Hear the word which Yahweh speaks to you, house of Israel!
Parallel Translations
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Hear the word which Yahweh speaks to you, house of Israel!
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Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
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Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel;
Cross-references (11)
Passages linked to Jeremiah 10:1 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- Jeremiah 13:15-17 Hear, and give ear. Don’t be proud, for Yahweh has spoken. Give glory to Yahweh your God, before he causes darkness, and before your feet stumble on the dark mountains, and while you look for light, he turns it into the shadow of death, and makes it deep darkness. But if you will not hear it, my soul will weep in secret for your pride. My eye will weep bitterly, and run down with tears, because Yahweh’s flock has been taken captive.
- Jeremiah 42:15 now therefore hear Yahweh’s word, O remnant of Judah: Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘If you indeed set your faces to enter into Egypt, and go to live there;
- Hosea 4:1 Hear Yahweh’s word, you children of Israel; for Yahweh has a charge against the inhabitants of the land: “Indeed there is no truth, nor goodness, nor knowledge of God in the land.
- Amos 7:16 Now therefore listen to Yahweh’s word: ‘You say, Don’t prophesy against Israel, and don’t preach against the house of Isaac.’
- 1 Thessalonians 2:13 For this cause we also thank God without ceasing, that when you received from us the word of the message of God, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also works in you who believe.
- Revelation 2:29 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the assemblies.
- Psalms 50:7 “Hear, my people, and I will speak. Israel, I will testify against you. I am God, your God.
- Isaiah 1:10 Hear Yahweh’s word, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah!
- Isaiah 28:14 Therefore hear Yahweh’s word, you scoffers, that rule this people in Jerusalem:
- Jeremiah 2:4 Hear Yahweh’s word, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel!
- Jeremiah 22:2 ‘Hear Yahweh’s word, king of Judah, who sits on David’s throne, you, your servants, and your people who enter in by these gates.
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John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain Jeremiah enters here on a new subject. Though he…
Jeremiah enters here on a new subject. Though he had, no doubt, taught this truth often, yet I consider it as distinct from what has gone before; for he begins here a new attack on those superstitions to which the Jews were then extremely addicted. He exhorts them first to hear the word of Jehovah; for they had so hardened themselves in the errors which they had derived from the Gentiles, and the contagion had so prevailed, that they could not be easily drawn away from them. This, then, is the reason why he used a sort of preface, and said, Hear ye the word of Jehovah, which he speaks to you, O house of Israel
He then mentions the error in which the Chaldeans and the Egyptians were involved; for they were, we know, very attentive observers of the stars. And this is expressly stated, because the Jews despised God’s judgments, and greatly feared what were foolishly divined. For when any one, by looking at the stars, threatened them with some calamity, they were immediately terrified; but when God denounced on them, as with the sound of a trumpet, a calamity by his Prophets, they were not at all moved. But it will be better to examine the very words of the Prophet, as then we shall more plainly see the drift of the whole.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain Jer 10:1 Hear ye the word which the LORD…
Jer 10:1 Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
Ver. 1. Hear ye the word which the Lord speaketh.] Exordium simplicissimum, saith Junius. A very plain preface calling for attention; (1.) From the authority of the speaker; (2.) From the duty of the hearers.
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O house of Israel.] The ten tribes, long since captivated, and now directed what to do, say some; the Jews, say others: and in this former part of the chapter, those of them that had been carried away to Babylon with Jeconiah.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain Here begins another sermon, i.e. most probably relating to…
Here begins another sermon, i.e. most probably relating to Jechonias and the Jews, that were already in captivity.
Israel; the ten tribes.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain The prophet Isaiah, when he prophesied of the captivity…
The prophet Isaiah, when he prophesied of the captivity in Babylon, added warnings against idolatry and largely exposed the sottishness of idolaters, not only because the temptations in Babylon would be in danger of drawing the Jews there to idolatry, but because the afflictions in Babylon were designed to cure them of their idolatry. Thus the prophet Jeremiah here arms people against the idolatrous usages and customs of the heathen, not only for the use of those that had gone to Babylon, but of those also that staid behind, that being convinced and reclaimed, by the word of God, the rod might be prevented; and it is written for our learning. Observe here,
I. A solemn charge given to the people of God not to conform themselves to the ways and customs of the heathen. Let the house of Israel hear and receive this word from the God of Israel: "Learn not the way of the heathen, do not approve of it, no, nor think indifferently concerning it, much less imitate it or accustom yourselves to it. Let not any of their customs steal in among you (as they are apt to do insensibly) nor mingle themselves with your religion." Note, It ill becomes those that are taught of God to learn the way of the heathen, and to think of worshipping the true God with such rites and ceremonies as they used in the worship of their false gods. See Deu 12:29-31. It was the way of the heathen to worship the host of heaven, the sun, moon, and stars; to them they gave divine honours, and from them they expected divine favours, and therefore, according as the signs of heaven were, whether they were auspicious or ominous, they thought themselves countenanced or discountenanced by their deities, which made them observe those signs, the eclipses of the sun and moon, the conjunctions and oppositions of the planets, and all the unusual phenomena of the celestial globe, with a great deal of anxiety and trembling. Business was stopped if any thing occurred that was thought to bode ill; if it did but thunder on their left hand, they were almost as if they had been thunderstruck. Now God would not have his people to be dismayed at the signs of heaven, to reverence the stars as deities, nor to frighten themselves with any prognostications grounded upon them. Let them fear the God of heaven, and keep up a reverence of his providence, and then they need not be dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the stars in their courses fight not against any that are at peace with God. The heathen are dismayed at these signs, for they know no better; but let not the house of Israel, that are taught of God, be so.
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II. Divers good reasons given to enforce this charge.
1. The way of the heathen is very ridiculous and absurd, and is condemned even by the dictates of right reason, Jer 10:3. The statutes and ordinances of the heathen are vanity itself; they cannot stand the test of a rational disquisition. This is again and again insisted upon here, as it was by Isaiah. The Chaldeans valued themselves upon their wisdom, in which they thought that they excelled all their neighbours; but the prophet here shows that they, and all others that worshipped idols and expected help and relief from them, were brutish and sottish, and had not common sense. (1.) Consider what the idol is that is worshipped. It was a tree cut out of the forest originally. It was fitted up by the hands of the workman, squared, and sawed, and worked into shape; see Isa 44:12, etc. But, after all, it was but the stock of a tree, fitter to make a gate-post of than any thing else. But, to hide the wood, they deck it with silver and gold, they gild or lacquer it, or they deck it with gold and silver lace, or cloth of tissue. They fasten it to its place, which they themselves have assigned it, with nails and hammers, that it fall not, nor be thrown down, nor stolen away, Jer 10:4. The image is made straight enough, and it cannot be denied but that the workman did his part, for it is upright as the palm-tree (Jer 10:5); it looks stately, and stands up as if it were going to speak to you, but it cannot speak; it is a poor dumb creature; nor can it take one step towards your relief. If there be any occasion for it to shift its place, it must be carried in procession, for it cannot go. Very fitly does the admonition come in here, "Be not afraid of them, any more than of the signs of heaven; be not afraid of incurring their displeasure, for they can do no evil; be not afraid of forfeiting their favour, for neither is it in them to do good. If you think to mend the matter by mending the materials of which the idol is made, you deceive yourselves. Idols of gold and silver are an unworthy to be worshipped as wooden gods. The stock is a doctrine of vanities, Jer 10:8. It teaches lies, teaches lies concerning God. It is an instruction of vanities; it is wood." It is probable that the idols of gold and silver had wood underneath for the substratum, and then silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish, imported from beyond sea, and gold from Uphaz, or Phaz, which is sometimes rendered the fine or pure gold, Psa 21:3. A great deal of art is used, and pains taken, about it. They are not such ordinary mechanics that are employed about these as about the wooden gods, Jer 10:3. these are cunning men; it is the work of the workman; the graver must do his part when it has passed through the hands of the founder. Those were but decked here and there with silver and gold; these are silver and gold all over. And, that these gods might be reverenced as kings, blue and purple are their clothing, the colour of royal robes (Jer 10:9), which amuses ignorant worshippers, but makes the matter no better. For what is the idol when it is made and when they have made the best they can of it? He tells us (Jer 10:14): They are falsehood; they are not what they pretend to be, but a great cheat put upon the world. They are worshipped as the gods that give us breath and life and sense, whereas they are lifeless senseless things themselves, and there is no breath in them; there is no spirit in them (so the word is); they are not animated, or inhabited, as they are supposed to be, by any divine spirit or numen - divinity. They are so far from being gods that they have not so much as the spirit of a beast that goes downward. They are vanity, and the work of errors, Jer 10:15. Enquire into the use of them and you will find they are vanity; they are good for nothing; no help is to be expected from them nor any confidence put in them. They are a deceitful work, works of illusions, or mere mockeries; so some read the following clause. They delude those that put their trust in them, make fools of them, or, rather, they make fools of themselves. Enquire into the use of them and you will find they are the work of errors, grounded upon the grossest mistakes that ever men who pretended to reason were guilty of. They are the creatures of a deluded fancy; and the errors by which they were produced they propagate among their worshippers. (2.) Infer hence what the idolaters are that worship these idols. (Jer 10:8): They are altogether brutish and foolish. Those that make them are like unto them, senseless and stupid, and there is no spirit in them - no use of reason, else they would never stoop to them, Jer 10:14. Every man that makes or worships idols has become brutish in his knowledge, that is, brutish for want of knowledge, or brutish in that very thing which one would think they should be fully acquainted with; compare Jde 1:10, What they know naturally, what they cannot but know by the light of nature, in those things as brute beasts they corrupt themselves. Though in the works of creation they cannot but see the eternal power and godhead of the Creator, yet they have become vain in their imaginations, not liking to retain God in their knowledge. See Rom 1:21, Rom 1:18. Nay, whereas they thought it a piece of wisdom thus to multiply gods, it really was the greatest folly they could be guilty of. The world by wisdom knew not God, Co1 1:21; Rom 1:22. Every founder is himself confounded by the graven image; when he has made it by a mistake he is more and more confirmed in his mistake by it; he is bewildered, bewitched, and cannot disentangle himself from the snare; or it is what he will one time or other be ashamed of.
2. The God of Israel is the one only living and true God, and those that have him for their God need not make their application to any other; nay, to set up any other in competition with him is the greatest affront and injury that can be done him. Let the house of Israel cleave to the God of Israel and serve and worship him only, for,
(1.) He is a non-such. Whatever men may set in competition with him, there is none to be compared with him. The prophet turns from speaking with the utmost disdain of the idols of the heathen (as well he might) to speak with the most profound and awful reverence of the God of Israel (Jer 10:6, Jer 10:7): "Forasmuch as there is none like unto thee, O Lord! none of all the heroes which the heathen have deified and make such ado about," the dead men of whom they made dead images, and whom they worshipped. "Some were deified and adored for their wisdom; but, among all the wise men of the nations, the greatest philosophers or statesmen, as Apollo or Hermes, there is none like thee. Others were deified and adored for their dominion; but, in all their royalty" (so it may be read), "among all their kings, as Saturn and Jupiter, there is none like unto thee." What is the glory of a man that invented a useful art or founded a flourishing kingdom (and these were grounds sufficient among the heathen to entitle a man to an apotheosis) compared with the glory of him that is the Creator of the world and that forms the spirit of man within him? What is the glory of the greatest prince or potentate, compared with the glory of him whose kingdom rules over all? He acknowledges (Jer 10:6), O Lord! thou art great, infinite and immense, and thy name is great in might; thou hast all power, and art known to have it. Men's name is often beyond their might; they are thought to be greater than they are; but God's name is great, and no greater than he really is. And therefore who would not fear thee, O King of nations? Who would not choose to worship such a God as this, that can do every thing, rather than such dead idols as the heathen worship, that can do nothing? Who would not be afraid of offending or forsaking a God whose name is so great in might? Which of all the nations, if they understood their interests aright, would not fear him who is the King of nations? Note, There is an admirable decency and congruity in the worshipping of God only. It is fit that he who is God alone should alone be served, that he who is Lord of all should be served by all, that he who is great should be greatly feared and greatly praised.
(2.) His verity is as evident as the idol's vanity, Jer 10:10. They are the work of men's hands, and therefore nothing is more plain than that it is a jest to worship them, if that may be called a jest which is so great an indignity to him that made us: But the Lord is the true God, the God of truth; he is God in truth. God Jehovah is truth; he is not a counterfeit and pretender, as they are, but is really what he has revealed himself to be; he is one we may depend upon, in whom and by whom we cannot be deceived. [1.] Look upon him as he is in himself, and he is the living God. He is life itself, has life in himself, and is the fountain of life to all the creatures. The gods of the heathen are dead things, worthless and useless, but ours is a living God, and hath immortality. [2.] Look upon him with relation to his creatures, he is a King, and absolute monarch, over them all, is their owner and ruler, has an incontestable right both to command them and dispose of them. As a king, he protects the creatures, provides for their welfare, and preserves peace among them. He is an everlasting king. The counsels of his kingdom were from everlasting and the continuance of it will be to everlasting. He is a King of eternity. The idols whom they call their kings are but of yesterday, and will soon be abolished; and the kings of the earth, that set them up to be worshipped, will themselves be in the dust shortly; but the Lord shall reign for ever, thy God, O Zion! unto all generations.
(3.) None knows the power of his anger. Let us stand in awe, and not dare to provoke him by giving that glory to another which is due to him alone; for at his wrath the earth shall tremble, even the strongest and stoutest of the kings of the earth; nay, the earth, firmly as it is fixed, when he pleases is made to quake and the rocks to tremble, Psa 104:32; Hab 3:6, Hab 3:10. Though the nations should join together to contend with him, and unite their force, yet they would be found utterly unable not only to resist, but even to abide his indignation. Not only can they not make head against it, for it would overcome them, but they cannot bear up under it, for it would overload them, Psa 76:7, Psa 76:8; Nah 1:6.
(4.) He is the God of nature, the fountain of all being; and all the powers of nature are at his command and disposal, Jer 10:12, Jer 10:13. The God we worship is he that made the heavens and the earth, and has a sovereign dominion over both; so that his invisible things are manifested and proved in the things that are seen. [1.] If we look back, we find that the whole world owed its origin to him as its first cause. It was a common saying even among the Greeks - He that sets up to be another god ought first to make another world. While the heathen worship gods that they made, we worship the God that made us and all things. First, The earth is a body of vast bulk, has valuable treasures in its bowels and more valuable fruit on its surface. It and them he has made by his power; and it is by no less than an infinite power that it hangs upon nothing, as it does (Job 26:7) - ponderibus librata suis - poised by its own weight. Secondly, The world, the habitable part of the earth, is admirably fitted for the use and service of man, and he hath established it so by his wisdom, so that it continues serviceable in constant changes and yet a continual stability from one generation to another. Therefore both the earth and the world are his, Psa 24:1. Thirdly, The heavens are wonderfully stretched out to an incredible extent, and it is by his discretion that they are so, and that the motions of the heavenly bodies are directed for the benefit of this lower world. These declare his glory (Psa 19:1), and oblige us to declare it, and not give that glory to the heavens which is due to him that made them. [2.] If we look up, we see his providence to be a continued creation (Jer 10:13): When he uttereth his voice (gives the word of command) there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, which are poured out on the earth, whether for judgment or mercy, as he intends them. When he utters his voice in the thunder, immediately there follow thunder-showers, in which there are a multitude of waters; and those come with a noise, as the margin reads it; and we read of the noise of abundance of rain, Kg1 18:41. Nay, there are wonders done daily in the kingdom of nature without noise: He causes the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth, from all parts of the earth, even the most remote, and chiefly those that lie next the sea. All the earth pays the tribute of vapours, because all the earth receives the blessing of rain. And thus the moisture in the universe, like the money in a kingdom and the blood in the body, is continually circulating for the good of the whole. Those vapours produce wonders, for of them are formed lightnings for the rain, and the winds which God from time to time brings forth out of his treasures, as there is occasion for them, directing them all in such measure and for such use as he thinks fit, as payments are made out of the treasury. All the meteors are so ready to serve God's purposes that he seems to have treasures of them, that cannot be exhausted and may at any time be drawn from, Psa 135:7. God glories in the treasures he has of these, Job 38:22, Job 38:23. This God can do; but which of the idols of the heathen can do the like? Note, There is no sort of weather but what furnishes us with a proof and instance of the wisdom and power of the great Creator.
(5.) This God is Israel's God in covenant, and the felicity of every Israelite indeed. Therefore let the house of Israel cleave to him, and not forsake him to embrace idols; for, if they do, they certainly change for the worse, for (Jer 10:16) the portion of Jacob is not like them; their rock is not as our rock (Deu 32:31), nor ours like their mole-hills. Note, [1.] Those that have the Lord for their God have a full and complete happiness in him. The God of Jacob is the portion of Jacob; he is his all, and in him he has enough and needs no more in this world nor the other. In him we have a worthy portion, Psa 16:5. [2.] If we have entire satisfaction and complacency in God as our portion, he will have a gracious delight in us as his people, whom he owns as the rod of his inheritance, his possession and treasure, with whom he dwells and by whom he is served and honoured. [3.] It is the unspeakable comfort of all the Lord's people that he who is their God is the former of all things, and therefore is able to do all that for them, and give all that to them, which they stand in need of. Their help stands in his name who made heaven and earth. And he is the Lord of hosts, of all the hosts in heaven and earth, has them all at his command, and will command them into the service of his people when there is occasion. This is the name by which they know him, which they first give him the glory of and then take to themselves the comfort of. [4.] Herein God's people are happy above all other people, happy indeed, bona si sua norint - did they but know their blessedness. The gods which the heathen pride, and please, and so portion themselves in, are vanity and a lie; but the portion of Jacob is not like them.
3. The prophet, having thus compared the gods of the heathen with the God of Israel (between whom there is no comparison), reads the doom, the certain doom, of all those pretenders, and directs the Jews, in God's name, to read it to the worshippers of idols, though they were their lords and masters (Jer 10:11): Thus shall you say unto them (and the God you serve will bear you out in saying it), The gods which have not made the heavens and the earth (and therefore are no gods, but usurpers of the honour due to him only who did make heaven and earth) shall perish, perish of course, because they are vanity - perish by his righteous sentence, because they are rivals with him. As gods they shall perish from off the earth (even all those things on earth beneath which they make gods of) and from under these heavens, even all those things in the firmament of heaven, under the highest heavens, which are deified, according to the distribution in the second commandment. These words in the original are not in the Hebrew, like all the rest, but in the Chaldee dialect, that the Jews in captivity might have this ready to say to the Chaldeans in their own language when they tempted them to idolatry: "Do you press us to worship your gods? We will never do that; for," (1.) "They are counterfeit deities; they are no gods, for they have not made the heavens and the earth, and therefore are not entitled to our homage, nor are we indebted to them either for the products of the earth or the influences of heaven, as we are to the God of Israel." The primitive Christians would say, when they were urged to worship such a god, Let him make a world and he shall be my god. While we have him to worship who made heaven and earth, it is very absurd to worship any other. (2.) "They are condemned deities. They shall perish; the time shall come when they shall be no more respected as they are now, but shall be buried in oblivion, and they and their worshippers shall sink together. The earth shall no longer bear them; the heavens shall no longer cover them; but both shall abandon them." It is repeated (Jer 10:15), In the time of their visitation they shall perish. When God comes to reckon with idolaters he will make them weary of their idols, and glad to be rid of them. They shall cast them to the moles and to the bats, Isa 2:20. Whatever runs against God and religion will be run down at last.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain Hear ye the word which the Lord speaketh unto…
Hear ye the word which the Lord speaketh unto you, O house of Israel. Or, "upon you"; or, "concerning you" (k); it may design the judgment of God decreed and pronounced upon them; or the prophecy of it to them, in which they were nearly concerned; or the word of God in general, sent unto them by his prophets, which they were backward of hearing; and seems to refer particularly to what follows.
(k) "super vos", V. L. Pagninus, Montanus; "de vobis", Vatablus; "super vobis", Cocceius.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain They are forbid to be afraid of the tokens…
They are forbid to be afraid of the tokens of heaven, and consult idols which are vain, ver. 1-5 and not to be compared with the majesty and power of God, who is Jacob's portion, ver. 6-16. The Babylonians destroy the temple; the brutish pastors and the flocks are scattered, ver. 17-22. The prophet's humble supplication, ver. 23-25.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain The Jews, about to be carried into captivity, are…
CHAPTER X
The Jews, about to be carried into captivity, are here warned
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against the superstition and idolatry of that country to which
they were going. Chaldea was greatly addicted to astrology, and
therefore the prophet begins with warning them against it,
1, 2.
He then exposes the absurdity of idolatry in short but elegant
satire; in the midst of which he turns, in a beautiful
apostrophe, to the one true God, whose adorable attributes
repeatedly strike in view, as he goes along, and lead him to
contrast his infinite perfections with those despicable
inanities which the blinded nations fear, 3-16.
The prophet again denounces the Divine judgments, 17, 18;
upon which Jerusalem laments her fate, and supplicates the
Divine compassion in her favour, 19-25.
NOTES ON CHAP. X
Verse 1. Hear ye the word which the Lord speaketh unto you] Dr. Dahler supposes this discourse to have been delivered in the fourth year of the reign of Jehoiakim. It contains an invective against idolatry; showing its absurdity, and that the Creator alone should be worshipped by all mankind.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain Jer 10:1-2. Hear ye the word, &c. — The…
Jer 10:1-2. Hear ye the word, &c. — The prophet continues his remonstrances and exhortations to Judah. He said, at the conclusion of the preceding chapter, that the Lord would punish, without distinction, all the ungodly and unrighteous Jews, as well as Gentiles. He here informs them that if they would avoid this vengeance of the Lord they must quit their idolatries and other impieties, and have nothing to do with the superstitious practices of the Gentile nations. Learn not the way of the heathen — Their manner of life or customs. And be not dismayed at the signs of heaven — “The Chaldeans, among whom the Jews were destined to live in captivity, were particularly addicted to astrology, and attributed to the heavenly bodies a considerable influence over human affairs. This naturally tended to beget a religious dread and awe of those objects, from whence so much good or evil was supposed to be derived. The sun, moon, and planets are said indeed to have been set in the firmament for signs. Gen 1:14. But hereby is meant, that they should serve, as natural marks, to distinguish, by their periodical revolutions and appearances, the various times and seasons; which, however, is a very different use from that of prognosticating future events, or causing an alteration in the fortunes of men.” — Blaney.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain a. The nothingness of idols
LATER ADDITION: WARNING AGAINST IDOLATRY
Jer_10:1-17
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a. The nothingness of idols
Jer_10:1-5 1
1 Hear the word, which Jehovah has spoken to you,2 house of Israel!
2 Thus saith Jehovah: To the way of the heathen accustom3 yourselves not,
And be not affrighted at the signs of Heaven, because the heathen are affrighted at them;
3 For the institutions of the nations—breath are they!
For as a forest tree have they been cut out,—
For the work4 of the hands of the artificer, with an axe.5
4 With gold and silver they adorn it,
With nails and hammers they fasten them, that it totter not.
5 They are as the pillars in a cucumber-field and speak not;
They must be borne,6 for they walk not.
Fear them not, for they do no harm,
But also to do good is not in their power.7
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
According to Jer_10:2 the object of this passage is to warn Israel from the worship of idols. In this behalf first the nothingness of idols, the dead work of men, is shown (Jer_10:1-5). Then the incomparable greatness of Jehovah and in contrast with the origin of the idol images His overwhelmingly impressive self-existence and power, in view of which the adoration of empty idols appears disgraceful folly, are set forth as the source of all great phenomena in nature and history (Jer_10:6-16).
Jer_10:1-2. Hear the word … affrighted at them. דֶרֶךְ, way. Comp. Jer_5:4-5. It is simply = religion, cultus. On this account and from what follows (Jer_10:3 sqq.) the “signs of the heaven” cannot be passing and chance signs, be they constellations (Hitzig), or comets, darkness, etc. (Rosenm., Graf), but only permanent signs which are connected with permanent worship, and affrighted is to be understood not of the momentary impression excited by an extraordinary phenomenon, but only of the constant religious terror manifesting itself in the ordinary worship (comp. Mal_2:5, and פַחַד, Gen_31:42; Gen_31:53). Were we to take affrighted in the former sense it would signify either an emphasis on the point of terror: ye may feel joy at favorable signs but ye are not to be terrified at supposed unfavorable signs—which would be a contradiction and at the same time confirm the superstition—or it would be: ye are not to conceive of the signs of heaven as under the influence of higher powers and therefore indifferent to human life, which would be a warning against astrology not in correspondence with the connection. In accordance with the subsequent warning against the worship of images idolatry only can be here spoken of, which renders not merely the extraordinary, but above all the ordinary signs of the heavens the object of adoration. The expression “signs” would refer less to the destination determined by the stars, Gen_1:14, than to the ancient constellations (Job_9:9), as whose signs appear the stars which form them (comp. the twelve signs of the Zodiac, 2Ki_23:5).—Because the heathen, etc., is not the argument of the author against idolatry—this does not come till Jer_10:13—but a statement of the reason, from the soul of the Israelites, why this service has so much that is seductive for them. This causal sentence corresponds to “accustom yourselves not.” The learning and becoming accustomed is the effect of the example. How dangerous this was to the Israelites we learn from the warnings: Exo_23:24; Exo_23:32-33; Lev_18:3 : Deu_7:1 sqq. Comp. Judges 2, 3—כִּי here=because. Comp. Naegelsb. Gr. § 110, 1.
Jer_10:3. For the institutions of the nations … with an axe.—The institutions, etc., stand in antithesis to the ordinances of Jehovah, Lev_18:3-4.—Breath are they [lit.: is it]. The singular of the pronoun appears to involve a contemptuous collective sense=all that trash. Comp. Jer_10:8; Ewald, § 319, c; Jos_13:14.—The nothingness of the deities which are here identified with the idol-images, is clear from their origin. If we trace the origin of the idol we find that the artificer found it as a tree standing among others in the forest, and as adapted to his purpose cut it down.—On the subject in cut out comp. Naegelsb. Gr. § 101, 2 b. As to the object it is formally undefined, but from the connection is clearly recognizable as the idol.—Second stage: the forest tree becomes a work of art in the hands of an artificer and by the aid of an axe.
