Jeremiah 3

This scene calls to mind something from the life of Hosea, a prophet in the former northern Jewish nation of Israel a century before Jeremiah. In either fact or a metaphor, Hosea married a loose lady, if not a prostitute. She later ran away. But Hosea took her back and may have had to pay her pimp for the right to do so. God stops short of calling his people of Israel a runaway bride who married someone else. That would have been frowned on as disgusting. But comparing Israel to a prostitute that God takes back under his wing is different. It would have reminded the people of Hosea’s century-old story about his wife, Gomer.

Jeremiah says God is either literally or figuratively saying the Israelite ancestors of today’s Jewish people were having sex by worshiping other gods. Some religions seemed to include sex as one of the rituals, to implore the gods to answer their prayers. It might have been a bit like fasting, and yet the opposite of it, too. Both could have been an extra effort to plead with God or the gods—one by abstaining and the other by indulging.

Josiah ruled about 641-609 BC, give or take a couple of decades. If that date is accurate, God delivered his first messages to Jeremiah in about 628 BC. Josiah famously led a religious reform, pointing the nation back to God. It’s unknown if Jeremiah influenced the king and helped talk him into it. But as Jeremiah would learn, the reform was too little, too late. God would punish Judah for centuries of sin. He would allow invaders to level Jerusalem, exile survivors, and erase the Jewish nation from the world map.

This reference to “Israel” is the former northern Jewish nation—the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Assyrian invaders wiped them off the map in 722 BC and deported the survivors of the war. They never returned to reinstate the Israelite nation.

This doesn’t sound like God is promising to bring back a large group of people, as he would later for Judah. He’s bringing back a fragment of scattered Jews from the northland Jewish nation of Israel. They never seemed to return from Assyrian exile in great numbers—certainly not enough to revive a government.

More literally “Zion,” a a term of endearment for Jerusalem or Israel. Here, it’s the nation of Israel, which had separated from Judah, but which would become a united Israel.

The Ark of the Covenant was Israel’s most sacred object. It was a wooden chest plated with gold all over. Inside that chest was a golden jar with some manna, Aaron’s almond wood staff that budded, and stone tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments. Covering the chest was a lid with figures representing glorious celestial beings called cherubim. This was the place where God’s people found forgiveness (Exodus 25:10-22; Hebrews 9:4-5). It was lost to history, perhaps stolen by invaders such as the Assyrians from what is now northern Iraq or the Babylonians of southern Iraq who leveled Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BC. Jeremiah is talking about true faith, which doesn’t need sacred objects or symbols. What he said was perhaps as jarring as saying today that there is coming a time when we won’t even think about the Bible. For his point seemed to be that our faith is in a Person, not in objects associated with the Person.

More literally, “They will come from the north.” When Assyrians exiled Israelites from the Jewish nation of Israel in 722 BC, they led them north along caravan routes to the Euphrates River and then east to what is now northern Iraq.