Jeremiah 9
Devoted to God in ritual only
I need more tears
1If my head became a spring of water
Maybe then I would have enough tears
To show you what I’m feeling
About the slaughter of my people.
So I could leave these wretched people behind.
They are traitors to God,
Spiritual adulterers who worship other gods.
You’re a bunch of liars
3These people use their tongues and words
Like bows and arrows on a firing line,
Shooting off their mouths with lie after lie.
Truth didn’t make them strong.
Lies did.
The LORD says these humans are evil.
And can’t trust their relatives.
They’re one big family of cheaters
With backstabbing friends.
5They lie to their neighbors
Like they’re telling the truth.
They’ve trained themselves to lie.
It’s their second nature.
They commit to the lie
And lie themselves exhausted.
6It’s one lie after another,
One bad act and then one more.
The LORD says they don’t know him.
7So, the LORD of everyone says,
“I’m going to light a fire under them.
I’m going to turn up the heat
And refine their metal. [1]
There’s no other way to get their attention.
8Their tongues fire deadly arrows,
Lies shot from the mouth.
These people talk kindly to their neighbors,
While planning to ambush them.
9Shouldn’t I punish them?” says the LORD.
“Doesn’t a nation like this deserve it?”
Israel as a wasteland
10Cry for the hills and fields,
Doomed to become a wasteland.
People will avoid the area.
Even the cattle, birds, and critters of the earth
Will flee this place.
“I will turn Jerusalem into rock city,
A town in ruins,
With open air for wild dogs.
I will turn Judah’s cities into ghost towns,
With nothing left but destruction.”
Why is God destroying us?
12Does this make sense to anyone? Has the LORD explained it to anyone so they can tell us what’s going on? Why is the land going to be decimated? And why will people avoid the area? [2]13The LORD answers those questions. “These people broke our agreement when they broke the laws I gave them. They ignored me when I spoke to them. Then they walked away. 14They decided to do whatever they wanted, and they got stubborn about it. They worshiped the Baal [3] idols, just like their ancestors taught them.
15So here’s what I’m going to do, as the LORD of everyone and the God of Israel. I going to feed these people spoiled food [4] and poisoned water. 16I’ll drive them off their land and scatter them to the wind. They’ll live in nations they don’t know, among ancestors they would never have wanted to know. I’ll chase them with a sword until I kill them all. [5]
Crying time in Jerusalem
17This is what the LORD of everyone says:Call in the weeping women.
Hire professional mourners.
Cry until our eyes bleed water
And our eyelids can’t hold it back.
19Listen to wailing on Zion’s hill
As the people cry, “Ruined!
We’ve lost our land.
We’ve lost our homes.
All we have left is shame.”
20Ladies, listen to the message of the LORD.
Pay attention when he talks.
Teach your daughters a song of death
And your neighbors how to sing along.
21Death has arrived.
It snuck through the window.
And it broke through the strongholds.
Death took kids in the streets
And young men in the marketplace.
22The LORD says,
People will drop
Like hot manure on a field,
And grain stalks on a farm.
But no one will touch them.
23The LORD says,
Wise people shouldn’t brag
About how smart they are.
Rich people shouldn’t brag
About how rich they are.
24If you’re going to brag,
Brag that you know me,
The LORD. What I do, I do out of love,
And for justice and goodness.
These are important to me. 25The LORD says, I’m coming for the people whose devotion to me goes no further than circumcision. [6]
26They’re no more devoted to me than the short-haired [7] men of Egypt, Edom, Ammon, Moab, and foreigners living in Judah. They’re not devoted to me. And neither are you, because your devotion doesn’t come from the heart. It comes from a ritual when you were a baby.
Footnotes
Heat melts metal and allows the purer molten metal to separate from other material that a smelter removes as slag. The picture here is of God getting rid of the worst of Israel, the slag, leaving the kind of people he can work with in the future. Time got rid of the slag: a generation died in exile. Babylonians overrun Judah and deport the survivors in 586 BC. Persians later defeated Babylon and freed their political prisoners, Jews among them, in 538 BC.
Travelers certainly would have avoided Israel and Judah when invaders were out on patrol in hunt and destroy missions throughout the lands. See an army with blood on them? Turn around and run.
Baal was one of the main gods of what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territory. He was the god people turned to for matters of flocks, fields, and family. Many scholars say there is plenty of evidence to show that worship practices involved sexual rituals. That alone would have been an attraction for many men. See Numbers 15.
Literally “wormwood,” a bitter herb used in alcoholic drinks such as vermouth. Jeremiah seems to use wormwood and poisoned water as a metaphor for punishment. They’ve bitten off more than they would ever have wanted to chew.
The Jews didn’t all die in battle. But they all died. The generation exiled to Babylon died there. Babylonians deported them in 586 BC. Persians freed them to go home almost 50 years later, in 538 BC.
Circumcision is a painful Jewish ritual that reportedly started with Abraham about 4,000 years ago (Genesis 17:10-13). God made a contractual agreement with Abraham, promising to give him many descendants and to let them live in Canaan, now Israel and Palestinian Territories. Instead of having Abraham sign the contract in handwriting, the Bible says God wanted every Jewish male to sign it in blood. Circumcision became a symbolic reminder of God’s promises to Abraham and his descendants. Paul later insisted that Jesus changed the requirements of the written law because he brought the Spirit, to guide each person toward God. “Circumcised. Uncircumcised. It doesn’t matter which. Here’s what matters: we’re a new creation” (Galatians 6:15). That seems to be what God, through Jeremiah, was asking the sinful, idol-worshiping Jews to do—to realize that it’s not about rituals. It’s about devotion to God. See Jeremiah 4:4.
Men of Israel weren’t supposed to cut hair on the sides of their heads: “Don’t trim your hair at the sides and don’t cut your beard” (Leviticus 19:10). That’s why some Orthodox Jewish men today wear sidelocks.
Discussion Questions
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