Jer_10:4. With gold and silver … that it totter not. Third stage: adornment with precious metals (Isa_30:20; Isa_40:19). Fourth stage: fastening on the place of exhibition (Isa_41:7).—Fasten them. Observe the change of number. (Comp. Naegelsb. Gr. § 105, 7, Anm. 2). With these words the construction passes into the plural. Comp. Jer_10:5. The subject of יָפִיק is ideal, namely the idea of the fastened derived from יְחַזְּקוּם.—Comp. Jer_46:6-7.
Jer_10:5. They are as the pillars … is not in their power.—Pillars in a cucumber field.Jerome: in similitudinem palmæ fabricata sunt. Syr.; tanquam palmæ sunt erectæ, in which תֹמֶר is taken according to analogy from תָּמָרand Jdg_4:5, but מקשׁה is very freely translated. Others, following Kimchi’s example take תִּימָרָה=תֹּמֶר, columna (Joe_3:8; Son_3:6) and תַּמְדוּרִים (Jer_31:21); מקשׁה however=turned work (Exo_25:18; 31:36; Exo_37:7; Exo_37:17; Exo_37:22; Num_8:4; Num_10:2 coll. Isa_3:24). The comparison is strange. More satisfactory is the explanation proposed by Movers, Fuerst (H. W. B., S. 781), Graf, according to which מקשׁה, as in Isa_1:8, signifies a cucumber field and תמר the scarecrows, or more correctly the priapus-pillars erected as such. These priapus-pillars are elsewhere ridiculed as useless watch-guards (comp. Epist. Jerem. 10:70: ὥσπερ ἐν σικυηράτω̣ προβασκάνιου ούδὲν φύλασσον οὕτως εἰσὶν οἱ δεοὶ αὑτῶν. Comp. Passow, s. v., προβασκάνιον, Seldende Diis Syriis, p. 300).—They must be borne. Comp. Isa_46:7.
Footnotes:
[1] Movers (De Utr. Rec. Jer. p. 43) was the first to deny the authenticity of the section Jer_10:1-16. After careful examination I have come to the following result: 1. That the passage breaks the connection cannot be doubted. For Jer_9:22-25 and Jer_10:17-25 joined to each other form an appropriate, orderly, progressive conclusion to the great discourse of the prophet. Comp. the introductory remarks on Jer_9:22-25 and Jer_10:17-25. This warning against idolatry to those who had just been rebuked for the most wanton idolatrous abominations (Jer_7:17 sqq.; 30 sqq.) is exceedingly surprising, particularly as the expression, “accustom yourselves not,” Jer_10:2, presupposes either a nation unspotted by idolatry or a nation purified from it, which however exposes itself to new temptations. The view of J. D. Michaelis and Kueper, that the ten tribes already carried away into Assyria are here addressed (on account of “house of Israel,” Jer_10:1), is no improvement, for the interruption of the connection still remains. When Keil (Einl. S. 256) says that the section affords only the foundation to that which Jeremiah has said in Jer_9:22-25 on the glorying of Israel and his equality with the uncircumcised heathen, and that the deeper ground of their idolatry is thus discovered to the people and the necessity of their being scattered among the heathen (Jer_9:15) proved, one might almost suppose that he had not read the passage with the necessary attention, for there is not a trace of reproach which would be thus brought upon Israel; throughout there is not a word on the inner spiritual condition of the people. At most we should conclude from Jer_10:2 that this was presupposed to be a good one. All which Keil designates as the object of this passage has been given by the prophet in part long before, and in part in vers, 24 and 25, for the uncircumcised heart is indeed the deepest ground of all the inner and outer corruption which the prophet so deeply bewails.—2. As to the language, I find in the first three verses some traces of Jeremiah’s idiom, but not so decisively as to feel compelled on their account to admit Jeremiah to be the author. The formula הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר י׳ is certainly Jeremiah’s (comp. Jer_45:1; Jer_46:13; Jer_1:1), hut in Jeremiah it stands only at the commencement of the larger sections. In the midst of the context, as here, it is striking, the more so as it is further extended by שִׁמְעוּ—לָֽמַד is nowhere else, even in Jeremiah, construed with אֵל, but with עַל (Jer_13:21), though very frequently he uses עַל and אֵל as synonymous (comp. on עֲלֵיכֶם Jer_10:1) wherefore also Graf on Jer_13:21 supposes that עַל in this passage is written “as so frequently” for אֵל,—The verb הַת (Jer_10:2) occurs in the Old Test. 55 times, in Jeremiah 20 times, from which it is clear that relatively it is used most frequently in this prophet.—חֻקוֹת (Jer_10:3) is the more usual form in Jer.; besides here it is found 5 times (Jer_5:24; Jer_31:35; Jer_33:25; Jer_44:10; Jer_44:23), הֻקִים only twice (Jer_31:36 and Jer_32:11, here perhaps after Deu_5:28. But the first form is as much used as the latter.—מֵאֵין (Jer_10:6) is a current word in Jer., but used so absolutely, simply as a negation, it is found neither in Jer. nor elsewhere. Comp. the exposition. עֵת פְקֻדִָתָם Jer_10:15, is the only expression which would speak decidedly in favor of the Jer. authorship, if the possibility of imitation were excluded. (Comp. Jer_8:12; Jer_46:21; Jer_50:27; ????????Jer_11:23; Jer_23:12; Jer_48:44). Apart from these few forms which correspond to Jeremiah’s usage, without being exclusively his or being raised above the suspicion of imitation, there are a relatively large number of expressions, which are in part ἄπαξ λεγόμενα, on which however we lay no stress (the Pi. יְיַפֵהוּ Jer_10:4; יָאָֽתָה Jer_10:7; בְּאַחַת in the meaning unâ Jer_10:8; יכְסָֽלוּ ibid.; אֱלחִֹים אֱמֶת Jer_10:10; תַּעְתֻּעִים Jer_10:15) and in part do not occur elsewhere in Jer., but take the place of other usual expressions. To these belong מְרֻקָּע Jer_10:9; לְבוּשׁ ,אַרְגָּמָן ,תְּכֵלֶת Jer_10:9; (Jer. uses for the latter בֵּנֵד Jer_12:1; Jer_36:24; Jer_41:5; Jer_43:12; מַד Jer_13:25); תֵּרֻקָּע Jer_10:12; תּבוּנָה and נָטָה שָׁמַיִם ibid. (the latter expression Job_9:8; Isa_40:22; Isa_13:5; Isa_44:24; Isa_45:12; Isa_51:13; Isa_66:12; Psa_104:2; Zec_12:2): נְשִׂאִים (comp. on the other hand Psa_135:7) מָרָק and מָטָר Jer_10:13; פֶסֶל Jer_10:14; (Jer. always says פָסִיל8:19; Jer_50:38; Jer_51:47; Jer_51:52), נֶסֶךְ in the sense of מַסֵּכָח Jer_10:14 נֶסֶךְ in Jer. is always libatio, Jer_7:18; Jer_19:3; Jer_32:29; Jer_44:17 sqq.), הֵלֶק and וִֹיִיבֶט Jer_10:16. From all this might well proceed some suspicion as to the authenticity of the passage Jer_10:1-16. In opposition to Movers, Hitzig and De Wette, Graf has fully shown that the supposed Isaiah II. could not be the author (S. 171 Anm.), although many relations are not to be denied. Who was the author and when and by whom the addition was made can scarcely be ascertained.
[2]Jer_10:1.—עַל in עֲלֵיכֶם is used here, as frequently in Jeremiah, as synonymous with אֵל (comp. the exchange of the two in Jer_11:2; Jer_18:11; Jer_23:35; Jer_25:2; Jer_27:19; Jer_36:31; Jer_44:20; besides Jer_25:1; Jer_26:15; Jer_35:15; Jer_42:19 coll. Hos_12:11).
[3]Jer_10:2.—לָמַד with אֵל here only. But it is found in Jer_13:21 with the synonymous על. Comp. Graf on this passage.—With לְ and the following subst., Deu_4:10; Deu_14:23; Deu_17:19; Psa_18:35; Psa_144:1. With לְ and the following inf., Deu_18:9; Isa_48:17; Jer_12:16; Eze_19:3; Eze_19:6; Psa_143:10.
[4]Jer_10:3.—מַעֲשֵׂה is the accusative of the object. Comp. 1Ki_18:32 : “he built the stones to an altar.” (Naegelsb. Gr. § 69, 3).—As כּרַת denotes not to hew but only to fell, the object designated is not the immediate but remote end of the activity.
[5]Jer_10:3.—מַֽעֲצָד is found only in Isa_44:12 in a similar connection. The connection and the dialects are both in favor of the meaning of axe. In Arabic the corresponding word designates a cutting instrument. Comp. Aram. חֲצַד metere. The prefix בּ may depend on מַֽעֲשֶׂה or on בּרָתוֹ, or on both. The latter is the more probable since in fact the axe is the instrument which serves for felling and hewing. Comp. Isa_44:14.
[6]Jer_10:5.—נָּשׂוּא for נָּֽשְׂאוּ. Comp. Ewald, § 194 b; Olsh. § 38 b, Anm. g; 265 e.
[7]Jer_10:5.—אוֹתם for אתּם Comp. rems. on Jer_1:16.
B. THE IDOLS CONTRASTED WITH JEHOVAH
Jer_10:6-16
6 None is like Thee,8 O Jehovah!
Great art Thou, and great is Thy name in might.
7 Who should not fear Thee, Thou King of nations?
For unto Thee is it due.9
For among all the wise men of the nations,
And in all their dominion there is none like Thee.
8 But altogether they are stupid10 and become fools:11
Vain instruction! It is wood!12
9 Silver plates are brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz,
The work of the smith and the hands of the smelter;
Blue and red purple is their raiment,
Artists’ work are they all.
10 But Jehovah is truly God,
He is a living God, and an everlasting King:
Before His anger the earth trembleth,
And the nations cannot endure His wrath.
11 Ye shall therefore say unto them: The gods,
Which have not made heaven and earth,13
Shall vanish away from the earth under the heaven.
12 Who made the earth by His power,
Established the world by His wisdom,
And by His understanding spread out the heavens.
13 At the sound of His voice a heaving of waters in the heavens,
He bringeth up vapors from the ends of the earth;
He produceth lightnings with the rain,
And bringeth the wind out of His storehouses.
14 Stupid are all men there without understanding;
All the founders of idol-images are put to shame,
For a lie is their casting, and there is no spirit in them.
15 For they are vapour and work of deceit;14
In the time of their visitation they perish.
16 Not like these is the portion of Jacob;
For He forms all things and Israel is the stock of His inheritance:
Jehovah Zebaoth is His name.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
Jer_10:6-7 contain the theme of the strophe: Jehovah is the highest, there is none like Him, all the world should fear Him. It is stupidity which opposes this truth, says Jer_10:8. The impropriety of this opposition is proved by the exposition of what idols really are. On the other hand the right of Jehovah maintained in Jer_10:7 is proved by the exposition of His attributes and works, Jer_10:10; Jer_10:12-13. From this exposition it is evident how well-founded on the one hand is the judgment pronounced against this opposition (Jer_10:14-15), and on the other hand the justice of Jehovah and the welfare of the people who serve Him. (Jer_10:16.)
Jer_10:6-7, None is like thee … none like thee.—In might is to be referred both to Thou and Thy name. Since the latter in relation to the former can designate only the name in the objective sense, the renown, glory, in might is equivalent to in manifestation of might, comp. Jer_16:21.—Who should not negative expression for the positive,—all must fear Thee.—For among all.Seb. Schmidt here rightly calls attention to the fact that כִּי here is to be regarded as local not partitive, because otherwise God would be compared with men: among all the wise men and in the whole circuit of their dominion, therefore in the whole domain of their wisdom and might, no God is found like unto Jehovah. Comp. Caspari, Micha der Morastite, S. 13 ff.
Jer_10:8. But altogether … it is wood. That which really is does not correspond to that which ought to be. The entirety of the heathen (בְּאַחַת = unâ, Targum Jon. בַּחֲרָא; the meaning in one contradicts the connection) feareth not the Lord, as it becomes them. This is to say, they are stupid as brutes.—Vain instruction! It is wood! If with Graf we should construe these words like 3a, we should develop the meaning that wood is wooden. But since this could not possibly be meant in the figurative sense, in which we use the word wooden, we should be obliged to take it literally, which, however we interpreted מוּסַר, would yield only nonsense. Accordingly עֵץ cannot be the predicate of מוּסַר. We must therefore regard the latter as a declaration made absolutely, with present brevity, an exclamation which represents a sentence.—Since the radical meaning of הֶבֶל is breath, vanitas, we are perfectly justified by passages like Ecc_1:2; Ecc_5:6; Ecc_12:8, in taking the plural in this sense, although an adhesion to the derived meaning (idols) may certainly be contained in the words מוּסַר הי׳ is therefore=institutio vanitatum, in the double sense of vain instruction and that which treats of vanities. At the same time the author may have had in mind an opposition to the “chastisement of Jehovah” (מוּסַר י׳) (Deu_11:2; Pro_3:11; Job_5:17).—Whatever also in idol doctrine is declared great and glorious of the idols is all vain lies and deceit. For the idol is wood! This points back to Jer_10:3, and at the same time declares in contradiction of what follows, that, though the idols may be ornamented with precious metals and material, the heart is still always wood. הוּא is used here, as in Jer_10:3, collectively with a contemptuous side-meaning.
Jer_10:9. Silver plates are brought … artists’ work are they all.כֶּסֶף מ׳ beaten silver, therefore silver plates, comp. Gen_1:6-8; Num_17:3-4. I do not think that these and the following words are to be regarded as a continuation of It is wood or are brought, as forming a relative sentence. For Jer_10:8 compared with Jer_10:3-4, is evidently intended to express that the idol is wood, a common material, and that the more precious metals, etc. are only theshell which covers the base kernel. The thought therefore that the idol is wood, silver and gold is remote from the connection. For what object silver and gold are brought from a great distance is not expressly stated, but is understood from the context, and especially from Jer_10:4.—Tartessus in Spain is mentioned as producing silver in Eze_27:12.—The name אוּפָז occurs besides only in Dan_10:5, where כֶּתֶם אוּפַז is spoken of. There are three views with respect to it: 1. Uphaz is designated as a real locality, and Bochart (Phaleg. II. 27), supposes it to be Tabrobana (Ceylon) where according to Ptolemy (VII. 4) there was a river and harbor Phasis; (Hitzig and Fuerst, H. W. B. S. 37) a place in Yemen (comp. Usal, Gen_10:27; Ophir, Sheba, Psa_45:10; 1Ch_29:4; Psa_72:15); in which case Uphaz may be regarded either as a compound of או=אוּ and פָזi.e. gold coast, or = Vipaça (Hyphasis); 2. Uphaz is regarded as incorrectly written for אוֹפִיר. So the Chaldee and Syriac, Theodoret and many of the moderns; 3. מֵאוּפָז is taken to be identical with מוּפזpurgatum (Part. Hoph. from מָזַז1Ki_10:18, Vid.Fuerst, Conc. p. 895). But since, 1. The hypothesis of a scriptural error is opposed to the critical principle of preferring the more difficult reading; 2. Tartessus is designated only as a land of silver never of gold (with the exception of the general and later passage, Macc. Jer_8:3); 3. The East is elsewhere generally represented as the home of gold (comp. Havila, Gen_2:11-12; Ophir, Sheba, ut supra)—and finally, 4. The connection of the passage requires the thought that the materials of the idols were brought from the most distant, and opposite places. I am in favor of regarding Uphaz as a definite locality to be sought in the East, although it is not possible now to determine its position more exactly.—The work of the smith is in apposition with silver and gold.—תִּכֵלֶת blue, אַרְגָמָן red purple, comp. Exo_26:31; Exo_26:36; Exo_27:16; Exo_28:8; Exo_28:15; Exo_28:33.—Artists’ [lit. skilful ones] comp. Jer_9:16; Isa_40:20.
Jer_10:10. But Jehovah…endure his wrath In contrast to the merely imaginary deity of the idols, Jehovah is designated as the true God (אמת in apposition, comp. Naegelsb. Gr. § 66) in contrast to their lifelessness as the living (הַיִים adject. comp. Jer_2:13; the plural as in Deu_5:23; 1Sa_17:26; Jer_23:36 coll.; Jos_24:19; Isa_37:4; Isa_37:17. VideNaegelsb. Gr. § 105, 4, a) in contrast to their powerlessness finally as the eternal governor (comp. Exo_15:18; Psa_10:16; Psa_66:7; Psa_93:1 sqq.; Psa_97:1). Before such a mighty God the earth trembles (Exo_19:16 sqq.; Psa_68:9; Psa_97:5; Nah_1:5) and the nations are not in a condition to hold or to bear the fulness of His anger (the figure is that of a vessel which is burst by the liquid poured into it. Mat_9:17; comp. Jer_2:13).
Jer_10:11. Ye shall therefore say … under the heaven. Houbigant, Venema, Dathe, Blayney, Döderlein, Rosenmueller, Maurer, Ewald, Graf, [Henderson—S. R. A.] and others declare this verse to be a gloss which has crept into the text. Even Neumann (S. 549 Anm.) inclines to this view. I must also decide in its favor. For 1. Since we must suspect the authenticity of Jer_10:1-10; Jer_10:12-16, we have no interest in maintaining that of this verse, but a reason is afforded for the insertion of the verse just here. To the marginal gloss of a second a third might have added a second gloss in a foreign language. He would not have ventured to make such an irrelevant addition to the text of the prophet. Both glosses have in later times been unjustifiably admitted into the text. Jeremiah would certainly not have interrupted a Hebrew discourse by a Chaldee interpolation, when he elsewhere never uses this language, not even in the letter to the exiles, Jeremiah 29. The reasons which have been adduced in favor of their authenticity are specious only. They may be found in Neumann, S. 547, sqq. [Vide also Eng. Trans, of Calvin, II. p. 31, n.—S. R. A.]. 2. The verse breaks the connection in the most abrupt manner. Jer_10:12 is by this verse suspended in the air, while without it, Jer_10:12 is connected quite regularly with Jer_10:10. The assumption of a parenthesis also (J. D. Michaelis) does not avail. For then the verse must be a necessary, not interruptive supplement to Jer_10:10, or preparation for Jer_10:12, neither of which is the case.
Jer_10:12. Who made the earth … the heavens—Who made (עֹשֵׂה) is in apposition to the main idea of Jer_10:10 : Jehovah Elohim. The absence of the article before such a participle standing in apposition after a Nom. determ. is frequent. Comp. Jer_2:27; Psa_9:12; Psa_104:2-4; Zec_12:1. VideNaegelsb. Gr. § 97, 2, a.—The contents of Jer_10:12-13 serve by the enumeration of facts as a confirmation of Jer_10:11, comp. Jer_27:5; Jer_32:17.—established, etc. comp. Psa_65:7; Psa_89:12; Psa_93:1.—spread out, etc. comp. Psa_104:2; Isa_40:22; Isa_44:24; Isa_51:13; Zec_12:1.
Jer_10:13. At the sound … storehouses. This verse, with the exception of the beginning is found in Psa_135:7.—Sound of his voice. It is not necessary with Ewald to take this for לִתִתּוֹ קוֹל, or with Maurer for לִתֵת קוֹלוֹ, or with Hitzig to make הֲמוֹן depend on תִּתּוֹ as the object. For the words mean simply ad vocem, quam edit. We are not then to take נָתַן in the general sense (on the noise which His giving makes) but in the special sense which lies at the root of the expression נָתַן בְּקוֹל (Jer_12:8; Psa_46:7; Psa_68:34) i.e., “to make a noise, sound with the voice.” That the thunder is meant is evident from the context. Thunder, lightning, clouds, rain and storm are mentioned as the essential constituents of a tempest, comp. Jer_11:16.
Jer_10:14-15. Stupid are all … they perish. In contrast to the living power of God the vanity of the idols is again set forth. While before Jehovah, when He arises, all trembles and is afraid, the worshippers of idols are by these merely—put to shame. The two members of Jer_10:14 a, stand in the relation of explicative, not of synonymous parallelism. The second is the explanation and more exact definition of the first. A change of reading therefore (אָדָם into חָכָם)or of the usual meaning of the word (דַּעַת = arte factum, idol-image) is unnecessary. נִכְעַר we take in the explicative sense=to appear stupid, to prove so, comp. Isa_19:11; Ewald, § 123, b. מִדַּעַת without insight, comp. Naegelsb. Gr. § 112, 5, d.—Men appear in the entire nakedness of their stupidity, in so far as they are put to shame by their idols, which are not God, but dead castings.—Work of deceit. The sense is: a work by which they themselves are stultified and put to shame who make it.
Jer_10:16. Not like these … is his name. The worshippers of Jehovah are yet again comprised with the idolaters, Jehovah is opposed to the idols, and the whole force of the demonstration is concentrated into the significant name of the true God. The first hemistich falls into two members. 1. Not like these is the portion of Jacob. The expression portion of Jacob reminds us of Deu_32:9; Psa_16:5. Observe how by this expression Jehovah and His servants are aptly comprised together. 2. Again the first sentence has a double basis: as former of all things Jehovah is not like the idols, and as those who have this God for their portion and inheritance the Israelites are not like the heathen.—Stock of his inheritance. Comp. Deu_4:20; Psa_74:2.—On the relation of this passage to Jer_51:19, and of the Hebrew original of the Alexandrian translation, consult Naegelsb. Jeremia u. Bab. S. 93, 131.
Footnotes:
[8]Jer_10:6.—כָּמוֹךָ מֵאֵין is remarkable. Venema supposes a transposition of the מ from אוֹתָם at the close of Jer_10:5, an hypothesis to which we can have recourse only in extreme cases, especially as the initial and final מ are different in form. Neumann would take מֵאֵין in a causal sense, but 1. it would be scarcely appropriate to designate the Lord as great merely inmparison with other great ones; 2. מֵאֵין must also then be taken as causal in Jer_10:7. Neumann indeed does this, but thus he obtains only a linguistic monstrosity, which condemns itself and also his rendering of the word. Hitzig would read מֵאַיִן, as in Jer_30:7, and with similarity of thought we should certainly expect similarity of expression. But might we not just as well require מָאֵין to be read in Jer_30:7, as in this place? The expression, from whence Thy like? is at least quite unusual. In this sense we elsewhere always find מִי (Deu_3:24; Deu_4:7; 2Sa_22:32; 2Ki_18:35; Psa_18:32; Psa_77:14; Mic_7:18 and the passages adduced by Hitzig himself Psa_35:10; Psa_71:19) while אֵי or אֵיֵה occurs only in an ironical negative sense (ex. gr. Psa_42:4; Psa_79:10; Psa_115:2; Jer_2:27). or in the sense of earnest search (Jer_2:6; Jer_2:8; 2Ki_2:14), but מֵאַיִן never occurs in that sense.—כֵאֵין occurs frequently in Jeremiah, more frequently than in any other author of the Old Testament.—The preposition מִן is in this connection used evidently sometimes in a causal sense (Jer_7:32; Jer_19:11; Isa_50:2; Eze_34:8), but mostly in a negative sense=away from, without. Two negatives thus united do not make an affirmative, but strengthen the negation. Comp. Naegelsb. Gr., § 106, 5; Gesen. § 152, 2. Everywhere, however except here, מִן depends on a preceding verb or noun, and indeed for the most part mediately, so that the preposition is to be considered as depending on an idea of existence (constructio prægnans) latent in the verb (or noun). Comp. Isa_6:11; Jer_4:7; Jer_20:9; Jer_32:43; Jer_33:10; Jer_33:12; Jer_34:22; Jer_44:22; Jer_46:19; Jer_48:9; Jer_51:29; Jer_51:37; Eze_33:28; Zep_2:5; Zep_3:6. In Jer_5:9 only is this idea of existence explicitly present.—That in this place כֵאֵין stands so abruptly is very remarkable and contrary to the usage of Jeremiah.
[9]Jer_10:7.—יָאָֽתָה from יָאָה (which occurs only in this single form and place)=נָאָה, decorum, consentaneum fuit, Isa_52:7; Psa_93:5; Son_1:10, On the feminine in the impersonal sense, comp. Naegelsb Gr. § 60, 6, b.
[10]Jer_10:8.—יבערו comp. Jer_10:14; Jer_10:21. Elsewhere occur only the participial forms בֹּעֲרִים (Psa_94:8; Ezek. 21:36) and נִבְעָרָה (Isa_19:11). The meaning, according to the analogy of בְּעִיר ,בַּעַר = bardum, stolidum esse.
[11]Jer_10:8.—ויכסלו. The verb here only—meaning (comp כְּסִיל כֶּסֶל) stultum, stupidum, esse.
[12]Jer_10:8.—[Blayney renders: the very word itself being a rebuker of vanities; Noyes better: Most vain is their confidence; it is wood—with the note, “Lit. their doctrine, their instruction: i.e., that in which they are taught to confide.” Henderson has; The tree itself is a reproof of vanities.—S. R. A.]
[13]Jer_10:11.—אַרְקָא is a harsher form of אַרְעָא. Comp. Fuerst, H. W. B. 1, S. 142. Buxtorf, Lex. Chald. p. 228. אֵלֶּה is again Hebrew and is referred by the LXX. to שְׁמַיָּא but by most commentators to אֱלָהַיא.
[14]Jer_10:14.—מַֽעֲשֵׂה מַּעְתֻּעִים The noun here only, the verb Gen_27:12; 2Ch_36:16.
2. BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE RETRIBUTION: COMMAND TO THE PEOPLE TO RETIRE; LAMENT OF THE DESOLATED LAND; LAST WATCH-CRY OF THE PROPHET: THE ENEMY IS HERE!
Jer_10:17-22 15
17 Pick up thy bundle16 from the earth, thou that sittest17 in distress!
18 For thus saith Jehovah: Behold!
I sling away the inhabitants of this land at this once,
And bring them into straits, that they may find it so.
19 Wo is me for my hurt! My wound is incurable.18
But I say: this is now my suffering and I will bear it.
20 My tent is laid waste and all my cords are broken.19
My children forsake me and are never here.
There is none to pitch my tent and set up my curtains,
21 For the pastors are become stupid and seek not Jehovah.
Hence they have effected nothing prudent and their whole flock is dispersed.
