [or want to] heal your apostasies.” For the use of the verb “heal” (רָפָא, rafa’) to refer to spiritual healing and forgiveness see Hos 14:4.

[3:22]  ⁹ tn Or “They say.” There is an obvious ellipsis of a verb of saying here since the preceding words are those of the Lord and the following are those of the people. However, there is debate about whether these are the response of the people to the Lord’s invitation, a response which is said to be inadequate according to the continuation in 4:1-4, or whether these are the Lord’s model for Israel’s confession of repentance to which he adds further instructions about the proper heart attitude that should accompany it in 4:1-4. The former implies a dialogue with an unmarked twofold shift in speaker between 3:22b-25 and 4:1-4:4 while the latter assumes the same main speaker throughout with an unmarked instruction only in 3:22b-25. This disrupts the flow of the passage less and appears more likely.

[6:18]  ¹⁰ tn These words are not in the text but are implicit from the flow of the context. They are supplied in the translation for clarity.

[6:18]  ¹¹ tn Heb “Know, congregation [or witness], what in [or against] them.” The meaning of this line is somewhat uncertain. The meaning of the noun of address in the second line (“witness,” rendered as an imperative in the translation, “Be witnesses”) is greatly debated. It is often taken as “congregation” but the lexicons and commentaries generally question the validity of reading that word since it is nowhere else applied to the nations. BDB 417 s.v. עֵדָה 3 says that the text is dubious. HALOT 747 s.v. I עֵדָה, 4 emends the text to דֵּעָה (de’ah). Several modern English versions (e.g., NIV, NCV, God’s Word) take it as the feminine singular noun “witness” (cf. BDB 729 s.v. II עֵדָה) and understand it as a collective. This solution is also proposed by J. A. Thompson (Jeremiah [NICOT], 259, n. 3) and appears to make the best sense in the context. The end of the line is very elliptical but is generally taken as either, “what I will do with/to them,” or “what is coming against them” (= “what will happen to them”) on the basis of the following context.

[7:30]  ¹² tn The words “I have rejected them” are not in the Hebrew text, which merely says “because.” These words are supplied in the translation to show more clearly the connection to the preceding.

[7:30]  ¹³ tn Heb “have done the evil in my eyes.”

[7:30]  ¹⁴ sn Compare, e.g., 2 Kgs 21:3, 5, 7; 23:4, 6; Ezek 8:3, 5, 10-12, 16. Manasseh had desecrated the temple by building altars, cult symbols, and idols in it. Josiah had purged the temple of these pagan elements. But it is obvious from both Jeremiah and Ezekiel that they had been replaced shortly after Josiah’s death. They were a primary cause of Judah’s guilt and punishment (see beside this passage, 19:5; 32:34-35).

[7:30]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “the house which is called by my name.” Cf. 7:10, 11, 14 and see the translator’s note 7:10 for the explanation for this rendering.

[21:14]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “oracle of the Lord.”

[21:14]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “I will set fire in its forest and it will devour its surroundings.” The pronouns are actually third feminine singular going back to the participle “you who sit enthroned above the valley.” However, this is another example of those rapid shifts in pronouns typical of the biblical Hebrew style which are uncommon in English. They have regularly been leveled to the same person throughout in the translation to avoid possible confusion for the English reader.

[23:12]  ¹⁸ tn For the last two lines see 11:23 and the notes there.

[23:12]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

[23:22]  ²⁰ tn Or “had been my confidant.” See the note on v. 18.

[26:13]  ²¹ tn Heb “Make good your ways and your actions.” For the same expression see 7:3, 5; 18:11.

[26:13]  ²² tn For the idiom and translation of terms involved here see 18:8 and the translator’s note there.

[26:13]  sn The Lord is being consistent in the application of the principle laid down in Jer 18:7-8 that reformation of character will result in the withdrawal of the punishment of “uprooting, tearing down, destroying.” His prophecies of doom are conditional threats, open to change with change in behavior.

[31:19]  ²³ tn For this meaning of the verb see HAL 374 s.v. יָדַע Nif 5 or W. L. Holladay, Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, 129. REB translates “Now that I am submissive” relating the verb to a second root meaning “be submissive.” (See HALOT 375 s.v. II יָדַע and J. Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament, 19-21, for evidence for this verb. Other passages cited with this nuance are Judg 8:16; Prov 10:9; Job 20:20.)

[31:19]  ²⁴ tn Heb “I struck my thigh.” This was a gesture of grief and anguish (cf. Ezek 21:12 [21:17 HT]). The modern equivalent is “to beat the breast.”

[31:19]  ²⁵ tn Heb “because I bear the reproach of my youth.” For the plural referents see the note at the beginning of v. 18.

[31:19]  sn The expression the disgraceful things we did in our earlier history refers to the disgrace that accompanied the sins that Israel did in her earlier years before she learned the painful lesson of submission to the Lord through the discipline of exile. For earlier references to the sins of her youth (i.e., in her earlier years as a nation) see 3:24-25; 22:21 and see also 32:29. At the time that these verses were written, neither northern Israel or Judah had expressed the kind of contrition voiced in vv. 18-19. As one commentator notes, the words here are both prophetic and instructive.

[31:37]  ²⁶ sn This answers Jeremiah’s question in 14:19.

[31:37]  ²⁷ tn Heb “If the heavens above could be measured or the foundations of the earth below be explored, then also I could reject all the seed of Israel for all they have done.”

[31:37]  ²⁸ tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

[44:3]  ²⁹ tn Heb “they.” The referent must be supplied from the preceding, i.e., Jerusalem and all the towns of Judah. “They” are those who have experienced the disaster and are distinct from those being addressed and their ancestors (44:3b).

[44:3]  ³⁰ tn Heb “thus making me angry.” However, this is a good place to break the sentence to create a shorter sentence that is more in keeping with contemporary English style.

[44:3]  ³¹ tn Heb “by going to offer sacrifice in serving/worshiping.” The second לְ (lamed) + infinitive is epexegetical of the first (cf. IBHS 608-9 §36.2.3e).

[44:3]  ³² tn Heb “fathers” (also in vv. 9, 10, 17, 21).

[44:3]  ³³ sn Compare Jer 19:4 for the same thought and see also 7:9.