Jeremiah 19
God will break Judah like a jar
Jerusalem, doomed to die
1The LORD told Jeremiah:Go buy a clay jar. Take some officials with you and some top priests. 2Then take the jar and the men with you to Broken Pottery Gate [1] in Hinnom Valley. Deliver my message there.
3Tell everyone: Kings of Judah and citizens of Jerusalem, this is a message from the LORD. Here’s what the LORD of everyone and the God of Israel says:
I’m gonna bring so much pain and destruction to this city that it’ll hurt your ears when you hear what’s coming.
4The people of Jerusalem left me. Then they turned Jerusalem into a foreign town. It’s not Israelite anymore. People sacrifice to gods their ancestors never even heard of. And they even sacrifice innocent people. 5They’ve built shrines to the god Baal and burned their children there as sacrificial offerings. [2] I never told them to do that. I never even considered it.
6So, there’s coming a day when people won’t call this place Topheth [3] or Hinnom Valley. They’ll call it Slaughter Valley. [4]
God’s plan to help Jerusalem: cancelled
7This is where I’ll cancel the plans I had for Jerusalem and the rest of Judah. I’ll let Judah’s enemies defeat them in battle, kill them, and leave their bodies as food for wild animals.8I will turn Jerusalem into a ruin so devastating that everyone passing by will shake their heads at the horrible sight and hurl insults. 9I’ll force Jerusalem into starvation while their enemy lays siege to the town. People trapped inside the city will get so hungry that they’ll eat their neighbors and even their own children.
Jeremiah breaks a jar to make a point
10Then the LORD told me to break the clay jar I brought, which I did. 11I told the people that this is the message the LORD asked me to deliver:I’ll break this city and its people just like you break a clay jar. After that, there’ll be no picking up the pieces or burying the dead. There won’t be any room for graves. 12That’s what I, the LORD, will do to these people and their town. I’ll make Jerusalem as ritually unclean as the pagan shrine at Topheth.
13I’ll do this to Judah’s royal palaces and to the homes in Jerusalem. For these people used the flat roofs of their homes to offer sacrifices and gifts to the sun, moon, and stars and to a gallery of pagan gods.
Jeremiah’s terrifying warning at the Temple
14Jeremiah left the Topheth area and walked [5] up to the Temple courtyard to deliver the next message from the LORD. 15Jeremiah said this is a message from the LORD of everyone and the God of Israel: The people in this town have stubbornly ignored me. They won’t listen. I’ve been warning them that if they didn’t shape up, I would hammer them with disaster. Well, here it comes.Footnotes
Also known as Potsherd Gate. A potsherd is a piece of broken clay pottery.
Manasseh pointed the nation of Judah back to idol worship. The most repulsive act of worship he performed for an idol was the sacrifice of one of his sons. “Manasseh sacrificed his own son and burned the body on an altar. He consulted sorcerers, wizards, fortunetellers, along with mediums who tried to contact the dead. These sins made the LORD angry. Manasseh put a carved image of the goddess Asherah on the Temple property. This is the same Temple that the LORD told David and his son Solomon would become his home” (2 Kings 21:6-7).
Topheth was a site in the Hinnom Valley just outside Jerusalem’s city walls, to the south. This is where some people of Judah reportedly sacrificed their own children to a god named Molech, much like others sacrificed sheep and bulls. Some kings of Jerusalem once sacrificed people there (2 Kings 23:10).
See the same warning in Jeremiah 7:32.
That’s about one kilometer, roughly half a mile, uphill from the Hinnom Valley to the Jerusalem Temple. Jerusalem is a city built on a ridge. King David’s Jerusalem was small and built on a low part of the ridge just above Hinnom Valley. His son Solomon expanded the town north to include an Upper Jerusalem, built on a higher part of the ridge.
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