22 Hark, a message comes and great tumult out of the north country,
That the cities of Judah are to become a desolation,
For the habitation of jackals.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
After by Jer_9:25 it is affirmed that the last and only means of safety is despised the prophet now in Jer_10:17-18 addresses a command to the people to remove into exile. The now desolated land is hereupon introduced as lamenting its misfortune and its causes (Jer_10:19-21). At last the prophet announces, as a herald or watchman on the lookout, that the enemy (long predicted and called to execute judgment) is present (Jer_10:22).
Jer_10:17. Pick up thy bundle … distress. It is the prophet who speaks.—מֵאֶרֶץ=from the earth, away from the ground, for here we have to do not with the retirement of the possessors from the country, but only of the hasty gathering up of the few effects, which a poor exile might take with him. The word “bundle”has therefore a contemptuous side-meaning.—In distress. The prophet speaks this of the people already severely distressed by the enemy in the cities whither they have fled, Jer_8:14. Comp. Jer_19:9; Jer_52:5.
Jer_10:18. For thus saith Jehovah … may find it so. Jehovah Himself is now introduced as speaking, to give a reason for the command in Jer_10:17.—Since the time of the Judges the people had often been oppressed by foreign enemies within their borders, now they are to be dragged far away into banishment, comp. Isa_22:17—That they may find it so. למען ימצאו. This expression, which has been very variously interpreted is explained most easily by remembering, a. its relation to bring into straits, b. the ease of supplying the indefinite object “it” (Naegelsb. Gr., § 78, 2 Anm.), c. the close connection of the ideas “to find” and “to know.” With respect to the latter, I refer especially to Ecc_8:17 (and I saw that man cannot find all God’s work, that is done under the sun; though a man labor to seek [it], yet he finds it not, and though a wise man think to know [it], yet can he not find it). Comp. also Jer_16:21.—He who is driven into straits must go whither he is driven. So God by affliction drives Israel into such straits that they must find, i.e., know what it is above all necessary and desirable for them to know, that great “it,” namely, which though unnamed, is well understood. Chap. Isa_43:20; Hos_9:7.
Jer_10:19-20. Wo is me … set up my curtains. That both these verses are the words of the country personified, is seen from “my children,” etc., in Jer_10:20, for neither the prophet says this, nor the people, who are identical with the children and not forsaken, but forsaking.—And I say. In these words also we have a proof that the land is the speaker. For the words express no consciousness of guilt, but a comfort, which the innocent land alone could find, in the fact that a calamity is laid upon it, which must be borne. At the same time we perceive in these words the first gleam of hope in a future deliverance. For men speak thus composedly only when they know that they will not have to bear perpetual but only transient suffering. Comp. Jer_5:4. Also the suffixes of the 1st Pers. in Jer_10:20 are in favor of the land as the speaker.—Forsake me. Comp. Gen_44:4; Num_35:26; Naegelsb. Gr., § 70, b.
Jer_10:21. For the pastors are become stupid … dispersed. The land is the speaker: 1. on account of; 2. because the metaphor of pastoral life is continued; 3. because in the mouth of the land this statement does not appear as the repetition of things which have been already frequently said, but as it were a confirmatory testimony from an impartial witness.—Become stupid. Comp. Jer_10:8,—effect nothing prudent. The meaning is to effect that which is prudent, sensible and in so far also prosperous, comp. Jer_20:11; Pro_17:8.
Jer_10:22. Hark, a message … jackal.—These words are, as it were, a last watch-call and signal which denotes (comp. Jer_1:14; Jer_4:6; Jer_6:1; Jer_6:22; Jer_8:16) that the enemy so frequently announced is present.—For a habitation, comp. Jer_9:10.
Footnotes:
[15]This strophe apart from the general relationship which it bears to chh. 7, 9, also has many particular points of connection with this passage, especially with Jer_8:13 sqq. Comp. Jer_10:17 with Jer_8:14—קוֹלֵעַ, Jer_10:18 with הִשְׁלַכְתִּי Jer_7:15.—שִׁבְרִי Jer_10:19 with Jer_8:21.—יְצָאֻנִי Jer_10:20 with עזַבִנוּ י׳ Jer_9:18.—מֵאֶרֶץ צָפוֹן Jer_10:22 with Jer_8:16.—לָשוּם וגו׳ Jer_10:22 with Jer_7:34; Jer_9:10.
[16]Jer_10:17.—כּנָצָה (ἅπ λεγ) from כָּנַע=the bowed together, twisted together, pack, bundle. On אִספִי comp. Olsh. § 234, b, Isa_47:2.
[17]Jer_10:17.—The Keri יוֹשֶׁבֶת is superfluous. Comp. Jer_22:23; Gen_49:11; Hos_10:11; Olsh. § 123, d.: Naegelsb. Gr. § 43, 1. On the construct state before prepositions, comp. Ib. § 63, 4 c. [Henderson renders: O inhabiters of the siege.]
[18]Jer_10:19.—נחלה (Olshaus. § 266, a). Comp. Jer_14:17; Jer_30:12. [Henderson: My stroke is grievous.]
[19]Jer_10:20.—[Henderson: all my tent pins are plucked up, but without reason.—S. R. A.]
3. CONSOLATORY GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE
Jer_10:23-25
23 I know, Jehovah, that not to man belongs his way,
It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.20
24 Correct me, Jehovah, but only as it is just,
Not in thine anger, lest thou bring me to nothing.
25 Pour out thy wrath on the nations that know thee not,
And on the nations that call not on thy name;
For they have devoured Jacob, yea they consumed and destroyed him,
And his pasture have they laid waste.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
These verses form a very appropriate conclusion. They involve an honest confession of sin in view of the numerous charges of the discourse. To the threatenings of punishment, however, corresponds the petition to punish not too severely, not in anger, but to pour out the fury on the heathen nations; the basis of which petition is the theocratic hope that Israel cannot be wholly rejected, but there must in the future be a day of grace for them, and vengeance on their enemies. The prophet must be regarded as the speaker, but as speaking not in his own name, but in that of the people.
Jer_10:23. I know … his steps. Man has not the power to determine how and where he will go. Comp. Psa_37:23; Pro_16:1; Pro_16:9; Pro_19:21.—הֹלֵךְ is taken by Hitzig=perishable, mortal. And the word, according to passages like Ps. 39:14; Psa_58:9; Psa_109:23; Job_19:10, cannot be denied this meaning. But since the most natural sense: it is not for man, so long as he walks, to determine his course—seems equally appropriate, the word may be regarded as having a double sense, or, as uniting both these meanings.
Jer_10:24-25. Correct me … and his pasture have they laid waste. In Jer_10:23 the thought is implicitly contained that Israel had wished in his own strength to walk in his own way contrary to the will of God. He now sees how greatly he has sinned and submits to the necessary and merited punishment, praying only for the utmost possible mildness and forbearance. The final conversion and re-acceptance of the people is thus set forth as prospective.—As is just, comp. Jer_30:11; Jer_46:28. As was remarked on Jer_7:5; Jer_9:23, justice in the Old Testament is not opposed to grace, but to brutal violence. The antithesis of צַדִּיק is not to הָסִיד, but to עָרִיץ the violence (עֹשֶׁק) exercised toward the poor, the stranger, orphan and widow. In contrast to this he who consciously maintains the straight line of justice appears fairly disposed and mild, not making his subjective desires his law, but submitting himself to the objective law. Accordingly this as it is just, which evidently has its antithesis in the following: in thine anger, also involves the idea of mildness, because justice in contrast to that anger which is its own law, and respects no other, appears like mildness. It must be granted that this dualistic conception of God as just towards Israel, but wrathful towards the heathen, is not that of the New Testament. That it is the genuine Old Testament view is shown by passages like Psa_6:2; Psa_38:2; Psalms 79 (where in Jer_10:6-7 our Jer_10:24 is reproduced); Psa_137:8. Observe, moreover, how the prophet here turns the tables. To Israel, now being severely punished, he presents the prospect of grace, but before the heathen, who are now God’s instruments in the punishment of Israel, is complete destruction. Comp. Isa_47:6; Hab_1:11; Hab_3:8-12, and Jeremiah 50, 51, especially Jer_50:10 sqq.—The repetition and accumulation of verbs in 25b, is to portray graphically the rage of the enemies, comp. Jer_51:34.
Footnotes:
[20]Jer_10:23.—והכין ו׳. From the LXX. (οὐδὲ ἀνηρ πορεύσεται καὶ κατορθώσει πορείας αὐτοῦ) and the Vulgate (nec viri est, ut ambulet et dirigat gressus suos), we might conclude that they read הֲלֹךְ וְהָכִין, if we might assume any exactness in these translations, and if it were not evident from the Chaldee (דְּאָזֵל וּמְחַקֵן qui ambalat at dirigit), and the Syriac, that they also read הֹלֵךְ. It is impossible to justify the Vau grammatically, when it stands before the infinitive. Even Ewald has accomplished nothing by reference to § 344, a. Gaab, by transposing the Vau, would read הֹלְכוֹ, which is an equally unusual construction, and gives a feeble sense. The easiest way would be to read לְחָכִין, if the very facility of this reading did not stand in its way. The general meaning is clear, but we must abandon for the present an exact determination of the word.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. On Jer_10:6. There cannot be two highest Beings, or there would be none. In the idea of the Absolute is involved that of uniqueness. Polytheism has therefore no highest Being in the absolute sense. Where, however, traces of such are found, polytheism is about either to rise to monotheism (comp. Friedrich Naegelsbach, nachhom. Theol. S. 140), or to dissolve into pantheism.
2. Who shall not fear thee? etc., Jer_10:7, Ghislerus remarks: “S. Remigius, Episc. Rhemensis ex hoc loco probat, multos ex gentibus credidisse et placuisse Deo, additque in hoc multo magis dici Deum gentium, quoniam multo plures credunt in eum ex gentibus, quam ex Judæis.” Comp. Rom_2:14-15, and Tholuck ad h. l.—Joh_1:4 (λόγος σπερματικός).
3. Augustine remarks on the Infinity of God, de Trin., V. 1. “Intelligimus Deum sine qualitate bonum, sine quantitate magnum, sine indigentia creatorem, sine situ præsentem, sine habitu omnia continentem, sine loco ubique totum, sine tempore sempiternum, sine ulla sui mutatione mutabilia facientem nihilque patientem.”
4. On Jer_10:10. In hemist. a, a proof of the Trinity has been repeatedly found. So ex. gr., Hailbrunner (Jer. proph. monumenta in locos comm. Theol. digesta, Lauingen, 1586, page 38), Förster (S. 61), and among the moderns Neumann (S. 547). The latter says … “the passage affords a sure testimony of the trinitarian view of God in the Old Testament; the truth of the Spirit, the life of the Father, the kingdom of the Son, comprising in themselves the fulness of all emanations of the divine existence in opposition to heathen superstition.” But against this it may be urged that in opposition to the multiplicity of idols the author had to set forth not the trinity, but the unity of the divine nature, as he has done in Jer_10:6-7, and that his purpose here (Jer_10:10) is merely to contrast the false gods with the true, the dead with the living, the powerless with the Almighty. That the contrast is exhibited in three points, we are not indeed to regard as accidental, but to explain it rather by the general significance of the number three, than by the purpose of intimating the Trinity.
5. On Jer_10:14 : “All men are fools. Ye fools and blind, says our Saviour (Matthew 23). Such a word, spoken in season takes hold and produces conviction; but it must be administered with spirit and fire; for if it is only human words to men, they will make a quarrel out of them.” Zinzendorf.
6. On Jer_10:14 (A lie is their casting). This applies not only to the idols which men make of earthly materials, but to all self-made idols of the heart. The carnal mind, which tends downwards, feels annoyed by the nearness of God, and seeks therefore at all times to escape from it. But since man cannot do without God, he makes himself a god or gods, as he wants them. Whether these gods are visible and palpable images, or the abstract forms of speculation, the words of the text always apply to them; they are a lie, and there is no spirit in them. Accordingly there is heathenism enough in themidst of Christianity, and it may be asked, which is worse, the new or the old?
7. On Jer_10:16. What perfect historical reality and personality is here! A creator of the universe stands before us, one therefore, who has called all things into existence by His free, personal will, and who at the same time as the living personal Head of all the spirits governing the world is infinitely exalted above every limited local deity. But at the same time the relation of this Deity to the world is not an abstract and general, but a living and personal relation. For this God primarily holds immediate personal intercourse with one nation of the earth, as a father with his son, and He is this nation’s greatest treasure and inalienable property, as on the other hand the nation belongs to Him as the object of His free personal election, which none may dispute or annul.
8. On Jer_10:19 (I must bear it). “I pray all teachers for God’s sake, that they reflect and err not, that they do not, in order to retain their living, repeat these words of Jeremiah, and cover up their laziness, ill-success, frivolity, their own unfruitfulness and selfishness, with the excuse, ‘this is my plague.’ O no, what we should call a plague is burdens of a hundred-weight, from which we long to be freed, which crush us almost to death; persons from whom we would flee as a bird from a cage; a pressure under which we are martyred with shame, and yet have no permission to depart. These lead one finally, after many struggles and cries unto the Lord for his dismission, and after an answer of absolute denial, to say in calmness: I believe this is now my plague, and I must bear it.” Zinzendorf.
9. On Jer_10:20. “The jealousy of the Saviour is so strict, that He will have His children directed to Him (Isa_65:11), and the idea of the pastoral office with which some good teachers are infected, of regarding and treating souls as their souls, sheep as their sheep, children as their children, is in the highest degree opposed to His will. Hence He often, for a just judgment, does not allow their joy in souls to last, but lets them see and conclude more of their decline and less of their success, than there really is. For He will not give His glory to another, and the teachers are not Christ, but sent by Him, before Him.” Zinzendorf.
10. On Jer_10:21. “As sheep must either starve or be led to filthy and poisonous pasture, if their shepherds are fools, who do not know how to manage sheep, so is this much more the case in the spiritual pastorate.” Cramer.
11. On Jer_10:23. “The steps of every man are ordered by the Lord, what man understands His way? (Pro_20:24). And every man’s way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord alone maketh the hearts certain (Pro_21:2). Therefore we must pray: Lord, make known to me the way in which I should walk, for after Thee is my desire. Teach me to do Thy will, for Thou art my God; let Thy good Spirit guide me in a plain path (Psa_143:8-10).” Cramer.
12. On Jer_10:23. “Certum est, nos velle, cum volumus, sed ille facit, ut velimus bonum, de quo dictum est, quod præparatur voluntas a Domino (Pro_8:35 sec. Sept.) Certum est, nos facere, cam facimus, sed ille facit, ut faciamus præbendo vires efficacissimas voluntati, qui dixit; faciam ut in justificationibus meis ambuletis et judicia mea observetis (Eze_36:26-27).” Augustin. De grat. et lib. arbitr. Cap. 16.
13. On Jer_10:24. “There is a beautiful distinction between the suffering and punishment of the pious and the ungodly, which consists in modo et in fine. For when God chastises the pious He does it not with anger and fury, but as a discrect and kind father or teacher may discipline his son and disciple, without ill-humor. Thus also God does with His children. He does it, not that He may bring them to nothing, but that they may not esteem themselves innocent (Jer_30:11). On the other hand he makes an end of the ungodly, and they must drink up the dregs (Psa_75:8).” Cramer.
14. On Jer_10:25. “Quæri potest hic, an contra infideles, ut hodie sunt Turcæ et Judæi, orandum? Orandum est contra eos et pro iis. Contra eos, quatenus persequuntur ecclesiam, pro iis, quatenus ecclesiam non persequuntur, ut convertantur, quemadmodum fit in Litania; forgive our enemies, persecutors and slanderers, and turn their hearts.” Förster.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
1. [On Jer_10:7. Saurin:—Fear may be 1. Terror. 2. A disposition to render God all the worship He requires, to submit to all the laws He imposes, to conceive all the emotions of admiration, devotedness and love, which the eminence of His perfections demands. 3. A disposition which considers Him as alone possessing all that can contribute to our happiness and misery. In the last sense (which is meant here) God is the only object of fear; for 1. God is a being whose will is self-efficient; 2. the only being who can act immediately on spiritual souls; 3. the only being who can make all creatures concur in His designs.”—S. R. A.]
2. On Jer_10:10. There are three main forms of idolatry: 1. Polytheism, which does not deny the predicates of deity, but attributes them to false subjects.—2. Pantheism, which denies the subjects and the predicates.—3. Deism, which confesses the subject but denies the predicates.—These errors are opposed in Jer_10:10, from which we derive the theme:—The Scriptural doctrine of God in opposition to the errors of idolatry.—This teaches us to know God, 1. as the true, real God in opposition to those who attribute the divine properties to imaginary false gods; 2. as the living God in opposition to those who represent God as a mere all-pervading force; 3. as the eternal King, in opposition to those who represent God only as a transient work-master, and not as the ever active ruler of the world.
3. There is a homily of Origen (Horn. VIII. ed. Lommatzsch) on Jer_10:12-14, in which by the earth he understands the body, by תֵּבֵל (οἰκουμένη) the soul, by the heavens the spirit. The clouds (mist) Jer_10:13 from the ends of the earth are the saints whom God has chosen from the least of the earth.
4. On Jer_10:14-16. It is manifest that the task of religion is not to make God, but to receive Him, who is, in faith. Every manufactured god is an idol, be it a visible one made with hands, or an invisible one made only in thought. The latter kind of idolatry is alas! very prevalent among us Christians. For a warning against such ruinous heresies, and for the confirmation of our faith in the God, whom as Christians we ought to serve, we institute on the basis of the text, a comparison between the manufactured gods and the God, of whom the Scriptures teach us. I. The manufactured gods, 1. are deceit, etc., Jer_10:14, b; 15, a. 2. They perish when they are visited (in the day of divine judgment upon them they vanish into nothing). 3. Those who made them are with all their skill put to shame. II. The God, of whom the Holy Scriptures teach us. 1. He is not a lifeless deceptive image, for He has created all things, the visible and the invisible (Jehovah Zebaoth). 2. Being the source of all life He cannot perish. 3. Those who serve Him are not put to shame, for He is their treasure, as they again are His heritage (He is not only infinitely exalted above time and space, but infinitely near us, His children).
5. On Jer_10:10. From these words of the prophet we may learn what it is in great affliction and sorrow of heart to bow under the mighty hand of God. It Isaiah 1, that a man recognize the suffering as his suffering, i.e., (a) as that which he has himself prepared, (b) as that which is right for him, i.e., not too heavy and not too light, but exactly corresponding to its beneficent purpose; 2, that they suffer willingly, (a) in patience, (b) in hope.
6. On Jer_10:23. Theme: Man proposes, God disposes. This Isaiah 1, a humbling of our pride, 2, a strong support of our hope.
Note.—Förster remarks that these words may serve for the text of a concio valedictoria.
7. On Jer_10:25. Theme: How we should behave under the chastisements of God. 1. We should humbly submit to them as necessary and wholesome means of improvement. 2. We should be certain that they will not then transgress those bounds nor proceed to our destruction.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain THE NOTHINGNESS OF THE FALSE GODS, Jer_10:1-5.
THE NOTHINGNESS OF THE FALSE GODS, Jer_10:1-5.
Several eminent German critics have pronounced against the genuineness of the first sixteen verses of this chapter. Among these is the scholarly and evangelical Nagelsbach. Some regard the passage as interpolated from Isaiah, while others, and among them Nagelsbach, reject this theory of its origin. Upon this general question we observe:
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1. The external evidence for the passage is practically perfect. It receives the unanimous testimony of the Hebrew MSS. and the ancient Versions. The partial qualification which this statement needs is, that four of the verses, namely, 6, 7, 8, and 10, are wanting in the Septuagint. But inasmuch as we meet with similar omissions everywhere in the Septuagint — it being estimated that about 2,700 of the Hebrew words in this book are unrepresented in that Version — very slight significance should attach to this fact. The only considerations which should shake our faith in the genuineness of these verses are those which come from within. And in the general it should be said, that internal evidence should be allowed to stand against clear and unanimous external testimony only when of the most positive and conclusive character. The hypothesis of ungenuineness should be accepted only when it becomes certain that no other can be admitted.
2. The reasons urged against this passage are: (a) That it interrupts the continuity of thought. But Jeremiah nowhere shows close logical coherence. The book is full of sudden and marked transitions. Its character is emotional rather than logical. (b) That the subject matter indicates a later time. But the passage is not inappropriate to any time, and especially to this one, in which idolatry was a living issue. (c) That the language differs from that ordinarily employed by Jeremiah. The opposite is the truth. The passage contains some of his characteristic expressions, such as the term vanity, for idols, day of visitation, etc., etc. (See a full list of these in Keil, in loc.) We conclude, then, that there is no sufficient ground for denying the genuineness of the passage. The eleventh verse of this chapter is in Chaldee, probably because it was a current aphorism familiar alike to the Jews and the Chaldeans, and inserted here in its popular form.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain Ch. Jer_10:1-16. The folly of idolatry
Ch. Jer_10:1-16. The folly of idolatry
It is now generally recognised that this passage is a later insertion, for (a) it breaks the connexion between Jer_9:1-22 and Jer_10:17 ff.; while by its omission the train of thought in the former is carried on smoothly in the latter; (b) elsewhere the people have been rebuked for being already devoted to idolatry (Jer_7:18; Jer_7:31), but here they are addressed as sincere and convinced worshippers of Jehovah, and are warned against imagining that idols are possessed of any real power, a warning which would be well adapted to the circumstances of the exiles in Babylon, surrounded as they were with its elaborate idol worship; (c) elsewhere Jeremiah’s argument is, “Expect no help from vain gods; they cannot save you” (Jer_2:28, Jer_11:12); here the argument is, “Do not fear them, they cannot harm you.” See LOT. p. 254. This does not indeed preclude the possibility that the passage is one which the prophet himself addressed at a later date to his brethren in captivity, and in fact it contains certain of his expressions, viz. vain, vanity, as applied to idols (Jer_10:3; Jer_10:15), in the time of their visitation (Jer_10:15). But the style generally is not that of Jeremiah, and resembles that of the second Isaiah (chs. 40–66), so that it may at any rate be attributed to that period. The MT. is an expansion of the original form of the Hebrew. This is shewn both by the superiority in logical sequence exhibited on the whole (but see on Jer_10:10) by the text of the LXX in the way of omission as well as change of order (see on Jer_10:5-8; Jer_10:10), and by the smoothness of metre which results from the adoption of the Greek form of text. Co. points out that we then have from Jer_10:2 onwards a series of clauses arranged in triplets, presenting a clear and well articulated connexion of thought. So too Gi. (in Jeremias Metrik) with slight differences in detail. Du. shortens the passage still further. We may add that Baruch, ch. 6 (The Epistle of Jeremy) is partly an amplification of this passage by one who was very familiar with particulars of the idolatry as practised at Babylon.
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The passage may be summarized thus. (i) Jer_10:1-5. Be not led away by heathen beliefs. The phenomena seen in the sky have no element of divinity about them. The gods are nothing beyond the materials put together by workmen. They are speechless, and incapable of movement. They are powerless both for good and for harm. (ii) Jer_10:6-16. Jehovah is not as these. He is the supreme God, Creator of the heavens and of the world, and Wielder of the powers of nature. The peoples of the earth may well tremble before Him, who has created all things and has chosen Israel for His own.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain (1) House of Israel.—This forms the link that connects…
X.
(1) House of Israel.—This forms the link that connects what follows with what precedes. The “house of Israel” had been told that it was “uncircumcised in heart,” on a level with the heathen; now the special sin of the heathen, which it was disposed to follow, is set forth in words of scorn and indignation.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain Whoever wrote the prophecy in Vers. 1-16 of this…
Whoever wrote the prophecy in Vers. 1-16 of this chapter, it was not Jeremiah; but of course, as the passage forms part of a canonical book, its claims to the character of a Scripture remain the same as if it were the work of our prophet. It is obvious at the very outset that it interrupts the connection; Vers. 17-25 stand in no relation to Vers. 1-16, but attach themselves most naturally (see below) to the concluding verses of Jeremiah 9. The author tolls us himself, as clearly as he can, that the people whom he addresses are free as yet (or at any rate have freed themselves) from the guilt of idolatry, and consequently cannot be the same as those who are so severely chastised for their polytheism in Jer_7:17, Jer_7:18, Jer_7:30, Jer_7:31. The style too is, on the whole, very different from that of the writer of the preceding chapters (see the details in the introduction to this passage in the Commentary of Naegelsbaeh). But how can we account for such an insertion? Only by the view already mentioned (supported by a large number of facts throughout the prophetic literature), that the prophecies were edited, and here and there supplemented by the "sons of the prophets" (if the term may be applied in a new sense), by persons providentially raised up for this purpose, and endowed with at least a younger son"s portion of the prophetic Spirit. In the times of the editor of Jeremiah, to whom we owe the first sixteen verses of this chapter, the Jews must have been in danger of falling into idolatry, and our prophet, guided by the Divine Spirit, took up the pen to counteract this danger. His name has not come down to us; indeed, self-abnegation is the characteristic of inspired writers. How uncertain is the authorship of at any rate not a few of the psalms, and of all the historical books? And have we a right to be surprised that the prophets too, absorbed in their glorious mission, have sometimes forgotten to hand on their names to posterity? It is of course possible, in the abstract, that some fragments of the passage are really due to Jeremiah; but how are we to distinguish them from the rest? Hitzig thinks that Vers. 6-8 and Ver. 10 are the great prophet"s work; but these are the very verses the origin of which is the most doubtful, since they are entirely omitted in the Septuagint. One thing is certain that the passage Vers. 1-16 stands in close relation to the latter part of the Book of Isaiah. The prophetic writer, whoever he was, had his mind saturated with the ideas and phraseology of that magnificent work. The similarity, however, is hardly so close as to justify the view that Isaiah 40-56, and Jer_10:1-16 are productions of the same inspired writer. It is no objection to the theory here advocated that the passage is found in the Septuagint; for no one has ever supposed that the process of editing the Scriptures was not already long since finished when the Alexandrine Version, or rather collection of versions, was made. It is a singular fact that Ver. 11 is written in Chaldee (see note below).
Vers. 1-5. The folly of paganism.
