Yeremia 2:25

2:25 Do not chase after other gods until your shoes wear out

and your throats become dry. ¹ 

But you say, ‘It is useless for you to try and stop me

because I love those foreign gods ²  and want to pursue them!’

Yeremia 3:21

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; ³ 

they have forgotten to be true to the Lord their God. ⁴ 

Yeremia 4:19

4:19 I said, ⁵ 

“Oh, the feeling in the pit of my stomach! ⁶ 

I writhe in anguish.

Oh, the pain in my heart! ⁷ 

My heart pounds within me.

I cannot keep silent.

For I hear the sound of the trumpet; ⁸ 

the sound of the battle cry pierces my soul! ⁹ 

Yeremia 4:28

4:28 Because of this the land will mourn

and the sky above will grow black. ¹⁰ 

For I have made my purpose known ¹¹ 

and I will not relent or turn back from carrying it out.” ¹² 

Yeremia 7:16

7:16 Then the Lord said, ¹³  “As for you, Jeremiah, ¹⁴  do not pray for these people! Do not cry out to me or petition me on their behalf! Do not plead with me to save them, ¹⁵  because I will not listen to you.

Yeremia 13:17

13:17 But if you will not pay attention to this warning, ¹⁶ 

I will weep alone because of your arrogant pride.

I will weep bitterly and my eyes will overflow with tears ¹⁷ 

because you, the Lord’s flock, ¹⁸  will be carried ¹⁹  into exile.”

Yeremia 19:6

19:6 So I, the Lord, say: ²⁰  “The time will soon come that people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Hinnom Valley. But they will call this valley ²¹  the Valley of Slaughter!

Yeremia 31:19

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

After we came to our senses ²²  we beat our breasts in sorrow. ²³ 

We are ashamed and humiliated

because of the disgraceful things we did previously.’ ²⁴ 

Yeremia 48:36

48:36 So my heart moans for Moab

like a flute playing a funeral song.

Yes, like a flute playing a funeral song,

my heart moans for the people of Kir Heres.

For the wealth they have gained will perish.

Yeremia 49:23

Judgment Against Damascus

49:23 The Lord spoke ²⁵  about Damascus. ²⁶ 

“The people of Hamath and Arpad ²⁷  will be dismayed

because they have heard bad news.

Their courage will melt away because of worry.

Their hearts will not be able to rest. ²⁸ 

[2:25]  ¹ tn Heb “Refrain your feet from being bare and your throat from being dry/thirsty.”

[2:25]  ² tn Heb “It is useless! No!” For this idiom, see Jer 18:12; NEB “No; I am desperate.”

[3:21]  ³ 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]  ⁴ 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.

[4:19]  ⁵ tn The words “I said” are not in the text. They are used to mark the shift from the Lord’s promise of judgment to Jeremiah’s lament concerning it.

[4:19]  ⁶ tn Heb “My bowels! My bowels!”

[4:19]  ⁷ tn Heb “the walls of my heart!”

[4:19]  ⁸ tn Heb “ram’s horn,” but the modern equivalent is “trumpet” and is more readily understandable.

[4:19]  ⁹ tc The translation reflects a different division of the last two lines than that suggested by the Masoretes. The written text (the Kethib) reads “for the sound of the ram’s horn I have heard [or “you have heard,” if the form is understood as the old second feminine singular perfect] my soul” followed by “the battle cry” in the last line. The translation is based on taking “my soul” with the last line and understanding an elliptical expression “the battle cry [to] my soul.” Such an elliptical expression is in keeping with the elliptical nature of the exclamations at the beginning of the verse (cf. the literal translations of the first two lines of the verse in the notes on the words “stomach” and “heart”).

[4:28]  ¹⁰ sn The earth and the heavens are personified here and depicted in the act of mourning and wearing black clothes because of the destruction of the land of Israel.

[4:28]  ¹¹ tn Heb “has spoken and purposed.” This is an example of hendiadys where two verbs are joined by “and” but one is meant to serve as a modifier of the other.

[4:28]  ¹² tn Heb “will not turn back from it.”

[7:16]  ¹³ tn The words “Then the Lord said” are not in the text but are supplied in the translation for clarity.

[7:16]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “As for you.” The personal name Jeremiah is supplied in the translation for clarity.

[7:16]  ¹⁵ tn The words “to save them” are not in the text but are implicit from the context. They are supplied in the translation for clarity.

[13:17]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “If you will not listen to it.” For the use of the feminine singular pronoun to refer to the idea(s) expressed in the preceding verse(s), see GKC 440-41 §135.p.