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I THE FOLLY OF PAGANISM PROVES THE WEAKNESS OF SUPERSTITIOUS FEARS. The Jews were tempted to fear astrological portents (Ver. 2) and idol-powers (Ver. 5). Yet a little reflection was enough to show that these things were impotent for harm. The lowest religion is a product of fear. Superstition finds converts where rational faith fails. The trouble thus resulting from the weakness of men can only be dissipated by boldly confronting the source of terror and thoroughly examining it.
II THE FOLLY OF PAGANISM REVEALS THE MISTAKE OF YIELDING TO ITS FASCINATIONS. For this miserable inanity the Jews were abandoning the God of heaven and earth! Religion should be accepted, not for its attractiveness, but for its truth. It must be a reality or it will be a snare. Yet how many are led to adopt systems of religion without any regard to the truth of the ideas they contain, but simply out of liking for their ritual, emotional sympathy for their poetry, or even mere love of the musical accompaniments of the worship connected with them!
III THE FOLLY OF PAGANISM IS AN EVIDENCE IN FAVOR OF THE TRUTH OF THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE. The reason and imagination of men in all ages, in all climes, in all degrees of civilization, have been set to the task of inventing religions (consciously sometimes, but for the most part unconsciously and therefore the more genuinely), and the result in all cases is far inferior to Christianity. A mere comparison of religions should lead us to prefer this, and a simple conclusion from such a comparison is that this must be of Divine origin.
HOMILIES BY S. CONWAY Vers. 1-17. Idolatry.
This section of Jeremiah"s prophecy is one of the notable passages in the. Scriptures concerning idolatry. It is like that in Ps 115, and in Isa 40 Isa 44. It states or suggests much of great interest on this subject, and which deserves to be well considered by us. There is
I THE TREMENDOUS FACT OF IDOLATRY. See:
1. The multitudes of mankind who have avowed such worship.
2. The wide extent of the world"s inhabited countries over which it prevails.
3. Its permanence. It has lasted on from age to age, and has been handed down unchanged from generation to generation, so that the prophet could challenge his countrymen to tell of any nation which had ever changed their gods. (cf. Jer_2:11) And though vast portions of mankind have professedly thrown aside their idols, yet there are still more who have not even at the present day. Idolatry is the dominant religion of the world today, if numbers are considered, even as it was in the days of Jeremiah, and this notwithstanding
II ITS MANIFEST ABSURDITY. How scathing is the ridicule which the prophet pours out upon such monstrous worship! With what sarcasm he dwells upon the fact of their being mere wooden dolls, hideous as a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers (cf. Exposition, Ver. 5), chipped into such shape as they have by the hands of the men who worship them, decked with tawdry finery, must be nailed up lest they should tumble down, and "must needs be borne because they cannot go" (Ver. 5), and are, of course, powerless either for evil or for good. And the prophet points out (Ver. 8) that the absurdity is none lessened when the idols are of a more costly sort. They may be plated with silver and adorned with gold (Ver. 9), and the workmanship may be of a much more elaborate and artistic kind. But it is all the same; the idol is nothing but a piece of wood, and that which is taught about them is "a doctrine of vanities," i.e. utterly false and absurd. But though idolatry be thus manifestly absurd, yet we are forced to admit the fact of
III ITS NEVERTHELESS STRANGE BUT STRONG ATTRACTIVENESS. How else can not only the multitude of its votaries be accounted for, and their fidelity to it, but also the high rank and leading position of those nations who adhered to it? They were not mere barbarous savages who worshipped idols, but the foremost peoples of the world. The empires of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Greece, Rome, were all sworn upholders of idolatry (cf. Acts 17). And today it is not the mere fetish-worshippers of the South Seas and Africa who are idolaters, but people such as the Chinese and Hindus to say nothing of those who in Christian Churches bow down before tinsel-decked images or pictures of virgins, apostles, and saints, and, if they do not worship them, render them homage which can hardly be distinguished from worship. And a yet further proof of this attraction is that the well-instructed people of God, the seed of Israel, the possessors of the oracles of God, were forever falling into this sin. This entire chapter is one appeal and protest against their so doing. And we know how often in the past they had bowed down to idols. The command which stands at the head of the Decalogue, by its position there, by its fullness of expression, and by the severity of its sanctions, shows that the attraction of the idolatry which it denounced was indeed terrible, and therefore needed to be thus solemnly forbidden. And age after age the same command had to be repeated, and its violation sternly punished, notwithstanding that (Ver. 16) "the Portion of Jacob" was "not like" these wretched idols no indeed, but was the alone true God, the living God, the everlasting King (Ver. 10). And yet there were needed this command and appeal; yes, and the consuming fire of God"s wrath which fell upon Israel in their captivity, before the taint of idolatry could be burnt out of them. Now, how was this? Note, therefore
IV ITS PROBABLE REASON AND CAUSE. We cannot observe the tremendous fact of idolatry without being led to inquire into its origin. It is not sufficient to refer to the license it gave to the sensual nature of man; if such license were all that was desired, why couple it with some form of worship? The explanation must lie deeper than this. And that missionary would get on very poorly with any tolerably educated heathen if he were to assume that the idolater worshipped the hideous idol before which he bows "himself down. He would tell you that he did nothing of the kind, but that which he worshipped was the unseen powers of which that idol was the symbol. No doubt idolatry degenerates into actual idol-worship. That with which something Divine has been so long associated comes to be regarded as itself Divine, and worshipped accordingly. And then idolatry has sunk down into fetishism. And it may be often seen where you would least expect it. But originally idolatry was not the worship of images. That worship may probably be thus explained.
1. Man cannot do without a deity of whom, in some form or other, he must be conscious, and whose presence he can realize so as to be able to look to him in time of need. Man cannot be a thorough atheist. His instinctive religiousness and tendency to worship cannot be ever kept under. For a while it may, but let heavy sorrow come, or let fear and dread fill his mind, and he will, he must, then call upon God.
2. But God will not reveal himself to us except to our spirits. He can be only spiritually discerned. Not through any of our senses, or through our intellect, but through the Spirit alone. "They that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
3. But such coming to God involves purity of heart and life. "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." And not only purity, but great spiritual effort. How difficult we find it to realize the presence of God, to hold down our minds, and to summon the energies of the will when we pray! "We know not how to pray as we ought." And permitted sin, defiling the conscience and destroying our confidence, will ever hinder spiritual worship.
4. But these imperative conditions of worship that it should be in spirit, and that it should be pure men like not. Still, they must worship. What, then, is to be done? The idol is the solution. To avoid the strain and effort of the spirit, men have taken as a symbol some material thing as the Israelites at Sinai took the golden calf and so have sought to represent God to their minds. The idolater persuades himself he cannot know the Deity directly, and therefore will avail himself of the aid some sensuous object will afford. And such symbol he can carry about with him, and there is no need of purity of heart for such worship it can be done without. What wonder, then, that man, averse to spiritual exercises and sensual-hearted, should have everywhere fled to idolatry, as in fact he has done? It is an endeavor to have the favor of God on cheaper terms than he demands; on conditions easier and more agreeable to our fallen nature. But in regard to the idolatries into which Judah and Jerusalem so often fell, there must be remembered not only the force of those universal causes of idolatry now considered, but the further force of powerful example all around them. Who were the mighty nations with whom they had most to do? Egypt, Assyria, Babylon. Tyre also, in her wealth and might, stood on their northern border, and yet others, whose fame reached them from afar, flourished and grew strong. But all these worshipped idols. Happiness, success, strength, and power seemed to be with these nations and not with the worshippers of Jehovah. And all this Judah saw and deeply observed, and at length came to believe that it was better for them to serve idols than to serve God. (for proof of this, Jer_44:17-19) For Israel to keep from idolatry was to swim against wind and tide, and to do so when wind and tide promised to bear them or to a condition of prosperity greater than they had ever known. And Jeremiah knew that in Babylon, where they were going, they would be exposed to the full force of this temptation. The devil of idolatry would come to them, and, pointing to the glory of Babylon, would say, "All these things will I give thee, if," etc. And to fortify them against this temptation was the object of the prophet"s earnest appeal. The tempter would suggest to them, "You have lost everything by worshipping God. Your conquerors, who hold you now in their power, and have destroyed your city, your temple, your land, have gained all their glory by worshipping their gods. Do you the same; learn their ways.
V ITS CONSEQUENCES. These have been very terrible. With Israel God dealt very sternly. His direct vengeance came upon them again and again. It was hanging over them at this time as a dark thunder-cloud. But besides this, there were the natural results of such worship results which were conspicuous in Judah and Jerusalem, and have ever been so in all idolatrous nations (cf. Ver. 8). They became "brutish," "given over to vile affections". (cf. Rom_1:20-32)
VI ITS SURE BUT ONLY ANTIDOTE. Living faith in the living God this alone, but this surely, would enable them to resist, not only the clamor and cravings of their lower nature, but also the seductive force of the seeming success which idolatry had won and they had lost. Only such faith would serve them, and hence, in Vers. 6, 7, 10-13, 16, the prophet bids them remember the incomparable glory, majesty, and power of the Lord, the true God, the living God (Ver. 10), and the terribleness of his wrath. He reminds them that God is Creator (Ver. 12) and Preserver (Ver. 13). He who formed the earth governs it still, and he is their God, and they are his people. He is their "Portion," and "Israel is the rod of his inheritance" (Ver. 16). And this which would be Israel"s safeguard must be ours still. Let that living faith in the living God be lost, and at once resort will be bad to symbols and substitutes for God, which, though in form they may be far different from the idols of the heathen, yet in substance and effect are the same.
VII ITS PRESENT-DAY LESSONS. There are such, for the peril of Israel is our own.
1. For we also may and many do substitute reverence for those things which are associated with the worship of God for that worship in spirit and in truth which he alone cares for. Symbols, sacraments, creeds, Churches, religious observances, any one of these may become an idol, that is, a substitute for God. They demand no strain and energy of our spiritual nature; the senses or the intellect can grasp them; and they make no such strenuous demand upon the surrender of the will, the yielding of the heart to God; they will let us do as we like, if not entirely yet far more than true spiritual worship ever will. And thus, though we be called Christians, we may be idolaters after all.
2. And let us guard against being deceived by the sanction which worldly success and present good so often lend to ways which God forbids. There was very much around Israel whose desirableness said to them, "Come with us, and we will do you good." Idolatry did seem to answer, whilst their religion did not. And the way of the wicked will often seem to prosper, whilst waters of a full cup" of sorrow "are wrung out" to the people of God. The mighty bribe which Satan pressed upon our blessed Lord, if he would but renounce the way of the cross appointed for him by his Father, and take "all the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them that same bribe is pressed upon myriad souls still.
3. By constant and earnest worship of God let us cherish and keep alive in our hearts that living faith in the living God made known to us in the Lord Jesus Christ, which alone can, but surely will, meet and overcome all those temptations to idolatry, which now, as of old, beset every human soul. C.
HOMILIES BY D. YOUNG Vers. 1-12. What men fear and what they ought to fear.
I WHAT MEN FEAR. They fear mere images of theft own manufacture. Note the connection between Vers. 2 and 3. In Ver. 2 the heathen are spoken of as being dismayed at the signs of heaven. Probably these signs, considered in their more particular and direct connection with the dismay, were really images on earth, representing the supposed Divine dignity. of the bodies in the heavens. The heavenly bodies were signs to the believer in Jehovah signs of the power and wisdom of Jehovah. But what signs could they be to the heathen? In their eyes they were themselves Divine realities, and the signs were on earth in the shape of images. If this view be correct, it makes dismay at the signs of heaven look more than ever absurd; for these signs were of man"s own making. He goes out to the wood and cuts down one tree, and it supplies material for common use, beams and flooring and furniture for his dwelling-place. He takes another tree, neighbor and of the very same kind, and of this he makes an image, to be an object of dread, to be approached with trembling solicitude and doubt. The very chips and shavings that come off as it is being shaped may be burnt, but it itself is sacred, decked with silver and gold, perfected by the most cunning art of the time, surrounded probably with the choicest treasures of the land where it is worshipped. And yet in itself it is nothing. When it grew in the wood it bore leaves and fruit, and had vital movement in it. By its life it spoke to those who had ears to understand. Other trees cut down, even when they become dead wood, are useful; but here is dead wood not only useless but so treated that it becomes full of the worst peril to all associated with it, a center of abominations, delusions, and cruelties. And it must be felt as a very extraordinary thing that what men thus make with their own hands should be regarded with such perpetual dread and circumspection. Partly it may be accounted for by the force of education. Those who had been brought up having their minds sedulously filled with certain associations in respect to these images, would either fail to see any absurdity in fearing them or, in spite of the absurdity, would be unable to get over the fear. It is very absurd to be afraid of walking through some secluded churchyard at midnight, but many people could only do so with the utmost trepidation even those who show plenty of good sense in their ordinary affairs. The mystery lies not so much in the continuance of image-worship as in the origin of it; and this is a mystery we have no power to penetrate. A more practical thing is to take heed to the counsel here given. These works of your own hands cannot hurt you. Neglect them, they cannot resent the negligence. Pile up before them all you can in the way of gift and honor, and yet you get not the least good in return. You may be hurt by other works of your hands, but assuredly not by them; and if you are hurt as it seems by the instrumentality of these images yet be sure of this, that the hurt comes from Jehovah"s anger because you are honoring and worshipping- the creature in opposition to the Creator. And if it be said, "How does all this dissuasion against image-worship concern us? The answer is plain that, although we do not make images of wood, we may have conceptions in our own minds which are as truly the cause of empty terror as any visible image that man ever made. The ultimate meaning of the counsel here is that it is vain to fear anything or any one save the omnipotent God.
II WHAT MEN OUGHT TO FEAR. Images are presented in this passage, first, in themselves, in all their emptiness, as pure fabrications of human superstitions; and then they are brought into the presence of the exceeding glory of Jehovah, and thus the exhibition of their nothingness is completed. Moreover, the glory of Jehovah shines more brightly still by contrast with the darkness and shame that are over against it. He is the great and strong One, the living One, and the everlasting King. The ever-living God over against dead and deeded matter! can there be a greater contrast? And to bring out God"s strength, his strength to make his wrath felt as real suffering in the lives of those who displease him, the contrast is made, not between the living God and dead idols, but between the omnipotent Ruler and the kings of the nations. Take the kings of the nations; take him who rules the widest territory, controls the largest resources, shows in himself the greatest resolution and force of character, achieves the most splendid reign that history can record take such a one, and yet what is he over against Jehovah? Jehovah is the King of the nations. It is his power that moulds them and gives them their destiny, their place in his economy of the ages. And as Jeremiah contemplates all this, he says, "Who would not fear thee?" Certainly there are none but what would fear, and with a properly befitting fear, if only they could properly regard the object presented to them. But while men are fearing that which need not be feared, they depart further and further from a sense of him who holds in his self-sufficing being complete power over all their best interests. When they suffer, being deceived by lying lips, they attribute their suffering to the wrath of a God whom they themselves imagine; and so, fixing their minds by a kind of fascination on the wrong cause, they fail to have even the least suspicion of the right one. If, when a blow falls upon us, we could trace that blow back, and see how much of it comes from God, and with what purpose it comes, then how much useless suffering would be spared! But blows come on men in the dark, and they prefer to remain in the dark with their evil deeds rather than be freed from their misconceptions by coming to the light. Y.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain
CHAPTER VI
THE IDOLS OF THE HEATHEN AND THE GOD OF ISRAEL
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Jer_10:1-16
THIS fine piece is altogether isolated from the surrounding context, which it interrupts in a very surprising manner. Neither the style nor the subject, neither the idioms nor the thoughts expressed in them, agree with what we easily recognise as Jeremiahs work. A stronger contrast can hardly be imagined than that which exists between the leading motive of this oracle as it stands, and that of the long discourse in which it is embedded with as little regard for continuity as an aerolite exhibits when it buries itself in a plain. In what precedes, the prophets fellow countrymen have been accused of flagrant and defiant idolatry; {Jer_7:17 sqq., Jer_7:30 sqq.} the opening words of this piece imply a totally different situation. "To the way of the nations become not accustomed, and of the signs of heaven be not afraid; for the nations are afraid of them." Jeremiah would not be likely to warn inveterate apostates not to "accustom themselves" to idolatry. The words presuppose, not a nation whose idolatry was notorious, and had just been the subject of unsparing rebuke and threats of imminent destruction; they presuppose a nation free from idolatry, but exposed to temptation from surrounding heathenism. The entire piece contains no syllable of reference to past or present unfaithfulness on the part of Israel. Here at the outset, and throughout, Israel is implicitly contrasted with "the nations" as the servant of Iahvah with the foolish worshippers of lifeless gods. There is a tone of contempt in the use of the term "goyim"-"To the way of the goyim accustom not yourselvesfor the goyim are afraid of them" (of the signs of heaven); or as the Septuagint puts it yet more strongly, "for they" (the besotted "goyim") "are afraid" (i.e., worship) "before them"; as though that alone - the sense of Israels superiority-should be sufficient to deter Israelites from any bowings in the house of Rimmon. Neither this contemptuous use of the term "goyim," "Gentiles," nor the scathing ridicule of the false gods and their devotees, is in the manner of Jeremiah. Both are characteristic of a later period. The biting scorn of image worship, the intensely vivid perception of the utter incommensurableness of Iahvah, the Creator of all things, with the handiwork of the carpenter and the silversmith, are well known and distinctive features of the great prophets of the Exile (see especially Isaiah 40-46). There are plenty of allusions to idolatry in Jeremiah; but they are expressed in a tone of fervid indignation, not of ridicule. It was the initial offence, which issued in a hopeless degradation of public and private morality, and would have for its certain consequence the rejection and ruin of the nation. {Jer_2:5-13; Jer_2:20-28; Jer_3:1-9; Jer_3:23 sqq.} All the disasters, past and present, which had befallen the country, were due to it (Jer_7:9; Jer_7:17 sqq., Jer_7:30 sqq., Jer_8:2, etc.). The people are urged to repent and return to Iahvah with their whole heart, {Jer_3:12 sqq., Jer_4:3 sqq., Jer_5:21 sqq., Jer_6:8} as the only means of escape from deadly peril. The Baals are things that cannot help or save; {Jer_2:8; Jer_2:1} but the prophet does not say, as here, {Jer_10:5} "Fear them not: they cannot harm you!" The piece before us breathes not one word about Israels apostasy, the urgent need of repentance, the impending ruin. Taken as a whole, it neither harmonises with Jeremiahs usual method of argument, nor does it suit the juncture of affairs implied by the language which precedes and follows. {Jer_7:1-9; Jer_7:26; Jer_10:17-25} For let us suppose that this oracle occupies its proper place here, and was actually written by Jeremiah at the crisis which called forth the preceding and following utterances. Then the warning cry, "Be not afraid of the signs of heaven!" can only mean "Be not afraid of the Powers under whose auspices the Chaldeans are invading your country; Iahvah, the true and living God, wilt protect you!" But consolation of this kind would be diametrically opposed to the doctrine which Jeremiah shares with all his predecessors; the doctrine that Iahvah Himself is the prime cause of the coming trouble, and that the heathen invaders are His instruments of wrath (Jer_5:9 sq., Jer_6:6); it would imply assent to that fallacious confidence in Iahvah, which the prophet has already done his utmost to dissipate. {Jer_6:14; Jer_7:4 sq.}
The details of the idolatry satirised in the piece before us point to Chaldea rather than to Canaan. We have here a zealous worship of wooden images overlaid and otherwise adorned with silver and gold, and robed in rich garments of violet and purple. {cf. Jos_7:21} This does not agree with what we know of Judean practice in Jeremiahs time, when, besides the worship of the Queen of Heaven, the people adored "stocks and stones"; probably the wooden symbols of the goddess Asherah and rude sun pillars, but hardly works of the costly kind described in the text, which indicate a wealthy people whose religion reflected an advanced condition of the arts and commerce. The designation of the objects of heathen worship as "the signs of heaven," and the gibe at the custom of carrying the idol statues in procession, {Isa_46:1; Isa_46:7} also point us to Babylon, "the land of graven images," {Jer_50:38} and the home of star worship and astrological superstition. {Isa_47:13}
From all these considerations it would appear that not Israel in Canaan but Israel in Chaldea is addressed in this piece by some unknown prophet, whose leaflet has been inserted among the works of Jeremiah. In that case, the much disputed eleventh verse, written in Aramaic, and as such unique in the volume of the prophets proper, may really have belonged to the original piece. Aramaic was the common language of intercourse between East and West both before and during the captivity; {cf. 2Ki_18:26} and the suggestion that the tempted exiles should answer in this dialect the heathen who pressed them to join in their worship, seems suitable enough. The verse becomes very suspicious, if we suppose that the whole piece is really part and parcel of Jeremiahs discourse, and as such addressed to the Judeans in the reign of Jehoiakim. Ewald, who maintains this view upon grounds that cannot be called convincing, thinks the Aramaic verse was originally a marginal annotation on Jer_10:15, and suggests that it is a quotation from some early book similar to the Book of Daniel. At all events, it is improbable that the verse proceeded from the pen of Jeremiah, who writes Aramaic nowhere else, not even in the letter to the exiles of the first Judean captivity (chapter 29).
But might not the piece be an address which Jeremiah sent to the exiles of the Ten Tribes, who were settled in Assyria, and with whom it is otherwise probable that he cultivated some intercourse? The expression "House of Israel" (Jer_10:1) has been supposed to indicate this. That expression, however, occurs in the immediately preceding context, {Jer_9:26} as does also that of "the nations"; facts which may partially explain why the passage we are discussing occupies its present position. The unknown author of the Apocryphal Letter of Jeremiah and the Chaldee Targumist appear to have held the opinion that Jeremiah wrote the piece for the benefit of the exiles carried away with Jehoiachin in the first Judean captivity. The Targum introduces the eleventh verse thus: "This is a copy of the letter which Jeremiah the prophet sent to the remnant of the elders of the captivity which was in Babylon. And if the peoples among whom ye are shall say unto you, Fear the Errors, O house of Israel! thus shall ye answer and thus shall ye say unto them: The Errors whom ye fear are (but) errors, in which there is no profit: they from the heavens are not able to bring down rain, and from the earth they cannot make fruits to spring: they and those who fear them will perish from the earth, and will be brought to an end from under these heavens. And thus shall ye say unto them: We fear Him that maketh the earth by His power," etc. (Jer_10:12). The phrase "the remnant of the elders of the captivity which was" (or "who were") "in Babylon" is derived from Jer_29:1. But how utterly different are the tone and substance of that message from those of the one before us! Far from warning his captive countrymen against the state worship of Babylon, far from satirising its absurdity, Jeremiah bids the exiles be contented with their new home, and to pray for the peace of the city, The false prophets who appear at Babylon prophesy in Iahvahs name (Jer_9:15, Jer_9:21), and in denouncing them Jeremiah says not a word about idolatry. It is evident from the whole context that he did not fear it in the case of the exiles of Jehoiachins captivity. (See also the simile of the Good and Bad Figs, chapter 24, which further illustrates the prophets estimation of the earlier body of exiles.)
The Greek Epistle of Jeremiah, which in MSS is sometimes appended to Baruch, and which Fritzsche refers to the Maccabean times, appear to be partially based upon the passage we are considering. Its heading is: "Copy of a letter which Jeremiah sent unto those who were about to be carried away captives to Babylon, by the king of the Babylonians; to announce to them as was enjoined him by God." It then begins thus: "On account of your sins which ye have sinned before God ye will be carried away to Babylon as captives by Nabuchodonosor king of the Babylonians. Having come, then, into Babylon, ye will be there many years, and a long time, until seven generations; but after this I will bring you forth from thence in peace. But now ye will see in Babylon gods, silver and golden and wooden, borne upon shoulders, showing fear" (an object of fear) "to the nations. Beware then, lest ye also become like unto the nations, and fear take you at them, when ye see a multitude before and behind them worshipping them. But say ye in the mind: Thee it behoveth us to worship, O Lord! For Mine angel is with you, and He is requiring your lives." The whole epistle is well worth reading as a kind of paraphrase of our passage. "For their tongue is carven" (or polished) "by a carpenter, and themselves are overlaid with gold and silver, but lies they are and they cannot speak." "They being cast about with purple apparel have their face wiped on account of the dust from the house, which is plentiful upon them" (13). "But he holds a dagger with right hand and an axe, but himself from war and robbers he will not" (cannot) "deliver." {15, cf. Jer_10:15} "He is like one of the housebeams" (20, cf. Jer_10:8, and perhaps Jer_10:5). "Upon their body and upon their head alight bats, swallows, and the birds, likewise also the cats; whence ye will know that they are not gods; therefore fear them not". {cf. Jer_10:5} "At all cost are theypurchased, in which there is no spirit." {25; cf. Jer_10:9-14} "Footless, upon shoulders they are carried, displaying their own dishonour to men" (26). "Neither if they suffer evil from any one, nor if good, will they be able to recompense" (34; cf. Jer_10:5). "But they that serve them will be ashamed" (39; cf. Jer_10:14). "By carpenters and goldsmiths are they prepared: they become nothing but what the craftsmen wish them to become. And the very men that prepare them cannot last long; how then are the things prepared by them likely to do so? for they left lies and a reproach to them that come after. For whenever war and evils come upon them, the priests consult together where to hide them. How then is it possible not to perceive that they are not gods, who neither save themselves from war nor from evils? For being of wood and overlaid with gold and silver they will be known hereafter, that they are lies. To all the nations and to the kings it will be manifest that they are not gods but works of mens hands, and no work of God is in them." {45-51; cf. Jer_10:14-15} "A wooden pillar in a palace is more useful than the false gods" (59). "Signs among nations they will not show in heaven, nor yet will they shine like the sun, nor give light as the moon" (67). "For as a scarecrow in a cucumber bed guarding nothing, so their gods are wooden and overlaid with gold and silver." {70 cf. Jer_10:5} The mention of the sun, moon, and stars, the lightning, the wind, the clouds, and fire "sent forth from above," as totally unlike the idols in "forms and powers," seems to show that the author had Jer_10:12-13 before him.
When we turn to the Septuagint, we are immediately struck by its remarkable omissions. The four verses Jer_10:6-8 and Jer_10:10 do not appear at all in this oldest of the versions: while the ninth is inserted between the first clause and the remainder of the fifth verse. Now, on the one hand, it is just the verses which the LXX translates, which both in style and matter contrast so strongly with Jeremiahs authentic work, and are plainly incongruous with the context and occasion; while, on the other hand, the omitted verses contain nothing which points positively to another author than Jeremiah, and, taken by themselves, harmonise very well with what may be supposed to have been the prophets feeling at the actual juncture of affairs.
There is none at all like Thee, O Iahvah!
Great art Thou, and great is Thy Name in might!
Who should not fear Thee, O King of the nations? for tis Thy due,
For among all the wise of the nations
And in all their kingdom there is none at all like Thee.
And in one thing they are brute-like and dull;
In the doctrine of Vanities. which are wood!
But Iahvah Elohim is truth;
He is a living God, and an eternal King:
At His wrath the earth quaketh
And nations abide not His indignation.
As Hitzig has observed, it is natural that now, as the terrible decision approaches, the prophet should seek and find comfort in the thought of the all-overshadowing greatness of the God of Israel. If, however, we suppose these verses to be Jeremiahs, we can hardly extend the same assumption to verses Jer_10:12-16, in spite of one or two expressions of his which occur in them; and, upon the whole, the linguistic argument seems to weigh decisively against Jeremiahs authorship of this piece (see Naegelsbach).
It may be true enough that "the basis and possibility of the true prosperity and the hope of the genuine community are unfolded in these strophes" (Ewald); but that does not prove that they belong to Jeremiah. Nor can I see much force in the remark that "didactic language is of another kind than that of pure prophecy." But when the same critic affirms that "the description of the folly of idolatry is also quite new, and clearly serves as a model for the much more elaborate ones, Isa_40:19-24 (20), Isa_41:7, Isa_44:8-20, Isa_46:5-7"; he is really giving up the point in dispute. Jer_10:12-16 are repeated in the prophecy against Babylon; {Isa_51:15-19} but this hardly proves that "the later prophet, Isaiah 50 and Isaiah 51, found all these words in our piece"; it is only evidence, so far as it goes, for those verses themselves.
The internal connection which Ewald assumes, is not self-evident. There is no proof that "the thought that the gods of the heathen might again rule" occurred for one moment to Jeremiah on this occasion; nor the thought that "the maintenance of the ancient true religion in conflict with the heathen must produce the regeneration of Israel." There is no reference throughout the disputed passage to the spiritual condition of the people, which is, in fact, presupposed to be good; and the return in verses Jer_10:17-25 "to the main subject of the discourse" is inexplicable on Ewalds theory that the whole chapter, omitting Jer_10:11, is one homogeneous structure.
"Hear ye the word that Iahvah spake upon you, O house of Israel! Thus said Iahvah." The terms imply a particular crisis in the history of Israel, when a Divine pronouncement was necessary to the guidance of the people. Iahvah speaks indeed in all existence and in all events, but His voice becomes audible, is recognised as His, only when human need asserts itself in some particular juncture of affairs. Then, in view of the actual emergency, the mind of Iahweh declares itself by the mouth of His proper spokesmen; and the prophetic "Thus said Iahvah" contrasts the higher point of view with the lower, the heavenly and spiritual with the earthly and the carnal; it sets forth the aspect of things as they appear to God, in the sharpest antithesis to the aspect of things as they appear to the natural unilluminated man. "Thus said Iahvah": This is the thought of the Eternal, this is His judgment upon present conditions and passing events, whatever your thought and your judgment may happen or incline to be! Such, I think, is the essential import of this vox solennis, this customary formula of the dialect of prophecy.
On the present occasion, the crisis, in view of which a prophet declares the mind of Iahvah, is not a political emergency but a religious temptation. The day for the former has long since passed away, and the depressed and scattered communities of exiled Israelites are exposed among other trials to the constant temptation to sacrifice to present expediency the only treasure which they have salted from the wreck of their country, the faith of their fathers, the religion of the prophets. The uncompromising tone of this isolated oracle, the abruptness with which the writer at once enters in medias res, the solemn emphasis of his opening imperatives, proves that this danger pressed at the time with peculiar intensity. "Thus said Iahvah: Unto the way of the nations use not yourselves, And of the signs of heaven stand not in awe, for that the nations stand in awe of them!". {cf. Lev_18:3 Eze_20:18} The "way" of the nations is their religion, the mode and manner of their worship; {Jer_5:4-5} and the exiles are warned not to suffer themselves to be led astray by example, as they had been in the land of Canaan; they are not to adore the signs of heaven, simply because they see their conquerors adoring them. The "signs of heaven" would seem to be the sun, moon, and stars, which were the objects of Babylonian worship; although the passage is unhappily not free from ambiguity. Some expositors have preferred to think of celestial phenomena such as eclipses and particular conjunctions of the heavenly bodies, which in those days were looked upon as portents, foreshadowing the course of national and individual fortunes. That there is really a reference to the astrological observation of the stars, is a view which finds considerable support in the words addressed to Babylon on the eve of her fall, by a prophet, who, if not identical was at least contemporary with him whose message we are discussing. In the forty-seventh chapter of the Book of Isaiah, it is said to Babylon: "Let now them that parcel out the heavens, that gaze at the stars, arise and save thee, prognosticating month by month the things that will come upon thee". {Isa_47:13} The "signs of heaven" are, in this case, the supposed indications of coming events furnished by the varying appearances of the heavenly bodies; and one might even suppose that the immediate occasion of our prophecy was some eclipse of the sun or moon, or some remarkable conjunction of the planets which at the time was exciting general anxiety among the motley populations of Babylonia. The prophecy then becomes a remarkable instance of the manner in which an elevated spiritual faith, free from all the contaminating and blinding influences of selfish motives and desires, may rise superior to universal superstition, and boldly contradict the suggestions of what is accounted the highest wisdom of the time, anticipating the results though not the methods nor the evidence of science, at an epoch when science is as yet in the mythological stage. And the prophet might well exclaim in a tone of triumph, "Among all the wise of the nations none at all is like unto Thee, O Lord, as a source of true wisdom and understanding for the guidance of life" (Jer_10:7).
The inclusion of eclipses and comets among the signs of heaven here spoken of has been thought to be barred by the considerations that these are sometimes alleged by the prophets themselves as signs of coming judgment exhibited by the God of Israel: that, as a matter of fact, they were as mysterious and awful to the Jews as to their heathen neighbours; and that what is here contemplated is not the terror inspired by rare occasional phenomena of this kind, but a habitual superstition in relation to some ever-present causes. It is certain that in another prophecy against Babylon, preserved in the Book of Isaiah, it is declared that, as a token of the impending destruction, "the stars of heaven and the Orions thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause his light to shine"; {Isa_13:10} and the similar language of the prophet Joel is well known. {Joe_2:2; Joe_2:10; Joe_2:30-31; Joe_3:15} But these objections are not conclusive, for what our author is denouncing is the heathen association of "the signs of the heavens," whatever may be intended by that expression, with a false system of religious belief. It is a special kind of idolatry that he contemplates, as is clear from the immediate context. Not only does the parallel clause "Unto the way of the nations use not yourselves" imply a gradual conformity to a heathen religion; not only is it the fact that the Hebrew phrase rendered in our versions "Be not dismayed!" may imply religious awe or worship, {Mal_2:5} as indeed terms denoting fear or dread are used by the Semitic languages in general; but the prophet at once proceeds to an exposure of the absurdity of image worship: "For the ordinances" (established modes of worship; 2Ki_17:8; here, established objects of worship) "of the peoples are a mere breath" (i.e., naught)! for it (the idol) "is a tree, which out of the forest one felled" (so the accents); "the handiwork of the carpenter with the bill. With silver and with gold one adorneth it" (or, "maketh it bright"); "with nails and with hammers they make them fast, that one sway not" (or, "that there be no shaking"). "Like the scarecrow of a garden of gourds are they, and they cannot speak; they are carried and carried, for they cannot take a step" (or, "march"): "be not afraid of them, for they cannot hurt, neither is it in their power to benefit!" "Be not afraid of them!" returns to the opening charge: "Of the signs of heaven stand not in awe!". {cf. Gen_31:42; Gen_31:53; Isa_8:12-13} Clearly, then, the signa coeli are the idols against whose worship the prophet warns his people; and they denote "the sun, the moon, the constellations" (of the Zodiac), "and all the host of heaven". {2Ki_23:5} We know that the kings of Judah, from Ahaz onwards, derived this worship from Assyria, and that its original home was Babylon, where in every temple the exiles would see images of the deities presiding over the heavenly bodies, such as Samas (the sun) and his consort Aa (the moon) at Sippara, Merodach (Jupiter) and his son Nebo (Mercurius) at Babylon and Borsippa, Nergal (Mars) at Cutha, daily served with a splendid and attractive ritual, and honoured with festivals and processions on the most costly and magnificent scale. The prophet looks through all this outward display to the void within, he draws no subtle distinction between the symbol and the thing symbolised; he accepts the popular confusion of the god with his image, and identifies all the deities of the heathen with the materials out of which their statues are made by the hands of men. And he is justified in doing this, because there can be but one god in his sense of the word; a multitude of gods is a contradiction in terms. From this point of view, he exposes the absurdity of the splendid idolatry which his captive countrymen see all around them. Behold that thing, he cries, which they call a god, and before which they tremble with religious fear! It is nothing but a tree trunk hewn in the forest, and trimmed into shape by the carpenter, and plated with silver and gold, and fixed on its pedestal with hammer and nails, for fear it should fall! Its terrors are empty terrors, like those of the palm trunk, rough hewn into human shape, and set up among the melons to frighten the birds away.
"Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum,
Cum faber, incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum,
Maluit esse deum. Deus inde ego, furum aviumque
Maxima formido." (Hor., "Sat." 1:8, 1, sqq.)
Though the idol has the outward semblance of a man, it lacks his distinguishing faculty of speech; it is as dumb as the scarecrow, and as powerless to move from its place; so it has to be borne about on mens shoulders (a mocking allusion to the grand processions of the gods, which distinguished the Babylonian festivals). Will you then be afraid of things that can do neither good nor harm? asks the prophet: in terms that recall the challenge of another, or perchance of himself, to the idols of Babylon: "Do good or do evil, that we may look at each other and see it together." {Isa_41:23} In utter contrast with the impotence, the nothingness of all the gods of the nations, whether Israels neighbours or his invaders, stands, forever the God of Israel. "There is none at all like Thee, O Iahweh! great art Thou, and great is Thy Name in might!" With different vowel points, we might render, "Whence (cometh) Thy like, O Iahvah?" This has been supported by reference to Jer_30:7 : "Alas! for great is that day. Whence" (is one) "like it?" (meayin?); but there too, as here, we may equally well translate, "there is none like it." The interrogative, in fact, presupposes a negative answer; and the Hebrew particle usually rendered "there is not, are not" ("ayin, en") has been explained as originally identical with the interrogative "where?" ("ayin," implied in "meayin," "from where?" "whence?" cf. Job_14:10 : "where is he?" =" he is not"). The idiom of the text expresses a more emphatic negation than the ordinary form would do; and, though rare, is by no means altogether unparalleled. {see Isa_40:17; Isa_41:24; and other references in Gesenius} "Great art Thou and great is Thy Name in might"; that is to say, Thou art great in Thyself, and great in repute or manifestation among men, in respect of "might," virile strength or prowess. {Psa_21:13} Unlike the do nothing idols, Iahvah reveals His strength in deeds of strength. {cf. Exo_15:3 sqq.} "Who should not fear Thee, Thou King of the nations?" (cf. Jer_5:22) "for Thee it beseemeth" it is Thy due, and Thine only): "for among all the wise of the nations and in all their realm, there is none at all" (as in Jer_10:6) "like Thee." Religious fear is instinctive in man; but, whereas the various nations lavish reverence upon innumerable objects utterly unworthy of the name of deity, rational religion sees clearly that there can be but One God, working His supreme will in heaven and earth; and that this Almighty being is the true "King of the nations," and disposes their destinies as well as that of His people Israel, although they know Him not, but call other imaginary beings their "kings" (a common Semitic designation of a national god: Psa_20:9; Isa_6:5; Isa_8:20. He, then, is the proper object of the instinct of religious awe; all the peoples of the earth owe Him adoration, even though they be ignorant of their obligation; worship is His unshared prerogative.
"Among all the wise of the nations and in all their realm, not one is like Thee!" Who are the wise thus contrasted with the Supreme God? Are the false gods the reputed wise ones, giving pretended counsel to their deluded worshippers through the priestly oracle? The term "kingdom" seems to indicate this view, if we take "their kingdom" to mean the kingdom of the wise ones of the nations, that is, the countries whose "kings" they are, where they are worshipped as such. The heathen in general, and the Babylonians in particular, ascribed wisdom to their gods. But there is no impropriety from an Old Testament point of view in comparing Iahvahs wisdom with the wisdom of man. The meaning of the prophet may be simply this, that no earthly wisdom, craft, or political sagacity, not even in the most powerful empires such as Babylon, can be a match for Iahvah the All-wise, or avail to thwart His purposes. {Isa_31:1-2} "Wise" and "sagacious" are titles which the kings of Babylon continually assert for themselves in their extant inscriptions; and the wisdom and learning of the Chaldeans were famous in the ancient world. Either view will agree with what follows: "But in one thing they"-the nations, or their wise men-"will turn out brutish and besotted": (in) "the teaching of Vanities which are wood." The verse is difficult; but the expression "the teaching (or doctrine) of Vanities" may perhaps be regarded as equivalent to "the idols taught of"; and then the second half of the verse is constructed like the first member of Jer_10:3 : "The ordinances of the peoples are Vanity," and may be rendered, "the idols taught of are mere wood." {cf. Jer_10:3 b, Jer_2:27; Jer_3:9} It is possible also that the right reading is "foundation" ("musad") not "doctrine" ("musar"): "the foundation" (basis, substratum, substance) "of idols is wood." The term "Vanities-habalim"-is used for "idols." {Jer_8:19; Jer_14:22; Psa_31:7} And, lastly, I think, the clause might be rendered: "a doctrine of Vanities, of mere wood, it"-their religion-"is!" This supreme folly is the "one thing" that discredits all the boasted wisdom of the Chaldeans; and their folly will hereafter be demonstrated by events (Jer_10:14).
The body of the idol is wood, and outwardly it is decorated with silver and gold and costly apparel; but the whole and every part of it is the work of man. "Silver plate" (lit. "beaten out") "from Tarshish"-from far away Tartessus in Spain-"is brought, and gold from Uphaz," {Dan_10:5} "the work of the smith, and of the hands of the founder"-who have beaten out the silver and smelted the gold: "blue and purple is their clothing": {Exo_26:31; Exo_28:8} "the work of the wise"-of skilled artists {Isa_40:20} -"is every part of them." Possibly the verse might better be translated: "Silver to be beaten out"-argentum malleo diducendum-"which is brought from Tarshish, and gold" which is brought "from Uphaz," are "the work of the smith and of the hands of the smelter; the blue and purple" which are "their clothing," are "the work of the wise all of them." At all events, the point of the verse seems to be that, whether you look at the inside or the outside of the idol, his heart of wood or his casing of gold and silver and his gorgeous robes, the whole and every bit of him as he stands before you is a manufactured article, the work of mens hands. The supernatural comes in nowhere. In sharpest contrast with this lifeless fetish, "Iahvah is a God that is truth," i.e., a true God, {cf. Pro_22:21} or "Iahvah is God in truth"-is really God-"He is a living God, and an eternal King"; the sovereign whose rule is independent of the vicissitudes of time, and the caprices of temporal creatures: "at His wrath the earth quaketh, and nations cannot abide His indignation": the world of nature and the world of man are alike dependent upon His Will, and He exhibits His power and his righteous anger in the disturbances of the one and the disasters of the other.
According to the Hebrew punctuation, we should rather translate: "But Iahvah Elohim" the designation of God in the second account of creation, {Gen_2:4-25; Gen_3:1-24} "is truth," i.e., reality; as opposed to the falsity and nothingness of the idols; or "permanence," "lastingness," {Psa_19:10} as opposed to their transitoriness (Jer_19:11-13).
The statement of the tenth verse (Jer_10:10) respecting the eternal power and godhead of Iahvah is confirmed in the twelfth and thirteenth (Jer_10:12-13) by instances of His creative energy and continual activity as exhibited in the world of nature. "The Maker of the earth by His power, Establishing the habitable world by His wisdom, And by His insight He did stretch out the heavens: At the sound of His giving voice" {Psa_77:18; i.e., thundering} "there is an uproar of waters in the heavens, And He causeth the vapours to rise from the end of the earth; Lightnings for the rain He maketh, And causeth the wind to go forth out of His treasuries." There is no break in the sense between these sentences and the tenth verse. The construction resembles that of Amo_5:8; Amo_9:5-6, and is interrupted by the eleventh verse, which in all probability was, to begin with, a marginal annotation.
The solid earth is itself a natural symbol of strength and stability. The original creation of this mighty and enduring structure argues the omnipotence of the Creator; while the "establishing" or "founding" of it upon the waters of the great deep is a proof of supreme wisdom, {Psa_24:2; Psa_136:6} and the "spreading out" of the visible heavens or atmosphere like a vast canopy or tent over the earth, {Psa_104:2 Isa_40:22} is evidence of a perfect insight into the conditions essential to the existence and well-being of man.
It is, of course, clear enough that physical facts and phenomena are here described in popular language as they appear to the eye, and by no means with the severe precision of a scientific treatise. It is not to be supposed that this prophet knew more about the actual constitution of the physical universe than the wise men of his time could impart. But such knowledge was not necessary to the enforcement of the spiritual truths which it was his mission to proclaim; and the fact that his brief oracle presents those truths in a garb which we can only regard as poetical, and which it would argue a want of judgment to treat as scientific prose, does not affect their eternal validity, nor at all impair their universal importance. The passage refers us to God as the ultimate source of the world of nature. It teaches us that the stability of things is a reflection of His eternal being; that the persistence of matter is an embodiment of His strength; that the indestructibility which science ascribes to the materials of the physical universe is the seal which authenticates their Divine original. Persistence, permanence, indestructibleness, are properly sole attributes of the eternal Creator, which He communicates to His creation. Things are indestructible as regards man, not as regards the Author of their being.
Thus the wisdom enshrined in the laws of the visible world, all its strength and all its stability, is a manifestation of the Unseen God. Invisible in themselves, the eternal power and godhead of Iahvah become visible in His creation. And, as the Hebrew mode of expression indicates, His activity is never suspended, nor His presence withdrawn. The conflict of the elements, the roar of the thunder, the flash of the lightning, the downpour of waters, the rush of the storm wind, are His work; and not less His work, because we have found out the "natural" causes, that is, the established conditions of their occurrence; not less His work, because we have, in the exercise of faculties really though remotely akin to the Divine Nature, discovered how to imitate, or rather mimic, even the more awful of these marvellous phenomena. Mimicry it cannot but appear, when we compare the overwhelming forces that rage in a tropical storm with our electric toys. The lightnings in their glory and terror are still Gods arrows, and man cannot rob His quiver.
Nowadays more is known about the machinery of the world, but hardly more of the Intelligence that contrived it, and keeps it continually in working order, nay, lends it its very existence. More is known about means and methods, but hardly more about aims and purposes. The reflection, how few are the master conceptions which modern speculation has added to the treasury of thought, should suggest humility to the vainest and most self-confident of physical inquirers. In the very dawn of philosophy the human mind appears to have anticipated as it were by sudden flashes of insight some of the boldest hypotheses of modern science, including that of Evolution itself.
The unchangeable or invariable laws of nature, that is to say, the uniformity of sequence which we observe in physical phenomena, is not to be regarded as a thing that explains itself. It is only intelligible as the expression of the unchanging will of God. The prophets word is still true. It is God who "causes the vapours to rise from the end of the earth," drawing them up into the air from oceans and lakes by the simple yet beautiful and efficient action of the solar heat; it is God who "makes lightnings for the rain," charging the clouds with the electric fluid, to burst forth in blinding flashes when the opposing currents meet. It is God who "brings the wind out of His treasuries." In the prophets time the winds were as great a mystery as the thunder and lightning: it was not known whence they came nor whither they went. But the knowledge that they are but currents of air due to variations of temperature does not really deprive them of their wonder. Not only is it impossible, in the last resort, to comprehend what heat is, what motion is, what the thing moved is. A far greater marvel remains, which cries aloud of Gods wisdom and presence and sovereignty over all; and that is the wonderful consilience of all the various powers and forces of the natural world in making a home for man, and enabling so apparently feeble a creature as he to live and thrive amidst the perpetual interaction and collision of the manifold and mighty elements of the universe.
The true author of all this magnificent system of objects and forces, to the wonder and the glory of which only custom can blind us, is the God of the prophet. This sublime, this just conception of God was possible, for it was actually realised, altogether apart from the influence of Hellenic philosophy and modern European science. But it was by no means as common to the Semitic peoples. In Babylon, which was at the time the focus of all earthly wisdom and power, in Babylon the ancient mother of sciences and arts, a crude polytheism stultified all the wisdom of the wise, and lent its sanction to a profound moral corruption. Rapid and universal conquests, enormous wealth accruing from the spoils and tributes of all nations, only subserved the luxury and riotous living which issued in a general effeminacy and social enervation; until the great fabric of empire, which Nabopalassar and Nebuchadrezzar had reared by their military and political genius, sank under the weight of its own vices.
Looking round upon this spectacle of superstitious folly, the prophet declares that "all men are become too brute-like for knowledge"; too degraded to appreciate the truth, the simplicity of a higher faith; too besotted with the worship of a hundred vain idols, which were the outward reflection of their own diseased imaginations, to receive the wisdom of the true religion, and to perceive especially the truth just enunciated, that it is Iahvah who gives the rain and upon whom all atmospheric changes depend: {Jer_14:22} and thus, in the hour of need, "every founder blushes for the image, because his molten figure is a lie, and there is no breath in them"; because the lifeless idol, the work of his hands, can lend no help. Perhaps both clauses of the verse rather express a prophecy: "All men will be proven brutish, destitute of knowledge; every founder will blush for the graven image." Wise and strong as the Babylonians supposed themselves to be, the logic of events would undeceive them. They were doomed to a rude awakening; to discover in the hour of defeat and surrender that the molten idol was a delusion, that the work of their hands was an embodied lie, void of life, powerless to save. "Vanity"-a mere breath, naught-"are they, a work of knaveries" (a term recurring only in Jer_51:18; the root seems to mean "to stammer," "to imitate"); "in the time of their visitation they will perish!" or simply "they perish!"-in the burning temples, in the crash of falling shrines.
It has happened so. At this day the temples of cedar and marble, with their woodwork overlaid with bronze and silver and gold, of whose glories the Babylonian sovereigns so proudly boast in their still existing records, as "shining like the sun, and like the stars of heaven," are shapeless heaps or rather mountains of rubbish, where Arabs dig for building materials and treasure trove, and European explorers for the relics of a civilisation and a superstition which have passed away forever. Vana sunt, et opus risu dignum. In the revolutions of time, which are the outward measures of the eternally self-unfolding purposes of God, the word of the Judean prophets has been amply fulfilled. Babylon and her idols are no more.
All other idols, too, must perish in like manner. "Thus shall ye say of them: The gods who the heavens and earth did not make, perish from the earth and from under the heavens shall these!" The assertion that the idols of Babylon were doomed to destruction, was not the whole of the prophetic message. It is connected with and founded upon the antithetic assertion of the eternity of Iahvah. They will perish, but He endures. The one eternal is El Elyon, the Most High God, the Maker of heaven and earth. But heaven and earth and whatever partakes only of their material nature are also doomed to pass away. And in that day of the Lord, when the elements melt with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burnt up, {2Pe_3:10} not only will the idols of the heathen world, and the tawdry dolls which a degenerate church suffers to be adored as a kind of magical embodiment of the Mother of God, but all other idols which the sense bound heart of man makes to itself, vanish into nothingness before that overwhelming revelation of the supremacy of God.
There is something amazing in the folly of worshipping man, whether in the abstract form of the cultus of "Humanity," or in any of the various forms of what is called "Hero worship," or in the vulgar form of self-worship, which is the religion of the selfish and the worldly. To ascribe infallibility to any mortal, whether Pope or politician, is to sin in the spirit of idolatry. The Maker of heaven and earth, and He alone, is worthy of worship. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding". {Job_38:4} No human wisdom nor power presided there: and to produce the smallest of asteroids is still a task which lies infinitely beyond the combined resources of modern science. Man and all that man has created is naught in the scale of Gods creation. He and all the mighty works with which he amazes, overshadows, enslaves his little world, will perish and pass away; only that will survive which he builds of materials which are imperishable, fabrics of spiritual worth and excellence and glory. {1Co_3:13} A Nineveh, a Babylon, a London, a Paris, may disappear; "but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." {1Jn_2:17} "Not like these" (cf. Jer_10:11 ad fin.) "is Jacobs Portion, but the Maker and Moulder of the All-He is his heritage; Iahvah Sabaoth is His name!" (Both here and at Jer_51:19 the LXX omits: "and Israel is the tribe," which seems to have been derived from Deu_32:9. Israel is elsewhere called "Iahvahs heritage," Psa_33:12, and "portion," Deu_32:9; but that thought hardly suits the connection here.)
"Not like these": for He is the Divine Potter who moulded all things, including the signs of heaven, and the idols of wood and metal, and their foolish worshippers. And he is "Jacobs portion"; for the knowledge and worship of Him were, in the Divine counsels, originally assigned to Israel Deu_4:19; Deu_32:8, according to the true reading, preserved in the LXX; and therefore Israel alone knows Him and His glorious attributes. "Iahvah Sabaoth is His name": the Eternal, the Maker and Master of the hosts of heaven and earth, is the aspect under which He has revealed Himself to the true representatives of Israel, His servants the prophets.
The portion of Israel is his God-his abiding portion; of which neither the changes of time nor the misconceptions of man can avail to rob him. When all that is accidental and transitory is taken away, this distinction remains: Israels portion is his God. Iahvah was indeed the national God of the Jews, argue some of our modern wise ones; and therefore He cannot be identified with the universal Deity. He has been developed, expanded, into this vast conception; but originally He was but the private god of a petty tribe, the Lar of a wandering household. Now herein is a marvellous thing. How was it that this particular household god thus grew to infinite proportions, like the genres emerging from the unsealed jar of Arab fable, until, from His prime foothold on the tent floor of a nomad family, He towered above the stars and His form overshadowed the universe? How did it come to pass that His prophet could ask in a tone of indisputable truth, recognised alike by friend and foe, "Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith Iahvah"? {Jer_23:24} How, that this immense, this immeasurable expansion took place in this instance, and not in that of any one of the thousand rival deities of surrounding and more powerful tribes and nations? How comes it that we today are met to adore Iahvah, and not rather one of the forgotten gods of Canaan or Egypt or Babylon? Merodach and Nebo have vanished, but Iahvah is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It certainly looks very much as if the Hebrew prophets were right; as if Iahvah were really the God of the creation as well as the Portion of Jacob.