[13:17]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “Tearing [my eye] will tear and my eye will run down [= flow] with tears.”

[13:17]  sn The depth of Jeremiah’s sorrow for the sad plight of his people, if they refuse to repent, is emphasized by the triple repetition of the word “tears” twice in an emphatic verbal expression (Hebrew infinitive before finite verb) and once in the noun.

[13:17]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “because the Lord’s flock will…” The pronoun “you” is supplied in the translation to avoid the shift in English from the second person address at the beginning to the third person affirmation at the end. It also helps explain the metaphor of the people of Israel as God’s flock for some readers who may be unfamiliar with that metaphor.

[13:17]  ¹⁹ tn The verb is once again in the form of “as good as done” (the Hebrew prophetic perfect).

[19:6]  ²⁰ tn This phrase (Heb “Oracle of the Lord”) has been handled this way on several occasions when it occurs within first person addresses where the Lord is the speaker. See, e.g., 16:16; 17:24; 18:6.

[19:6]  ²¹ tn Heb “it will no longer be called to this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom but the Valley of Slaughter.”

[19:6]  sn See Jer 7:31-32 for an almost word for word repetition of vv. 5-6.

[31:19]  ²² 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]  ²³ 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]  ²⁴ 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.

[49:23]  ²⁵ tn The words “The Lord spoke” and “he said” are not in the text. There is only a title here: “Concerning Damascus.” However, something needs to be supplied to show that these are the Lord’s words of judgment (cf. v. 26 “oracle of the Lord” and the “I” in v. 27). These words have been supplied in the translation for clarity and consistency with the introduction to the other judgment speeches.

[49:23]  ²⁶ sn Damascus is a city in Syria, located below the eastern slopes of the Anti-lebanon Mountains. It was the capital of the Aramean state that was in constant hostility with Israel from the time of David until its destruction by the Assyrians in 732 b.c. At various times it was allied with the Aramean state of Hamath which was further north. Contingents from these Aramean states were involved in harassing Judah and Jerusalem in 598 b.c. when Jehoiakim rebelled (2 Kgs 24:2) but little is heard about them in the rest of the book of Jeremiah or in the history of this period.

[49:23]  ²⁷ tn Heb “Hamath and Arpad.” There is no word for people in the text. The cities are being personified. However, since it is really the people who are involved and it is clearer for the modern reader, the present translation supplies the words “people of” both here and in v. 24. The verbs in vv. 23-25 are all to be interpreted as prophetic perfects, the tense of the Hebrew verb that views an action as though it were as good as done. The verbs are clearly future in vv. 26-27 which begin with a “therefore.”

[49:23]  sn Hamath was a city on the Orontes River about 110 miles (183 km) north of Damascus. Arpad was a city that was 95 miles (158 km) farther north from there. These two cities were in the path of the northern descent of the kings of Assyria and Babylonia and had been conquered earlier under the Assyrian kings (Isa 10:9; 36:19; 37:13). The apparent reference here is to their terror and loss of courage when they hear the news that Nebuchadnezzar’s armies are on the move toward them and Damascus. They would have been in the path of Nebuchadnezzar as he chased Necho south after the battle of Carchemish.

[49:23]  ²⁸ tc The meaning of this verse is very uncertain. The Hebrew text apparently reads “Hamath and Arpad are dismayed. They melt away because they have heard bad news. Anxiety is in the sea; it [the sea] cannot be quiet.” Many commentaries and English versions redivide the verse and read “like the sea” for “in the sea” (כַּיָּם [kayyam] for בַּיָּם [bayyam]) and read the feminine singular noun דְּאָגָה (dÿ’agam) as though it were the third masculine plural verb דָּאֲגוּ (da’agu): “They are troubled like the sea.” The translation follows the emendation proposed in BHS and accepted by a number of commentaries (e.g., J. Bright, Jeremiah [AB], 333; J. A. Thompson, Jeremiah [NICOT], 723, n. 1). That emendation involves reading נָמֹג לִבָּם מִדְּאָגָה (namog libbam middÿ’agah) instead of נָמֹגוּ בַּיָּם דְּאָגָה (namogu bayyam dÿ’agah). The translation also involves a double reading of “heart,” for the sake of English style, once in the sense of courage (BDB 525 s.v. לֵב 10) because that is the nuance that best fits “melts” in the English idiom and once in the more general sense of hearts as the seat of fear, anxiety, worry. The double translation is a concession to English style.