"The portion of Jacob." Is His relation to that one people a stumbling block? Can we see no eternal truth in the statement of the Psalmist that "the Lords portion is His people?" Who can find fault with the enthusiastic faith of holy men thus exulting in the knowledge and love of God? It is a characteristic of all genuine religion, this sweet, this elevating consciousness that God is our God; this profound sense that He has revealed Himself to us in a special and peculiar and individual manner. But the actual historical results, as well as the sacred books, prove that the sense of possessing God and being possessed by Him was purer, stronger, deeper, more effectual, more abiding, in Israel than in any other race of the ancient world.
One must tread warily upon slippery ground; but I cannot help thinking that many of the arguments alleged against the probability of God revealing Himself to man at all or to a single nation in particular, are sufficiently met by the simple consideration that He has actually done so. Any event whatever may be very improbable until it has happened; and assuming that God has not revealed Himself, it may perhaps be shown to be highly improbable that He would reveal Himself. But, meanwhile, all religions and all faith and the phenomena of conscience and the highest intuitions of reason presuppose this improbable event as the fact apart from which they are insoluble riddles. This is not to say that the precise manner of revelation-the contact of the Infinite with the Finite Spirit-is definable. There are many less lofty experiences of man which also are indefinable and mysterious, but none the less actual and certain. Facts are not explained by denial, which is about the most barren and feeble attitude a man can take up in the presence of a baffling mystery. Nor is it for man to prescribe conditions to God. He who made us and knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows also how best to reveal Himself to His creatures.
The special illumination of Israel, however, does not imply that no light was vouchsafed elsewhere. The religious systems of other nations furnish abundant evidence to the contrary. God "left not Himself without witness," the silent witness of that beneficent order of the natural world, which makes it possible for man to live, and to live happily. St. Paul did not scruple to compliment even the degenerate Athenians of his own day on the ground of their attention to religious matters, and he could cite a Greek poet in support of his doctrine that man is the offspring of the one God and Father of all.
We may see in the fact a sufficient indication of what St. Paul would have said, had the nobler non-Christian systems fallen under his cognisance; had heathenism become known to him not in the heterogeneous polytheism of Hellas, which in his time had long since lost what little moral influence it had ever possessed, nor in the wild orgiastic nature worships of the Lesser Asia, which in their thoroughly sensuous basis did dishonour alike to God and to man; but in the sublime tenets of Zarathustra, with their noble morality and deep reverence for the One God, the spirit of all goodness and truth, or in the reformed Brahmanism of Gautama the Buddha, with its grand principle of self-renunciation and universal charity.
The peculiar glories of Bible religion are not dimmed in presence of these other lights. Allowing for whatever is valuable in these systems of belief, we may still allege that Bible religion comprises all that is good in them, and has, besides, many precious features peculiar to itself; we may still maintain that their excellences are rather testimonies to the truth of the biblical teachings about God than difficulties in the way of a rational faith; that it would be far more difficult to a thoughtful mind to accept the revelation of God conveyed in the Bible, if it were the fact that no rays of Divine light had cheered the darkness of the millions of struggling mortals beyond the pale of Judaism, than it is under the actual circumstances of the case: in short, that the truths implicated in imperfect religions, isolated from all contact with Hebrew or Christian belief, are a witness to and a foreshadowing of the truths of the gospel.
Our prophet declares that Jacobs portion-the God of Israel-is not like the gods of contemporary peoples. How, then, does he conceive of Him? Not as a metaphysical entity-a naked, perhaps empty abstraction of the understanding. Not as the Absolute and Infinite Being, who is out of all relation to space and time. His language-the language of the Old Testament-possesses no adjectives like "Infinite," "Absolute," "Eternal," "Omniscient," "Omnipresent," nor even "Almighty," although that word so often appears in our venerable Authorised Version. It is difficult for us, who are the heirs of ages of thought and intellectual toil, and whose thinking is almost wholly carried on by means of abstract ideas, to realise a state of mind and a habit of thought so largely different from our own as that of the Hebrew people and even of the Hebrew prophets. Yet unless we make an effort to realise it, however inadequately, unless we exert ourselves, and strive manfully to enter through the gate of an instructed imagination into that far off stage of life and thought which presents so many problems to the historical student, and hides in its obscurity so many precious truths; we must inevitably fail to appreciate the full significance, and consequently fail of appropriating the full blessing of those wonderful prophecies of ancient Israel, which are not for an age but for all time.
Let us, then, try to apprehend the actual point of view from which the inspired Israelite regarded his God. In the first place, that point of view was eminently practical. As a recent writer has forcibly remarked, "The primitive mind does not occupy itself with things of no practical importance, and it is only in the later stages of society that we meet with traditional beliefs nominally accepted by every one but practically regarded by none; or with theological speculations which have an interest for the curious, but are not felt to have a direct bearing on the concerns of life."
The pious Israelite could not indulge a morbidly acute and restlessly speculative intellect with philosophical or scientific theories about the Deity, His nature in Himself, His essential and accidental attributes, His relation to the visible world. Neither did such theories then exist ready made to his hand, nor did his inward impulses and the natural course of thought urge him to pry into such abstruse matters, and with cold irreverence to subject his idea of God to critical analysis. Could he have been made to understand the attitude and the demands of some modern disputants, he would have been apt to exclaim, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out Shaddai unto perfection? It is as high as heaven, what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know?" To find out and to know God as the understanding finds out and knows, how can that ever become possible to man? Such knowledge depends entirely upon processes of comparison; upon the perception of similarity between the object investigated and other known objects: upon accurate naming and classification. But who can dream of successfully referring the Deity to a class? "To what will ye liken God, or what likeness will ye compare unto Him?" In the brief prophecy before us, as in the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, with which it presents so many points of contact, we have a splendid protest against all attempts at bringing the Most High within the limitations of human cognition, and reducing God to the category of things known and understood. Directed in the first instance against idolatry-against vain efforts to find an adequate likeness of the Supreme in some one of the numberless creations of His hand, and so to compare and gauge and comprehend Himself, -that protest is still applicable, and with even greater force, against the idolatrous tendencies of the present age: when one school of devotees loudly declares,
"Thou, Nature, art our goddess; to thy law
Our services are bound:
Wherefore should we
Stand in the plague of custom?"
and another is equally loud in asserting that it has found the true god in man himself; and another proclaims the divinity of brute force, and feels no shame in advocating the sovereignty of those gross instincts and passions which man shares with the beasts that perish. It is an unworthy and an inadequate conception of God, which identifies Him with Nature; it is a deplorably impoverished idea, the mere outcome of philosophic despair, which identifies him with Humanity; but what language can describe the grovelling baseness of that habit of though which knows of nothing higher than the sensual appetite, and seeks nothing better than its continual indulgence; which sees the native impress of sovereignty on the brow of passing pleasure, and recognises the image and likeness of God in a temporary association of depraved instincts?
It is to this last form of idolatry, this utter heathenism in the moral life, that all other forms really converge, as St. Paul has shown in the introduction of his Epistle to the Romans, where, in view of the unutterable iniquities which were familiar occurrences in the world of his contemporaries, he affirms that moral decadence of the most appalling character is ultimately traceable to a voluntary indulgence of those idolatrous tendencies which ignore Gods revelation of Himself to the heart and reason, and prefer to find their deity in something less awful in purity and holiness, less averse to the defilements of sin, less conversant with the secrets of the soul; and so, not liking to retain the true and only God in knowledge, change His truth into a lie, and worship and serve the creature more than the Creator: changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like unto corruptible man, or even to birds and fourfooted beasts and creeping things.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES.—1. Chronology of the chapter. Section…
CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES.—1. Chronology of the chapter. Section 1–16 has been declared spurious (by De Wette, Movers, and Hitzig), its authenticity disputed, a late interpolation by either the pseudo-Isaiah (Movers) or by a Babylonian exile. Even Naegelsbach affirms, “Who was the author, and when and by whom” the section was written, “cannot be ascertained.” Two difficulties lead to this severance of the section from the book: 1. The continuity of thought is abruptly broken by these verses; 2. The topics treated therein belong to the time of the exile. Graf, Keil, Henderson, and Speaker’s Com. contend for the genuineness and authenticity of the section; and affirm that Jeremiah here views his people “proleptically as in captivity,” that he addresses them in exile, and places himself among them merely for the sake of argument (Hend.); that the train of thought in these sixteen verses is but an enlargement of the truth in Jer_9:23-24, and that the fragmentary disconnected form of this chapter is, probably, owing to the fact “that only portions of the concluding part of Jeremiah’s temple sermon were embodied in Baruch’s roll” (Speaker’s Com.). Thus Dr. Payne Smith and Keil date this chapter as synchronous with chap. 9, a part of the same discourse. Henderson isolates the chapter, but suggests no date. Dr. Dahler supposes it to be a separate discourse, delivered in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, after the first capture by Nebuchadnezzar, when the chiefs among the Jews were borne into Babylon—B.C. 605; Assyrian chronology, B.C. 586. This seems satisfactory: so we may venture with Bagster to separate this chapter from the foregoing by an interval of three years. The section 17–25 is by some referred to the eleventh year of Jehoiakim, the year of the king’s death at the hand of the Chaldean monarch, Nebuchadnezzar.
2. National History; see chap. 7, in loc. Judah’s experience of captivity began in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, when Nebuchadnezzar, acting as Nabopolassar’s lieutenant, besieged Jerusalem, and carried away, together with the spoils of the Temple, the youths of highest rank in the land, “the principal persons in dignity, 3000 in number” (Josephus), among whom were Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—cousins of Jehoiakim. A mournful event; for in their loss the nation was deprived of well-nigh all the persons of piety and virtue whose influence in court tended to restrain the reckless, godless king, and to befriend Jeremiah in his sacred ministry of witness for righteousness and Jehovah. The solitary flower was plucked; the hope of Judah was now gone.
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3. Contemporary History. Egypt retained international supremacy, and Judah was a vassal kingdom under Necho, until the fourth year of Jehoiakim. In that year Nebuchadnezzar defeated Necho at Charchemish, and Judea, wrested from the Egyptian empire, became subject to the now Babylonian domination.
4. Geographical References. Jer_10:9. “Tarshish,” probably Tarsessus, in south of Spain, emporium of the Phœnicians, and mart for trade (cf. Eze_27:12). Heereen says that Spain “was once the richest country in the world for silver,” and that “the silver mountains were in those parts which the Phœnicians comprised under the name of Tarsessus or Tarshish.” “Uphaz,” thought to mean Ophir. Henderson suggests that a copyist may have changed the original word אופר, Ophir, into אוּפָז, Uphaz. But Dr. Payne Smith contends that “the word is not to be regarded as an error for Ophir upon the authority of the Syriac; probably Uphaz was a place in the neighbourhood of the river Hyphasis, the Sanscrit name for which is Vipâçâ.”
5. Natural History. Jer_10:2. “The signs of heaven,” Chaldean astrology, which professedly gathered from the position of stars and celestial signs predictions as to the career and destinies of nations and individuals. Jer_10:5. “Palm-tree,” formerly abundant in Judea (re-Jericho, Deu_34:3); grew to great height, often 60 to 100 feet; always “upright;” winde had no power over its erect growth; threw out from its crown feathery leaves, each from 4 to 8 feet long, and from 40 to 80 in number; it lives about 200 years; yields dates. Jer_10:9. “Blue and purple.” Both colours were purple, but the “blue” had a dark violet tinge, the “purple” a light reddish hue; both were obtained from a secretion of shell-fish found on the shores of the Mediterranean. Jer_10:22. “Den of dragons.” See on Jer_9:11.
6. Manners and Customs. Jer_10:2. “Dismayed at signs of heaven … heathen are dismayed at them.” Astrologers read the startling celestial phenomena, eclipses, comets, meteors, unusual conjunctions of the stars, as precursors of nearing calamities, and used them for working upon the superstitious fears of the people. Jer_10:9. “Silver spread into plates.” Silver is so malleable that it may be beaten out into 100,000th part of an inch thick; gold into 200,000th part of an inch. Images for idolatrous worship were overlaid with the precious metal (Hab_2:19). These “plates” brought from Tarshish were “like those on which the sacred books of the Singhalese are written to this day” (Dr. W. Smith). “Blue and purple is their clothing.” Robes of these colours were worn by kings (Jdg_8:26; Mat_27:28), by the highest civil and religious officers, and by the wealthy and luxurious (Luk_16:19). Jer_10:20. “Tabernacle is spoiled, cords broken.” Tents were still largely in use, emphatically so in the pastoral districts, where the nomadic life was retained.
7. Literary Criticisms. Jer_10:2. “Dismayed at signs of heaven.” The verb expresses apprehension, dread; not homage. Jer_10:6. “There is none like unto Thee,” i.e., no one, a double negative, intensifying the denial; מֵאֵין, no nothing; the strongest form of negation. Jer_10:7. “To Thee doth it appertain; יָאָתָה, from יָאָה, to be beautiful, decorous, suitable. “Unto Thee is it (fear) due” (Naeg.). Jer_10:8. “The stock is a doctrine of vanities,” i.e., their doctrine, that in which they are taught to trust, is wood. Keil: “The teaching of the vanities is wood.” Speaker’s Com.: “The instruction of idols is a piece of wood.” Lange: “Vain instruction? It is wood!” Noyes: “Most vain is their confidence; it is wood.” Blayney: “The very wood itself being a rebuker of vanities.” Henderson: “The tree itself is a reproof of vanities.” Ewald. “The wood is more vain teaching.” Jer_10:10. “The true God.” אֱמֶת, truth, in contrast with הֶבֶל, vanity (Jer_10:3). “Jehovah, God in truth.” Jer_10:11. “Thus shall ye say,” &c. This verse is in Chaldee, on which account some critics reject it as a gloss (Venema, Ewald, Henderson); but Seb. Schmidt suggests that Jeremiah gave to the Jews this retort to the Chaldeans, for use when exiled and taunted in Chaldea—“Ut Judaeis suggerat, quomodo Chaldaeis (ad quos non nisi Chaldaice loqui poterant) paucis verbis respondendum sit.” Dr. Payne Smith thinks the verse “a proverbial saying, which Jeremiah inserts in its popular form.” Jer_10:14. “Every man is brutish in his knowledge,” i.e., without knowledge every man is brutish (Keil. Henderson, Lange); or, as others render the words, every man is rendered brutish by his skill, i.e., in idol-making (Jamieson, Fausset, &c.). Jer_10:15. “The work of errors,” i.e., of mockeries; the idols themselves deserving only derision and contempt, or inflicting on their worshippers only delusion and ridicule. Jer_10:17. “Thy wares,” i.e., thy bundle, packages; not goods for trading, but articles for use. “Inhabitant of the fortress,” inhabitress of the siege. Jer_10:18. “That they may find it so.” Find what? The Syriac upplies the word, “Me”—“that they may find Me.” But the Targum renders the word find, “feel”—“I will distress them with the rigours of a siege that they may feel it.” (So Hitz, Umbr., Naeg., Hend.).
HOMILETIC TREATMENT OF SECTIONS OF CHAPTER 10
Section
Jer_10:1-16.
Jehovah, the true and eternal God, contrasted with idols.
Section
Jer_10:17-25.
Judah’s mournful distress; prayer for Jehovah’s mitigating mercy.
Section 1–17.—JEHOVAH, THE TRUE AND ETERNAL GOD, CONTRASTED WITH IDOLS
This appeal, addressed to “house of Israel,” the whole covenant race. It may, however, be (as in chap. Jer_3:12) a distinct address to the then scattered Israelites, in exile already among “the heathen;” or an inclusive appeal to the entire nation; Judah soon to go into exile, and Israel already there.
I. Superstitions and idolatries censured and contemned. “Learn not the way of the heathen” (Jer_10:3); “for the customs of the people are vain” (Jer_10:3).
1. The casuistries of astrology censured (Jer_10:2). The creation of “the heavens” is Jehovah’s handiwork (Jer_10:12), and His “signs” there must not be regarded superstitiously, nor be associated with false deities, as is “the way of the heathen;” but be regarded with intelligent admiration, with adoring homage of Him whose glory and goodness they reveal. (Addenda on Jer_10:2. “Signs of heaven.”)
2. The vanities of idolatry contemned. Observe (1.) how these idols originate (Jer_10:3-4); (2.) how senseless and helpless they are when made (Jer_10:4-5); (3.) how little power they possess over men, either for “evil” or “good” (Jer_10:5); (4.) how ridiculous (Jer_10:8) they are, notwithstanding their gorgeous decoration (Jer_10:9); (5.) how certainly they who make and trust in them will be put to derision (Jer_10:14); (6.) how prophecy foredooms them all (Jer_10:11; Jer_10:15).
II. Sublime representations of Jehovah’s glory and Israel’s resources in Him. “Who would not fear Thee, O King of nations?” (Jer_10:7).
1. The majesty of Jehovah’s attributes. (1.) His incomparable greatness appeals to universal reverence (Jer_10:6-7). (2.) His eternal glory and sway admonish those who provoke Him (Jer_10:10). (3.) All creation asserts His grandeur and illustrates His power (Jer_10:12-13). Thus He is God of “the nations” (Jer_10:7), and men of every nationality and in every land should own and revere Him. Moreover, false deities shall “perish” (Jer_10:11), but Jehovah ever liveth, “the true and living God, the everlasting King” (Jer_10:10); hence there is no hope of evading Him. Yea, and the wide universe testifies of Him (Jer_10:12-13), therefore He everywhere commands man’s recognition, even as everywhere He extends to man His providential care. (Addenda on Jer_10:6; Jer_10:10.)
2. The grandeur of Israel’s heritage in God. To His chosen people the double blessing avails: (1.) God is their portion (Jer_10:16); “the portion of Jacob” is “the Former of all things.” What wealth, therefore, they have in Jehovah? “My God shall supply all need according to His riches in glory.” (2.) Israel is God’s inheritance, chosen by Him as His peculiar treasure; therefore, “all things were theirs”—covenants, promises, adoption! What could they want with other and vain gods, having Him who was the Creator and Governor of the universe as their own God, who claimed and loved them as “the rod of His inheritance?” Had they been satisfied with God, He would have satisfied their souls with His infinite fulness.
Section 17–25. JUDAH’S MOURNFUL DISTRESS: PRAYER FOR JEHOVAH’S MITIGATING MERCY
It would soon be Judah’s melancholy fate to go after Israel into captivity and degradation. “Gather up thy wares out of the land” (Jer_10:17). This had become a stern necessity in consequence of Judah’s spiritual revolt, and God Himself would secure its accomplishment: “Behold I will sling out the inhabitants,” &c. (Jer_10:18).
I. The anguish of exiled Judah. “Woe is me for my hurt,” &c. (Jer_10:19). Language either of pathetic bemoaning or of sullen repining. Suggests 1. Terrified realisation of punishment: “Woe is me!” She had “looked for peace,” thought to sin on with impunity, dreamed not that “sudden destruction” would come, imagined herself secure in her ungodliness; but “behold bitterness!” Note the aspect of her suffering: “hurt” something real, injurious, painful; not a mere terror, but a keen pang. Such are God’s chastisements and punishments. 2. Poignant experience of distress: “wound grievous.” And a grievous wound is both a pain and a peril, dreadful to bear and threatening fatal issues. 3. Sullen submission to calamity: “But I said,” when about to lament my lot, what good will come of making ado? “Truly this is a grief, and I must bear it!” Stoical hardness: “I cannot remedy it, so I must bear it. Fretting will not alleviate it, so I will keep silence!” How different this from penitence for the cause of the misery, and patient submission to consequences, which find solemn expression in, “It is the Lord; let Him do what seemeth Him good!” 4. Hopeless reconciliation to misery: “I must bear it!” Not, “Come and let us return to the Lord, for He hath smitten and He will heal us!” She will not seek Divine healing for her “wounds” (chap. Jer_8:21-22), therefore she sees no hope in her anguish; for being “without God,” she is “without hope in the world.”
II. The devastations of the Holy Land. The figure, “tabernacle” (Jer_10:20), suggests the idea of (1.) weakness and insecurity; for though the Jews prided themselves in Jerusalem as a strong and fortified city, it would prove as defenceless as a tent. The “tabernacle spoiled and cords broken” suggest (2.) the total dissolution and destruction of the Jewish state: the government had broken up, the nationality had collapsed. Thus the lament declares, 1. The overthrow of the theocracy: “Tabernacle spoiled.” 2. The banishment of the people: “Children gone forth,” &c., either exiled or slain: “they are not.” 3. The rulers are defeated: “pastors become brutish; not prosper; flocks scattered (Jer_10:21); they were impotent to repair the ruined state: the explanation being, “they have not sought the Lord;” they ignored the fact that His hand was in this overthrow, and hence they ignored the fact that to Him must they look for deliverance and redress. 4. The enemy was triumphant: “To make the cities desolate, a den of dragons” (Jer_10:22): the Chaldean avarice would spare nothing. What direful ravages follow in the train of sin!
III. The prayer for Jehovah’s intervention. Though the suffering nation repudiated God, there was one intercessor—Jeremiah—who cried to Jehovah for mercy. Yes; and though the world ignores God now, still there in “One Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus;” whose pleading voice goes up even for the fruitless thing—“Let be this year also?” Preaching had done little good, so the prophet turns to prayer. Words addressed to God may be powerful when words addressed to men are powerless. He will hear though they forbear. 1. Acknowledgment of God’s supreme providence. Man’s designs are subordinate to God’s purposes (Jer_10:23). We cannot have everything according to our own mind, and here Jeremiah surrendered his desires to God’s will; he will not ask God to do other than He deems best, sad though he is for his nation’s nearing ruin. Yet also the prophet seems to imply that the army of Nebuchadnezzar will not be allowed by God to do other than as He wills: enemies are not unrestrained; God worketh according to His will among armies and over men. 2. Appeal to Divine pitifulness. The prophet identifies himself with his nation, and entreats that the necessary punishment may be mercifully tempered and restrained. We deserve “correction,” need chastisement, but could not survive “anger.” 3. Imprecation of God’s wrath upon Judah’s oppressors; for the Chaldeans, though used by God, were malevolent, implacable, and impious, and merited punishment even while carrying out God’s designs. God may permit oppression of His people, may even use it to chasten them; but oppressors, who deny God and work malicious projects, shall in their turn feel the crushing rebukes of a mightier Power (Psa_75:8).
HOMILIES AND COMMENTS ON SUCCESSIVE VERSES OF CHAPTER 10
Jer_10:2. Theme: INFLEXIBLE GODLINESS. “Learn not the way of the heathen.”
Cast among “the heathen” by exile, Israel was not to accommodate herself to the religious or irreligious aspects which there environed her.
“The way” means either their mode of life or their customs in worship. The phrase is used in the New Testament as descriptive of the Christian discipleship. Ἠ ὁδὸς—comp. Act_9:2; Act_19:9.
Suggested that—
I. Concession to the order of things surrounding us is a specious temptation. Among “the heathen” do as they do. 1. Convenient: for saves us from the annoyances which self-assertion and individuality provoke. 2. Advantageous: for it appeases and gratifies others, and lays some worldly gains within our reach. 3. Pleasant: there is a novelty and a relaxation and an enjoyment in this self-adaptation; good for us to bend a little.
II. Conformity to the dominant religion is not to be our ruling habit. It may be needful to stand apart from “the way” which the state supports and wealth fosters. Do “not learn” it even: have nought to do with it. There are different forms of religion abroad; and more, there are antagonistic forms of religion. Are we to conform to any “way” which favour and fortune patronises simply because in that locality or country we find it dominant? 1. Religion asks unswerving allegiance of the soul. If we are unstable, God’s covenant and promises will not stand good for us. 2. God asks us to witness for Him against false religious in irreligious scenes and in irreligious times. The dominant religion may be plausible, it may be imperious; but whether baited with seductions, or armed with persecutions, if it be not right, refuse compliance. “Learn not the way.”
III. Fidelity to conscience and to God must be uncompromising. In all scenes, under all circumstances, at all times. A pliant godliness is: 1. Cowardly: contrast with it Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. 2. Contemptible: the “man of God” sinks down into a mere time-serving hypocrite. 3. Condemned: for it not only degrades the man himself, and dishonours God, for hom he should be valiant and bold, but it denies to Jehovah His due; for He has rights in His people; they are “not their own, but bought with a price, and hence should glorify Him in body and spirit, which are His;” and His people owe obligations to Him in return for the revelation and the grace He has bestowed on them. Hide not “light under bushel;” “Even in Sardis defile not your garments;” “Have no fellowship with unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” (Comp. 2Co_6:14-18.)
Illustrations of unyielding constancy: Moses refused to be called son of Pharaoh’s daughter, and joined himself valiantly with the despised Hebrews. Daniel, who prayed, despite the royal edict. Our Lord Himself, who repudiated the religious habits and ideas which prevailed. Paul, who “approved himself to God in much patience, in affliction, in distress, in stripes,” &c. (2Co_6:4, sq.). Indeed, godliness has produced martyrs in every age whose sole crime, civil or ecclesiastical, was, that they would “not learn the way” which those in power would have enforced. (Comp. Heb_11:32. sq.) “Quit you like men, be strong!”
Jer_10:2. Theme: SUPERSTITIOUS TERROR AT THE MARVELS OF NATURE:
“Be not dismayed at the signs of heaven.”
Eichorn supposes a reference to some astronomical portent which was then causing “dismay.” Hitzig thinks these “signs” were some alarming celestial appearances intended as heralds of impending judgment. Naegelsbach, however, believes the reference to the permanent constellations and usual signs of the firmament; nothing extraordinary or portentous. But Kiel and Dr. P. Smith well argue that the word “dismay” suggests, not adoration such as the heathen might yield to ordinary celestial appearances, but alarm and consternation, consequent upon some unwonted phenomena.
Before such “signs,” wonder but not worship; admire the heavens, but do not adore; ponder them intelligently, but do not prostrate yourself before them idolatrously.
I. Ignorance and idolatry are alike in this: they fall into superstitious terror of natural things.
The crude and uninformed mind is startled, bewildered, and appalled by celestial phenomena. Nor by these alone; terrestrial marvels equally awaken superstitious dismay. They drive the ignorant to terror, the idolatrous to worship. Eclipses or earthquakes, comets or tempests, unusual constellations or calamities, fill with consternation. This indicates that:
1. The wonders of nature are very majestic and solemn. Sufficient to impress men everywhere with the supernatural; speaking to them of vast and hidden realities.
2. The benighted mind of man is fruitful of fears. Sees terrors and portents everywhere. And “fear hath torment.” How much better the “perfect love which casteth out fear,” which assured reliance on God secures! Religion is the antidote of the miseries of superstition.
II. Sacred enlightenment reveals God as above all nature’s wonders. “The heathen are dismayed;” but a people knowing God should not be dismayed. They adored celestial appearances, bowed in terror before nature’s marvels, because they knew not the Great First Cause. Astrologers taught that events depended on the stars which were possessed with power; and Plato thought them endued with spirit and reason. (Addenda on Jer_10:2, “Signs of heaven.”)
1. The benefit of natural knowledge, of physics, science, &c., which reveal to us that nature is not a fitful, capricious omnipotence, but is obedient to law, regulated in all occurrences; that a Supernatural Ruler controls and directs all events.
2. The blessings of sacred revelation, which opens the hidden world to us, makes clear to us this fact that a Father governs the universe, who loves man, who asks man’s loving trust, not slavish terror.
3. The joyfulness of spiritual enlightenment, which goes beyond a sacred knowledge, and dwells in personal enjoyment of God; not only as the Lord of the universe, who “works all things together for good,” but as the Father of Jesus, who claims and cherishes us as His children, which enables us to say,
“This awful God is ours!”
which sees His love in Christ, and by that light interprets all that occurs.
III. Possession of God’s favour enables man intelligently to enjoy His works. “The Lord speaketh unto you, O house of Israel (Jer_10:1), Be not dismayed,” &c. And theirs were the covenants and promises, &c. They were a people “whose God is the Lord.”
1. God’s works call forth amazement and admiration, even where intelligence alone is possessed; yet this is not equal to the childlike gladness of the Christian which revels amid the wealth and loveliness of the “Father’s house.”
2. In God’s works the Christian finds sublime illustrations of God Himself. Scientific men pause at the works; the Christian passes on to the Worker: “through nature up to nature’s God.” “When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy hands, the moon and stars, which Thou hast ordained,” &c. They alone truly enjoy nature who “also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom_5:11). What beautiful and inspiring aspects of God’s attributes do the glories of nature supply to us! (Comp. Isa_40:25-31.)
Jer_10:3-5. Theme: IDOL MANUFACTURE. (Addenda on Jer_10:3.)
I. The original materials to which the idol owes its existence. “A tree out of the forest” (Jer_10:3). Only like other trees, which still remain trees!
II. The industrious toils to which the idol owes its formation. “The work of the workman” (Jer_10:3). Not divine in its structure.
III. The formative instrument to which the idol owes its dignity. “The axe.” No supernatural appliances or aids came to its help; merely a hatchet.
IV. The process of adornment to which the idol owes its attractiveness. “They deck it with silver,” &c. (Jer_10:4).
V. The ingenious arrangement by which the idol is invested with a decent posture. “They fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not” (Jer_10:4).
VI. The clumsy workmanship which denies to the idol becoming stateliness. A god ought to be of fair and graceful form, but it is “upright as a palm-tree” (Jer_10:5); stiff, inelegant pillars. Many commentators render the words thus: “They are like pillars in a cucumber garden;” i.e., the shapeless blocks set up to scare away birds.
VII. The generous attentions to which the idol owes its movements. “They must needs be borne, for they cannot go.” (Addenda on Jer_10:5.) So that all an idol is and does, it owes to man! It could not make itself, it cannot help itself.
Hence, 1. How degrading this for a god! 2. How degrading this for a worshipper! Surely (Jer_10:3. “the customs of the people are vain.” What need to lead the people to “turn from dead idols to serve the living God!” For as the idols cannot help themselves, neither can they help their worshippers, unable to speak or stir, to render them any service. Without life or power.
VIII. The natural treatment which the idol merits. “Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil nor good.” (Comp. Isaiah 40, 41, from which doubtless Jeremiah drew his illustrations, he being familiar with Isaiah’s writings.)
Jer_10:6. Comments:
There cannot be two highest Beings, or there would be none. In the idea of the Absolute there is involved that of uniqueness. Polytheism has therefore no highest Being in the absolute sense. Where, however, traces of such are found, polytheism is about either to rise to monotheism or to dissolve into pantheism.—Lange. (Addenda on Jer_10:10.)
“None like unto Thee, O Lord;” none of all the heroes which the heathen have deified, the dead men of whom they made dead images, and whom they worshipped. Some were deified and adored for their wisdom, but “among all the wise men of the nations” (Jer_10:7), the greatest philosophers or statesmen, as Apollo or Hermes, there is none like Thee. Others were deified and adored for their dominion, but “in all their royalty” (so Jer_10:7 may read), among all their kings, as Saturn and Jupiter, there is none like unto Thee. What is the glory of a man who invented a useful art or founded a flourishing kingdom, what the glory of the greatest prince or potentate (and on such grounds did the heathen deify men), compared with the glory of the Creator of the world?—Henry.
Jer_10:7. Theme: JEHOVAH’S UNCHALLENGEABLE CLAIM ON HUMAN REVERENCE.
To worship any other than Him is an infringement of His inalienable prerogative.
I. The universal scope of God’s dominion. “King of nations;” not only “King of the Jews,” nor only “King of saints,” but all nations are within His domain. Hence, therefore, not Israel alone should yield Him fealty and homage, for the Lord of all should be worshipped and obeyed by all. He reigns over all mankind (Psa_22:28); all mankind should render loyal reverence to Him. God’s sway is over each, as well as all; over me, as well as over nations; and each must therefore for himself own Him King.
II. The impressive manifestations of Divine power. As “King of nations,” God’s “name is great” (Jer_10:6); it is a lofty and imposing title. Does Jehovah sustain by deeds this universal dominion? “Thy name is great in might” (Jer_10:6): the King rules royally as far as His name and domain extend. “Name great in might,” means displaying itself in acts of might. Great in renown, God justifies His title by manifestations of majesty and power. His footsteps are on every scene, His hand doeth wondrous things in every man’s experience and career: “Marvellous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.” Therefore I should revere Him.
III. The incomparable perfections of God Himself. The possession of glory and power does not always coincide with personal worth and goodness. But with Jehovah, “among all the wise men, &c. (Jer_10:7), none like Thee.” Omit “men;” for “wise” includes gods also, the authors of heathen oracles. “In all their kingdoms,” properly, their royalty or kingship, none so royal as Jehovah. (1.) Unapproachable wisdom. (2.) Incomparable royalty. Contrast the “wisdom” of pagan gods, even their most clever oracles; and what are they when set over against the benignant wisdom of the Creator evident in all His works, and the redeeming wisdom, the wondrous graciousness of God’s plan, shown in the Gospel, in “Christ the wisdom of God.” Contrast the royal dignity and nobleness of idols with Him whose “glory the heavens declare,” and whose highest manifestation of “glory is in the face of Jesus Christ.” How blessed are we, having Him as “our Lord and our God!”
IV. The solemn appropriateness of human homage. “To Thee doth it appertain.” (See Crit. Notes, supra.) “Fear,” i.e. trustful reverence, the lowly homage of love. Not (1.) Terror; that is for the vanquished, for slaves. (2.) Nor worship alone, rendering Him the adoration, devotedness, and love which the eminence of His perfections demands. But (3.) Restful and happy trust; a “fear” which finds in Him all occasions for our own happiness if we do His will and please Him, yet which recognises His power to consume the disobedient—realising that life and death are with Him. It is a happy “fear” with those who are “hid with Christ in God;” but a deep dread of His disfavour if by guilt we incur His frown. (See Jer_10:10.)
There is an appropriateness and a rightness in our loving reverence of God; it is the dutiful child resting in the Father’s embrace, reverently contemplating His graciousness, and gratefully adoring him in return. (Addenda on Jer_10:6, “None like Thee, O Lord,” and “Thy Name is great.”)
Jer_10:8-9. Comments:
“They are altogether brutish. Brutishness here does not refer to a vicious state, but to the senseless stupidity of savages, who know no better than to adore a “tree.” “Altogether brutish;” rather all alike: the “wise” (Jer_10:7) and the “heathen” (Jer_10:2) equally on a level with “brutes.” Note that in Daniel and Revelations how often the power which opposes and ignores God is personified in a “beast.” Man forfeits his dignity, and even his humanity, and sinks to the level of a “brute,” when he severs himself from God (Psa_115:8).
“Their stock is a doctrine of vanity.” (Cf. Lit. Crit., supra.) The idols are vanity; hence, also, their doctrine is vanity. From such senseless gods what could their worshippers learn? Ex nihilo nihil fit. Thus Keil remarks, “The heathen, with all their wise men, are brutish, since their gods, from which they should receive instruction, are wood.”
“Silver spread into plates,” &c. (Cf. Geographical References, and Manners and Customs, supra.)
“However much the wood (“stock”) be decked out with silver, gold, and purple raiment, it remains but the product of men’s hands; by no such process does the wood become a god.”—Keil.
Jer_10:10. Theme: THE ONLY TRUE GOD.
Observe with what unity of assertion the Scriptures, Old and New, affirm this of Jehovah: He is “the true God” (text); “That they might know Thee, the only true God” (Joh_17:3), &c. (Addenda on Jer_10:10, “The true God.”)
I. In contrast with the “vanity” of idols (Jer_10:3; Jer_10:8; Jer_10:15) Jehovah is Truth. Not merely “true” in word and deed, veracious and faithful, but truth in essence, in Himself, as a quality of His being. And also a God who is no mere imaginary Being, but a sublime reality. God is a FACT. And being real, He is essentially true. And because in Himself true, He will deceive and disappoint none who trust in and seek Him. As He has revealed Himself, so He is; no insincerity in Him, no misrepresentation of Himself. That being so, how cheering to turn to the revelation He has made—to Moses as “merciful and gracious,” &c., and in Jesus as the Friend and Father of man—and to know all this is really so: “The Lord is the true God.”
II. In contrast with lifeless idols (Jer_10:5) Jehovah lives. He is “the living God.” Not a mere impersonal all-pervading Force; not a self-evolving Law; but a BEING. And because He lives, He has life in Himself, underived, and is Himself the Fount of Life, dispensing vitality to humanity. “Who only hath immortality.” “In whom we live,” &c. “As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given the Son to have life in Himself.” “In Him was life.” “Christ is our life.”
III. In contrast with the temporary duration of idols and idolatry (Jer_10:11; Jer_10:15) Jehovah is eternal. Idols are but of yesterday, and they shall perish; but the Lord is “everlasting,” and therefore they who are His have an imperishable Hope, a never-failing Refuge, a deathless Friend. And the human soul wants more than the transient. “When heart and flesh faileth, God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” Here is the confidence of the righteous: God will never fail them. Here, too, is the terror of the disobedient: they will never evade the “everlasting God.” The like attribute is assigned to Jesus (Heb_1:12), and He is “the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.”
IV. In contrast with the impotence of idols (Jer_10:5, “Cannot go; cannot do evil nor good”) God is King. A monarch so mighty that his wrath fills “earth” with trembling; so terrible that “nations” fail at His anger. Men do well to “fear” Him (Jer_10:7), and by reverent homage to abide in His favour. Alarming as is such a presentation of God’s monarchical majesty, it is only the manifestation suited to defiant sinners. There is a gentler side of the character of God: view it revealed in “the Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, and hath declared Him.” “God is love.” (Addenda on Jer_10:10. “The true God.”)
Jer_10:11-13. Theme: AN APPEAL TO GOD’S WORKS
A challenge seems suggested: judge of the idols by their works. What have they done? (Jer_10:11, “Not made heavens and earth”). But estimate Jehovah by His creative power (Jer_10:12), and by His providential operations in nature (Jer_10:13). It was in effect the like challenge to that of Elijah, “He who answers by fire, let Him be God”—decide by the works. So Jesus asks, “Believe Me for the very work’s sake.” It was an old Greek saying, “Whoever thinks himself a god besides the One God, let him make another world.” (See Psa_96:5.) Contemplate—
I. God as manifested in His original work of creation. Three distinct acts recorded (Jer_10:12)—“made,” “established,” “stretched out;” and three distinct attributes marked—“power,” “wisdom,” “discretion.”
1. God’s formative power: “Made the earth by His power.” And consider the size, the materials, the wealth and beauty stored within the earth, and the loveliness and variety with which He has clothed it, setting man thereon “over the works of His hands.” What a conception of God is supplied! What have idols “made”?
2. God’s ordering and controlling wisdom: “Established the world by His wisdom.” Separating the waters from the land, regulating the seasons, making the habitable parts suitable for the living creatures and serviceable for man, and, amid all natural changes, securing the world from convulsions which would destroy life from the surface of the world, or overthrow the healthful and happy order which prevails. What have the idols arranged for man’s daily good, and enjoyment of unmolested safety in the world?
3. God’s benignant discretion: “Stretched out the heavens by His discretion.” The “heavens” are full of proof of intelligent design in themselves, and of gracious consideration for God’s creatures (Gen_1:18; Jer_31:35). But “the gods have not made the heavens,” &c. (Jer_10:11).
II. God as manifesting Himself in His perpetual work of providence; controlling and caring for the world He made (Jer_10:13).
1. All parts of the universe yield their stores at His command. “The heavens” their waters; “the ends of the earth” their vapours; the chambers of “lightning” and the caves of the “wind” their “treasures.” So that there is no recess of nature, celestial or terrestrial, whereinto His controlling will does not penetrate. Hence God’s providence pervades all scenes, and He has the universe under His control. But idols are “fastened with nails” (Jer_10:4) to one spot, and have no power to move from it, nor wield a sceptre over any scene.
2. All forces of nature implicitly obey His bidding. The thunder utters His command: “uttereth His voice.” The “waters in the heavens” hear, and accumulate in “a multitude.” The clouds, “vapours,” ascend in recognition of His sway, for He “causeth” them to rise in clouds from the ends of the earth, the seas and rivers responding to His laws. “Lightnings” are His “making,” and also “rain.” And as for the “winds,” they only escape from their recesses as “He bringeth them forth.” All forces of nature are within His sway, and they serve His will. (See Psa_147:8; Psa_147:15-18). But what resources can idols command?
This is the argument of Natural Religion—God’s pervading power and goodness, manifest in His works, and those works manifesting Him to man (Rom_1:19-20), making an appeal to man’s reverence, gratitude, and love (Rom_1:21; Rom_2:4).
But what are these utterances in the heavens, and these voiceless wonders of nature, and these startling accompaniments of storms as heralds and witnesses of God, compared with the tenderer and more solemn revelations of Him in Christ? Not in the earthquake, tempest, or fire did Elijah discern God, but in “the still small voice.” And God’s highest argument, His unchallengeable claim to human reverence and love, bases itself less on the wonders of His works in the world around man than on the wonders of His grace within the human soul. There He asserts His supreme worth to man; it is His undisputed empire, His rightful throne.
Jer_10:14-15. Theme: REFLEX INFLUENCE OF THE OBJECT OF WORSHIP UPON THE WORSHIPPER.
Text means: His skill in making idols, or his acquaintance with idols, debases and brutalises him, deadens the sensibilities of his nature, and degrades the dignity of his manhood. Thus:—
I. Acquaintance with false gods debases men. “Knowledge” in this region renders men “brutish.” Such is the universal consequence of idolatry. Heathenism shows how damaging to the finest instincts and noblest virtues of humanity idol-worship becomes. (Addenda on Jer_10:14.)
This applies not alone to material idols, graven and fashioned by the heathen, but to those heart idols which the irreligious man, and even the worldly Christian man, makes to himself. The thing which he allows to usurp God’s place in his soul, that is his idol, and it will give a tone to his character and career. Worship acts reflectively on the Worshipper.
II. Confidence in false gods deludes men. The “founder is confounded by the graven image.” Why? “His molten image is falsehood”—a deception, without spirit or “breath.” Idols are delusions; they fulfil not our hopes; they embitter our hearts by their “falsehood.” They are themselves “vanity” (Jer_10:15). Their creation was a “work of errors,” a profound and hollow mockery, and covering with ridicule their votaries and worshippers.
God prophesies their doom. “In the time of their visitation they shall perish;” i.e., when God visits the idol-worshippers, the idols shall be destroyed. It was so when God visited these idolatrous Jews in Babylon; He destroyed their idols by Cyrus. So have they perished everywhere when God has “visited” the deluded with better knowledge. And as the Gospel spreads, idols shall be cast down, and the enslaved soul find emancipation and illumination in Christ.
Jer_10:16. Theme: GOD’S COVENANT HERITAGE IN ISRAEL.
Notwithstanding Israel’s desertion of Jehovah for idols, observe how they are here spoken of as if still united and inseparable. God continues to be “the portion of Jacob,” and “Israel the inheritance” of the Lord. This relationship is not to be easily or lightly severed or ignored. More; as Jehovah is “not like” idols, so neither is Israel like idolaters; for they have this glorious God as their portion—a crowning distinction that!
I. What a lavish estimate God forms of Israel’s worth.
1. He prized Israel as His peculiar possession; calls them His “inheritance,” something upon which He sets His heart, cherishes jealously, prizes greatly. (Comp. Eph_1:17-18, “What the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.”) It amazes us that God should so value His people.
2. He bestows Himself on Israel in exchange for this “inheritance;” becomes in return “the portion of Jacob.” This expresses how highly He esteems His people; He holds back nothing in order to secure their love and allegiance. See this bestowing Himself fully illustrated and enacted in Christ, “who loved us, and gave Himself for us.”
II. What a glorious supremacy distinguishes Israel’s God.
1. By emphatic dissimilarity with false gods: “Not like them.” They are themselves “vanity” (Jer_10:15), and they delude their votaries (Jer_10:14).
2. By the sublimity of His works: “The Former of all things.” Creation reflects Him; the boundless universe shows who God is.
3. By the dignity of His name: “The Lord of Hosts;” i.e., the hosts of heaven, the nations of earth (Jer_10:7). He is The Highest therefore; and the highest is God, God alone.
Israel’s honour and happiness in possessing the one true God as a “portion.” With whom should this God be exchanged? “The Lord is the true God, living God, everlasting King” (Jer_10:10). What dignity the possession of such a Deity imparts to Israel; what a firm basis for faith is supplied in having such a God as He!
III. What an infinite inheritance Israel has in Jehovah.
1. Consider the resources God has in Himself: “He is the Former of all things.” The firmament shows His glory, the earth is full of His riches; all these things His hand made. What cannot He do? What is beyond Him? Is there anything He cannot perform or produce, or procure for Israel, if necessity demands it? Yet this outgoing of Power in Creation is less an assurance to us than the outgoing of Love in Redemption; and “He that spared not His own Son, but freely delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things?”
2. Consider the forces God has at His command: “The Lord of hosts is His name.” (See Psa_103:19-21.) “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently give Me more than twelve legion of angels” (Mat_26:53). No man can number the hosts of God. In part they were shown to Elisha’s attendant (2Ki_6:17); Daniel saw something of the host (Dan_7:12); the Apocalypse revealed the “armies of heaven” more fully (Rev_5:11). And “are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” (Heb_1:14).
God is Israel’s treasure, and all His wealth is theirs: we are “heirs of God, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ.” “All things are yours, for ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”
Jer_10:17-18. Theme: IMMINENT EXILE.
A new section: discourse addressed (not to Israel, as the foregoing, but) to inhabitants of Jerusalem. Be in readiness to start for captivity.
I. The situation of the people. She is an “inhabitress of the fortress” besieged. The time of this prophecy is probably at the end of Jehoiakim’s reign. Nebuchadnezzar is at the gates of Jerusalem, the city assailed by Babylonian forces; but a brief interval and the foe will be occupant of the citadel.
II. The issue of the siege. The “fortress” will be vanquished. The people are urged to use the short opportunity remaining for “gathering up their packages” ready, thereby making what preparation they can for their migration as captives into “the north.” All resistance is now impotent.
III. The sentence of Jehovah. “I will sling out the inhabitants.” God’s hand was in their defeat and misfortunes. It would be effected with violence: “sling out,” properly “hurl out.” It would be thorough: “at this time”—hitherto hostile invasions had ended with plundering and imposition of tribute. It would be painful: “distress them.” It would have a definite purpose: “that they may find,” i.e., feel, either their sin, or “feel” after Me. (See Lit. Crit. on verse.)
Jer_10:19. (See “Noticeable Topics.”)
Theme: GREAT AFFLICTION AND SORROW OF HEART.
We may learn what it is to bow under the mighty hand of God. It is
i. That a man recognise the suffering as his suffering; i.e., (a.) as that which he has himself prepared; (b.) as that which is right for him, not too heavy and not too light, but exactly corresponding to its beneficent purpose.
ii. That a man accept his suffering willingly; (a.) in patience; (b.) in hope.—Lange.
(Addenda on Jer_10:19. “Sore affliction.”)
“Some make this the lamentation of the prophet for the calamities and desolations of his country. In mournful times it becomes us to be of a mournful spirit: “Woe is me!” But it may be taken as the language of the people speaking as a single person. Some among them would thus bemoan themselves, and all of them, at last, would be forced to do it.
i. They lament that the affliction is very great, very hard for them to bear it, and more so because they had not been used to trouble, and now did not expect it. “Woe is me for my hurt;” not for what I fear, but what I feel. Not a slight hurt, but a “wound,” and a wound that is “grievous.”
ii. That there is no remedy but patience. They cannot help themselves, but must sit still and abide it. Theirs is the language of sullen rather than of gracious submission. It argues a want of those good thoughts of God which we should have even under our afflictions; saying not, God can do what He wills, but “Let Him do as seemeth Him good.”—M. Henry.
(Addenda on Jer_10:20.)
Jer_10:20. Comments:
The Targum paraphrases the verse thus: “My land is desolate, and all my cities are plundered; my people are gone into captivity, and are no longer here.”
“The suffering was unmerited in so far as the prophet and the godly amongst the people were concerned, but it was inevitable that he and they should take it upon their shoulders along with the rest.”—Graf.
“Jerusalem laments that her tent is plundered, the cords which kept it erect rent asunder, and her children carried into exile, and so are not—are dead (Mat_2:18), either absolutely, or dead to her in the remote land of their captivity. They can aid the widowed mother no longer in pitching her tent, or in hanging up the curtains round about it.”—Speaker’s Com.
“My children are gone forth from me.” “The jealousy of the Saviour is so strict, that He will have His children directed to Him (Isa_45:11); and the idea of the pastoral office (see Jer_10:21) with which some good teachers are infected—of regarding and treating souls as their souls, sheep as their sheep, “children” as their children—is in the highest degree opposed to His will. Hence He often, for a just judgment, does not allow their joy in souls to last, but lets them see and conclude more of their decline and less of their success than there really is. For He will not give His glory to another, and the teachers are not Christ, but sent by Him before Him.”—Zinzendorf.
Jer_10:21. “The pastors are become brutish,” &c. “As sheep must either starve or be led to filthy and poisonous pasture, if their shepherds are fools, who do not know how to manage sheep; so is this much more the case in the spiritual pastorate.”—Cramer.
“The cause of this calamity is that the shepherds, i.e., the princes and leaders of the people, are become “brutish,” have “not sought Jehovah,” i.e., have not sought wisdom and guidance from the Lord. And so they could not “deal wisely,” i.e., rule the people with wisdom. “Prosper” is not here, have prosperity, but show wisdom, deal wisely, securing thus the blessed results of wisdom.”—Keil.
“Therefore they shall not prosper.” Rather, have not governed wisely. The verb has the sense of (1) acting prudently, (2) being prosperous as the necessary consequence. Here all the versions take in the first sense. The kings and rulers, having sunk to the condition of barbarous and untutored men, could not govern wisely, and so “all their flocks,” literally, their pasturing, that which they governed, “are scattered.”—Speaker’s Com.
Jer_10:22. “Behold, a voice is heard! it comes!” &c. “A last watch-call and signal, which denotes that the enemy so frequently announced is present.”—Lange.
“Already is heard the tremendous din of a mighty host which approaches from the north. The great commotion is that of an army on the march, the clattering of the weapons, the stamping and neighing of the war-horses.”—Keil.
“Bruit,” rumour of invasion. The antithesis is between the voice of God in His prophets, to which they paid no heed, and the cry of the enemy, to which they must attend.
“There is a contrast to be understood between the voice of God, which had constantly resounded in Judea, and the tumultuous clamours of enemies. The prophet declares that new teachers were now come, who would address them in another and unusual manner. ‘I have spent my labour many years in vain. I now turn you over to the Chaldeans; they shall teach you.’ ”—Calvin.
Jer_10:23. Theme: MAN’S CAREER UNDER GOD’S CONTROL.
The Jews regarded this as asserting that Nebuchadnezzar could not do as he listed. God’s will ruled his action and restrained his fury; he came to the land by Divine leading, he could deal with the people only as God permitted. More properly this declares that the Jews themselves had been relying on their own counsels and devices for the national safety and welfare, negotiating with Assyria when danger was apprehended from Egypt, and with Egypt or Babylon when Assyria was dreaded; but the national policy was futile, their hopes and designs were of no avail. True of us; our life and career are not wholly in our keeping; our planning is often frustrated; a Divine direction and determination overrule our movements.
I. Conscious liberty. “The way of man;” his own way. He obeys only (so far as he feels and knows) the impulses of his own nature, the determinations of his own judgment, the resolutions of his own will.
II. Unconscious control. “The way of man is not in himself.” His way is in God’s power and God’s purpose.
III. Unsurrendered volition. “Man that walketh.” As these Jews were doing, in defiance of the prophet’s appeals and God’s warnings. As Nebuchadnezzar would walk in obedience to his lust of empire. As we walk, “turning every one of us to his own way.” Man insists on his right of self-government.
IV. Insufficient discernment. “Not in man to direct his steps,” i.e., he is (1) bewildered in judgment, so that he often does not know how to walk, what to do—can act, but not foresee issues; (2) inconstant in will, so that he changes his course frequently in life, influenced by his own caprice or by altered circumstances; (3) incapable in self-government, for he finds a warfare raging within him, “so that he cannot do the things he would;” he cannot carry out his own resolutions—weakness arrests him; he is not the master of his own nature—evil is there, passion vanquishes his purposes, fear makes him cowardly, indolence holds him in the snare of indifference or inaction.
V. Involuntary submission. “O LORD, it is not in man.” In whom then? God holds the impulses of our nature in His control. He has free entrance into the secret chambers of our affections and thoughts. His Spirit can “witness within us” and “work within us to will and to do of His good pleasure.” He can alter the circumstances around us which lead us to modify our plans. He can lay inducements in our path. He can check our course by affliction, &c. He can help us to do otherwise impossible things.
Believers bow their wills to God as an act of filial submission, but the grace to do it was God-given. Sinners yield their love and faith to Christ, but the persuasives thereto were Divine. Rebels rise in defiance against Him, but He curbs their fury, uses their rage, and “restrains the remainder of their wrath.” “Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther.”
(Addenda on Jer_10:23. “God’s control of man’s career.”)
Notes: Blayney, following the Syriac, renders the verse, “I know Jehovah, that His way is not like that of men; nor like a human being doth He proceed to order His going.” It is inadmissible: את should have preceded “Jehovah,” marking the objective case.
“He first acknowledges that man cannot direct “HIS WAY,” his path in life, himself; dependent as it is only in part upon his own will, and in part upon the conduct of others, and everywhere upon God. There is an antithesis between “man,” i.e., any man, in the first clause, and the word “man” in the second clause, i.e., man in his strength. The strong man may fancy that at least each single “STEP” is under his own control, even if his whole path, or “way,” be not; but God declares otherwise. (Pro_16:9).—Speaker’s Com.
“Theme: MAN PROPOSES, GOD DISPOSES. This is—i. A humbling of our pride, ii. A strong support of our hope.”—Naeg.
Jer_10:24. Theme: MERCIFUL CHASTISEMENT. “Correct me not in anger, lest Thou bring me to nothing.”
Israel had wished in his own strength to walk in his own way, contrary to the will of God (Jer_10:23). He now recognises the sinfulness of this wilful rejection of God’s control, and submits to the merited chastisement—be it even national humiliation and exile; but, while bowing to this, pleads for the utmost possible mildness and forbearance. This prophetic language sets forth Israel’s future repentance and restoration.
I. Surrender to gracious chastisement. The soul recognises it as needful, and bows resigned; and there is no agony of dismay in the thought, “Let me fall into the hands of the Lord.” “O Lord, correct me.”
II. Shrinking from full retribution. “Correct me, but with judgment.” With mildness, in opposition with “anger.” The transgressor cannot bear the treatment he deserves, and for which his sins make demand. It would issue in destruction. No soul could survive. Hence the plea, “with judgment,” as “knowing our frame and remembering we are dust;” with moderation and leniency.
III. Terror of God’s wrath. “Not in anger.” For “we are consumed in Thy wrath.” The soul of man stands in dismay before the thought of Omnipotence wielding itself in anger! The child of God trembles in the anticipation of His displeasure. Suffering and even calamity can be borne, but not a Father’s wrath. That would give the keenest pang to heaviest affliction; but the stroke will not crush the heart if God only corrects in mercy. Who will dare provoke and brave the “wrath of Almighty God”?
IV. Consequences of Divine severity. “Bring me to nothing.” Surely so; if the rocks tremble and the earth smokes at His “look,” if angels must veil themselves from His glory, how can frail man other than perish at His rebuke, how survive His anger? Is this annihilation? Not in text; but only “diminish me,” make me little (margin): i.e., reduce Judah to an insignificant people. Calvin, however, says, “The prophet takes diminution here for demolition.” But the history of the nation shows the people not destroyed, but only diminished and dishonoured. Such is the issue of Divine displeasure.
Happy they who by prayer and propitiation (in Christ) avert the “anger” and find mercy. (Addenda on Jer_10:24, “Lenient correction.”)
Jer_10:25. Theme: FURY FOR THE IMPIOUS OPPRESSOR. (Addenda on Jer_10:25.)
i. Guilty of cruelty to God’s people. “Eaten up Jacob, devoured and consumed him.”
ii. Gratifying thus their hatred to true religion. Not acting reverently, as agents of God’s purpose, but impiously. “Know Thee not; call not on Thy name.”
iii. Meriting therefore the fury they have poured out on others. “With what measure ye mete,” &c. “He that toucheth you, toucheth the apple of Mine eye.” “Pour out Thy fury upon the heathen.”
iv. Suffering the doom of enemies of God. For the malicious deeds of the Babylonians showed them impious, implacable, foes of Jehovah as well as His people. They treated His holy Temple and its sacred treasures with ruthless scorn, and blasphemed His great name. Hence, having insulted God, they should suffer “His fury.” “So let Thine enemies perish, O God.”
Note:—This verse is reproduced in Psa_79:6-7, which was written during the exile, or at least after the Chaldeans had destroyed Jerusalem.
“Theme: How we should behave under the chastisements of God. i. Humbly submit to them as necessary and wholesome means of improvement, ii. Be certain that they will not then transgress those bounds, nor proceed to our destruction.”—Lange.
NOTICEABLE TOPICS IN CHAPTER 10
Topic: BEREAVED OF CHILDREN. Text: “My children are gone forth of me, and they are not; there is none to stretch forth my tent any more” (Jer_10:20).
The cry of dread from aged Jacob, “If I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved;” the anguish of Rachel’s lament, “weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they were not;” and this pathetic dirge of Zion, “Woe is me for my hurt! my wound is grievous: my children are not!”—all denote this loss of children to be one of life’s heaviest yet commonest sorrows.
Danger when in trouble of thinking our case wholly and hopelessly dark: “All things against me!” But see: “Truly this a grief!” Terrible indeed, yet only one, standing alone amid ten thousand kindneses, and after long years of forbearance and grace. Bright days, sunny and happy, go on multiplying without our heeding them; suddenly one day of gloom and storm breaks the order; then we properly say, “This is a dreary day, but we must not murmur.” And so the years of life go by in peace and prosperity; suddenly a grievous sorrow interrupts the course of enjoyment; shall we not say, “Truly this is a grief, and I must bear it”—not sullenly but submissively,—“remembering the years of the right hand of the Most High”?
I. Desolating bereavement. “Children gone forth from me, and they are not,” Then it is so that—
1. “Children” may be taken away. They seem to belong to us; we entwine our love around them, and rest hopes on them, as though none could or should touch them. But they are not ours; “no power over spirit to retain it.” Let parents heed it, and hold them from God, for God. They may not live to inherit our worldly substance; lead them early to know Christ, and “lay hold on eternal life.” Let the young heed it: children may die: early seek and serve the Lord!
2. Home is desolated by their loss. “Tabernacle spoiled, cords broken.” Seems now that light of home is all darkened, flowers, all withered, music all silenced. Suggests for children and the young—your power to make home beautiful and glad. Let your life there be a joy and perpetual blessing.
3. Hopes built upon our “children” may fail us. “There is none to stretch tent,” &c. Naturally we look to them for our earthly future, to surround us with comfort, “set up curtains;” to minister to and solace us in hoar years. This makes their loss so sad: destroys our hopes, and leaves us helpless against years and infirmities. Oh, how often warned against “making flesh our arm.” “Put not trust in man, whose breath is in his nostrils,” &c. God is needful to us all, and He not fail. Christ essential, and He “same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” Rest not on what is so fleeting: “They are gone forth, and are not.” Our sweetest earthly hopes may perish.
II. Bitterest grief. “Woe is me for my hurt! my wound is grievous.”
1. The distress over bereavement finds outlet in lamentations. Natural to mourn: “Jesus wept.” Let the stricken spirit raise its bitter outcry, even as Rachel. God does not forbid or despise tears. “In all your afflictions He is afflicted.” Remember “the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief.” He would bear your sorrow, and open to you the sympathy and solace of His tender heart.
2. There was sore occasion for such grief. Calamity had befallen Zion. Look at those words, “woe,” and “my hurt.” They tell that a sudden blow had fallen heavily on her. All disastrous everts fall suddenly; we never prepared for them; strike us to the earth alarmed, “hurt;” and we cry, “Woe is me for my hurt!” In such sudden sorrow we want the Saviour’s instant succour: “Brother born for adversity.” More: “My wound is grievous.” The stroke makes a “wound” not to be quickly healed: “grievous,” indicating the severity of the hurt, the depths of the pang. “My children are not”—it means a lifelong wound. “My tabernacle is spoiled”—the joy of earth can never be complete again. Not mock the stricken with the assurance “Time will heal.” No, “the wound is grievous:” rather speak of the restoration; tell Zion of exiles’ return to her; tell bereaved of nearing day, when “no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, nor pain, but former things are passed away.”
III. Patient resignation. “But I said, Truly this is a grief, and I must bear it.” First comes the wild outcry of “Woe!” succeeded by the hushed sob of submission.
1. It was felt that the loss would not be alleviated by abandonment to grief. To nurse our sorrow only leads to repining; then life becomes “a waste, howling wilderness.” Not yield to fruitless anguish, but seek grace to bear it with composure, and to turn ourselves with all possible courage and heartiness to what duties are around us, and to what comforts Heaven has preserved.
2. It was recognised as from the Lord, and therefore bowed to with submission. Sudden, desolating, terrifying the calamity, but the hand of God was in the event. Not easy to say, “Thy will be done!” “It is the Lord, let Him do,” &c. Yet make the endeavour and say, “Truly a grief, and I must bear it!” “God cannot afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.” Doubt not His love, His wisdom, His grace. “Oh, rest in the Lord.” Draw near Him for comfort, and cast on Him the burden of your loneliness and grief. “He hath torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up.” (Addenda on Jer_10:20, “Bereaved of children.”)
Topic: PROGRESSION AND DIRECTION. Text: “It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps” (Jer_10:23).
Self-distrust the teaching of long discipline: the more tried and advanced the believer, the more unreservedly will he say, with Solomon, 1Ki_3:7; and that saying, as then, will “please the Lord.”
I. Natural action. “Man that walketh.” Man’s action in life complex, involving two distinct parts, of which he has only one in himself—the power of natural action.
1. Its ease. It is just the simple putting forth of the power of life; going on, without thinking if right or wrong. Danger of forgetting a deficiency in this part-progression: mistake a part for the whole. We think we can act aright, simply because we have the power of action at all. It is as if ship could reach the port just because she has undoubted capacities for sailing, though no helmsman or compass.
2. This mere power of natural action has a tendency to mislead. It makes a man unreflective. Proneness to slight the invisible, because it does not intrude itself upon us, although the things of this life have inseparable association with those hidden from sight in another world. Thus man’s “walk” may do much as regards this life, but alas! how little effect for the world beyond! Leads to a waste of strength; for toil where nothing can be taken, and inaction where much might be won. We often wonder there is so much failure where there is so much energy. The value of pausing amid the bustle of action.
II. Needful direction. Direction is often the remedy for all this failure (Psa_119:133; Psa_119:105). Once let us be persuaded we cannot guide ourselves, and we would never willingly lose all the results of our labour by working at random.
1. Take care to go out of ourselves for direction. Shall not remedy the matter by taking more thought. When we have done much in that way, it will only be “man that walketh” directing his own steps; doing it more carefully, but still doing it himself. This going out of self may be humiliating.
2. The advantages of this going out of self. There will flow in upon us “the wisdom from above;” from the Father of lights. He will show us things in new lights altogether, that see them in their entirety.
3. But we must yield ourselves to God to be ordered. Content to be led “by ways we know not.” Not troubling ourselves with continual questionings on the subject. Trust Him to choose the road; even though it seem to lead away from the desired end. St. Augustine said, “I am a little child, but my Father is my sufficient guardian.”
4. Ways are not really open because apparently so. Not because we can do this thing or that, is it therefore right. Because of this error, we have often gone into spheres where God is not, and where we should not have been.
5. Success before the world is not, therefore, a proof of our being right, nor of success in our relationship towards God. Failure here, leaves our work but as “wood, hay, stubble.” Danger of being too eager for success. So that what appears success to us may not be so at all, and may be a prelude to heavy loss.
6. Learn not to put implicit confidence in energy or action. It is likely to mislead; it may make the “man” prominent in us, and not God. And a very little thing may put a sudden stop to it.
Conclusion: Bind together the two ideas of our own foolishness and God’s wisdom. We never learn a depressing truth concerning ourselves without an encouraging one concerning God. We are to be emptied out of ourselves to be filled with Him. Under His guidance, our calm progress in “ordered ways” will lead in God’s own time to happy ends.—Abstract of “Breviates,” by P. B. Power, M.A.
ADDENDA TO CHAPTER 10: ILLUSTRATIONS AND SUGGESTIVE EXTRACTS
Jer_10:2. “The signs of heaven.” Which the blind heathens feared and deified, and none did more than the Syrians, the Jews’ next neighbours. Experience frequently confuteth those vain astrologers that pretend to read men’s fates and fortunes in the heavens, as it did Abraham the Jew, who foretold by the stars the coming of their Messiah A.D. 1464; and Albumazar, a Mohammedan wizard, who predicted an end of the Christian religion A.D. 1460 at utmost. A great flood was foretold by these diviners to fall out in the year 1524, cum planetæ comita in piscibus celebrarent. This caused the Prior of St. Bartholomew, in London, wise-man-like, to go and build him a house at Harrow-on-the-Hill, for his better security. Mulcasses, king of Tunis, a great star-gazer, foreseeing by them, as he said, the loss of his kingdom and life together, left Africa that he might shun that mischief; but thereby he hastened it, A.D. 1544. God suffereth sometimes such fond predictions to fall out right upon men for a just punishment of their curiosity.—Trapp.
Jer_10:3. Idol manufacture. In India, it is computed, there are 30,000,000 of idols. British Christians should remember the idolatry of their ancestors. “In Scotland there was a temple of Mars; in Cornwall, of Mercury; in Bangor, of Minerva; in Bath, of Apollo; in Leicester, of Janus; in York, where St. Peter’s now stands, the temple of Bellona; in London, on the site of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the temple of Diana; and at Westminster, where the Abbey rears its venerable pile, a temple of Apollo.”—Dr. Plaifere.
Jer_10:5. Idols “must needs be borne.” Missionaries in India were once proclaiming the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ, when one of the audience cried, “Jesus is the true God!” Others caught the cry and reiterated it, till the whole group burst into response. Then they shouted “Come with us, and pull down our temples, and cast our gods down the hills.” They led the way, and soon the helpless idol was carried along—for though it had legs it could not walk—to the brow of a neighbouring hill and flung contemptuously over.
It is a fact and a sight to be met with any day in Madras and other large European cities: a set of hired bearers will carry one day on their shoulders a hideous idol, ornamented with gold and gems, and the next day the same hired bearers will carry forth in state the Virgin Mary.—Biblical Treasury.
Jer_10:6. “NONE LIKE THEE, O LORD.” All things in the natural world symbolise God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words. High above all He sits, sublimer than mountains, grander than storms, sweeter than blossoms and tender fruits, nobler than lords, truer than parents, more loving than lovers. His feet tread the lowest places of the earth, but His head is above all glory, and everywhere He is supreme.—Beecher.
“THY NAME IS GREAT IN MIGHT.” A Jew entered a Persian temple, and saw there the sacred fire. He said to the priest, “How do you worship fire?”—“Not the fire: it is to us an emblem of the sun and of his animating light,” said the priest. The Israelite continued, “You dazzle the eye of the body, but darken that of the mind; in presenting the terrestrial light you take away the celestial.” The Persian asked, “How do you name the Supreme Being?”—“We call Him JEHOVAH ADONAI; that is, the Lord who was, who is, and shall be.”—“Your word is great and glorious, but it is terrible,” said the Persian. A Christian approaching, said, “We call Him, “Abba, Father.” Then the Persian and the Jew regarded each other with surprise, and said, “Your word is the nearest and the highest; but who gives you courage to call the Eternal thus?”—“The Father Himself,” said the Christian, who then expounded to them the plan of redemption.—Krummacher.
Jer_10:10. “THE TRUE GOD.” “How many Gods are there?” was once asked of a boy. “One.”—“How do you know there is only one?”—“Because there is no room for more, for He fills heaven and earth.”
The Egyptian hieroglyphic, representing God, was a winged globe and a serpent coming out of it: the globe to signify God’s eternity, the wings His active power, and the serpent His wisdom.—Bowes.
Two gentlemen were once disputing on the divinity of Christ: one of them, who argued against it, said, “If it were true, certainly it would have been expressed in more clear and unequivocal terms.” “Well,” said the other, “admitting that you believed it, were you authorised to teach it, and allowed to use your own language, how would you express the doctrine to make it indubitable?”—“I would say,” replied he, “that Jesus Christ is the true God.”—“You are very happy,” replied the other, “in the choice of your words, for you have happened to hit upon the very words of inspiration; for John, speaking of the Son, says, ‘This is THE TRUE GOD, and eternal life.’ ”—Wilson.
Jer_10:11-13. AN APPEAL TO GOD’S WORKS.
“Who guides below and rules above,
The great Disposer and the mighty King;
Than He none greater, next Him none
That can be, is, or was:
Supreme, He singly fills the throne.”
HORACE.
An Arab, when one day asked, “How do you know there is a God?” turned indignantly upon the questioner, and replied, “How do I know whether a man or a camel passed my tent last night?” His own footprints in creation and providence testify of Him.
Jer_10:14. WORSHIP OF IDOLS DEBASES THE WORSHIPPER. The gods of Greece and Rome had at least human features, and modelled after the likeness of men; but among the millions of the gods of India affecting the character of their worshippers, there is not one which represents a virtue, not one which is not a monster of iniquity. Brahma is acknowledged by the Hindoos themselves as too bad to be worshipped. Their god, Shiva, is distinguished for his revenge and malignity; Krishna bears a character of a notorious licentious profligate; Juggernaut is represented by an old idol without legs and arms, because the legs and arms of the god were cut off by a sentence of the gods for his incurable iniquity. What but impurity and cruelty can be the result of a religion which has such patrons in its god?—Dictionary of Illustrations.
“Any opinion which tends to keep out of sight the living and loving God, whether it be to substitute for Him an idol, or any occult agency, or a formal creed, can be nothing better than the portentous shadow projected from the slavish darkness of an ignorant heart.”—Hallam.
Jer_10:19. SORE AFFLICTION.
As they lay copper in aquafortis before they begin to engrave it, so the Lord usually prepares us by searching, softening discipline of affliction for making a deep, lasting impression upon our hearts.—Nottidge.
There is as much difference between the sufferings of the saints and those of the ungodly as between the bandages wherewith the tender surgeon binds his patients and the cords with which an executioner pinions a condemned malefactor.—Arrowsmith.
One in affliction, when asked how he bore it so well, replied, “It lightens the stroke to draw near to Him who handles the rod.”
Jer_10:20. BEREAVED OF CHILDREN.
“Death lies on her, like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”
SHAKSPEARE.
Bengel had twelve children, of whom half died in infancy. He said, when speaking of his loss, “As little children give their sweetmeats to their parents to keep for them, so my pleasant things are safer in God’s keeping than in that of my own treacherous heart.”—Bowes.
Elliot said of the death of his children, “I have had six children, and I bless God they are all either in Christ or with Christ, and my mind is now at rest concerning them.”—Ibid.
“I cried, ‘Lord, spare my child!’ He did; but not as I meant. He snatched it from danger, and took it to His own home.”—Cecil.
“See, father,” said a lad, “they are knocking away the props from under the bridge. What are they doing that for? Won’t the bridge fall?”—“They are knocking them away,” said the father, “that the timbers may rest more firmly upon the stone piers, which are now finished.” God only takes away our earthly helps that we may rest firmly upon Him.
A lady in one day, during her husband’s absence from home, lost both her children by cholera. With a mother’s anguish of heart she covered a sheet over them, and awaited her husband’s return. “A Person lent me some jewels,” she said when she met him, “and now he wishes them again? What shall I do?”—“Return them, by all means,” said her husband. Then she led the way, and silently uncovered to him the forms of his dear children.—Dictionary of Illustrations.
Jer_10:23. GOD’S CONTROL OF MAN’S CAREER.
“The wish, which ages have not yet subdued
In man, to have no other master but his mood.”—BYRON.
“Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them how we will.”—SHAKESPEARE.
“A wheel within a wheel’s the Scripture notion,
And all those wheels traverse and cross in motion.
All creatures serve it in their place; yet so
As thousands of them know not what they do:
At this or that their aim they do direct,
But neither this nor that is the effect.
Men are, like horses, set at every stage,
For Providence to ride from age to age;
Which, like a post, spurs on, and makes them run
From stage to stage, until their journey’s done;
Then takes a fresh: but they the business know
No more than horses the post-letters do.
Yet though its work be now concealed from sight,
’Twill be a glorious piece when brought to light.”—FLAVEL.
“Certum est, nos velle, cum volumus, sed ille facit, ut velimus bonum, de quo dictum est, quod præparatur voluntas a Domino (Pro_8:35). Certum est, non facere, cum facimus, sed ille facit, ut faciamus præbendo vires efficacissimas voluntati, qui dixit; faciam ut in justificationibus meis ambuletis et judicia mea observetis (Eze_36:26-27).”—Augustine.
Jer_10:24. Lenient correction. “Correction is not simply to be deprecated. The prophet here cries, ‘Correct me;’ David saith, ‘It was good for me;’ Job calleth God’s afflicting of us His magnifying of us (chap. Jer_8:17). Feri Domine, feri clementer; ipse paratus sum, saith Luther,—Smite, Lord, smite me, but gently, and I am ready to bear it patiently. King Alfred prayed God to send him always some sickness, whereby his body might be tamed, and he the better disposed and affectioned towards God.”—Trapp.
Jer_10:25. Fury for the oppressor. This is not a New Testament aspect of God; gracious towards Israel, tempering affliction with mercy, but severe and wrathful, with no restraining of anger, towards the heathen. Rather, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” “Pray for them that despitefully use you.” Hence the true piety of the Prayer-Book petition: “That it may please Thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers; and turn their hearts.”
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain 1-16. The folly of idolatry.
1-16. The folly of idolatry.
This section of the prophecy is of doubtful authorship. For (a) it introduces a break in the sense; (b) there is less smoothness between the parts than we generally find in Jeremiah's writings; (c) its language differs considerably from his use elsewhere, and closely resembles that of Isaiah 40-44; (d) the writer emphasises the fact that false gods are incapable of hurting, while Jeremiah elsewhere speaks rather of them as powerless to aid; (e) Isa_44:2, Isa_44:4 read as though addressed to men who were contemplating the idolatry around them, rather than guilty of it themselves. For these reasons it is held by some to be a discourse addressed by an unknown author during the captivity to the exiles at Babylon: cp. the spurious letter ascribed to Jeremiah, which forms Jeremiah 6 of the (apocryphal) book of Baruch.
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It should, however, be said, on the other hand, that the Septuagint version of this book, though omitting much that is found in the Hebrew (see Intro.), yet contains this chapter.
2. Signs of heaven] portents in the sky, such as comets and meteors.
3. People] nations.
5. Upright as the palm tree] RV 'like a palm tree, of turned work.' These idols are as stiff and lifeless.
7. To thee doth it appertain] Thine is the supreme kingship.
8. The stock, etc.] RV 'the instruction of idols, it is but a stock': an idol is wood, and can never get beyond it.
9. Tarshish] probably Tartessus in Spain, or perhaps Tarsus in Cilicia.
Uphaz] perhaps the same as Ophir, which was probably either in India or on the E. coast of Arabia. Founder] RV 'goldsmith': so in Jer_10:14.
11 This v. is in the later Hebrew or Aramaic. It may therefore have been originally a note on the margin of the manuscript, afterwards copied into the text.
13. The ascent of the vapours in clouds is spoken of poetically, as though it were the consequence of the thunder (his voice), because it is seen to follow it.
14. In his knowledge] RV 'and is without knowledge.'
16. The portion of Jacob] i.e. the true God, upon whom Israel has a claim. Former] Maker, Fashioner. The rod] RV 'tribe.'
17-25. The coming troubles. This section seems to be closely connected with, and should probably be read after, Jer_9:7-22.
17. Gather up, etc.] i.e. collect articles for a hasty flight, O thou who art in a besieged city'; i.e. prepare for exile.
18. Find it so] RV 'feel it'.
19f. The lament of Jerusalem.
20. The spoiling and exile represented in figurative language. Tabernacle] RV 'tent.'
21. The condemnation of the rulers.
22. The bruit] RV 'a rumour.' The north country] see on Jer_1:13. Dragons] see on Jer_9:11.
23. Jeremiah's prayer: the helplessness of man, and his dependence on God.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain The Vanity of Idols
CHAPTER 10
The Vanity of Idols
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1. Be not dismayed at the signs of heaven (Jer 10:1-5)
2. The contrast: The vanity of idols and the Lord, the King of Nations (Jer 10:6-18)
3. The affliction of the prophet and his prayer (Jer 10:19-25)
Jer 10:1-5. The heathen paid attention to the signs of heaven, such as eclipses, comets, meteoric showers, etc. They were dismayed at these things. All they did, their customs and observances in connection with idol worship, was nothing but vanity.
Jer 10:6-18. Idols are nothing, but the Lord God of Israel is all. He is the King of Nations, who rules over all. He is the true God, the living God, the everlasting King. At His wrath the earth trembles and the nations shall not be able to abide His indignation. He made the earth by His power; He established the world by wisdom; He stretched out the heavens by His discretion. But what is man? Brutish in his knowledge.
Jer 10:19-25. Here we see how Jeremiah identified himself with the afflictions and sorrows of Jerusalem. In his prayer he pleads that the judgment might be only for correction and not for a complete and perpetual consummation. “O LORD correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger, lest thou bring me to nothing.” He calls for judgment upon the nations. Well may we see in pleading Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, who is afflicted in Jerusalem’s affliction, who identified himself with his people, a type and picture of Him who is greater than Jeremiah.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain The Nothingness of Idols
The Nothingness of Idols
v. 1. Hear ye the word which the Lord speaketh unto you, O house of Israel! those who now survived as the representatives of the former great nation.
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v. 2. Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, in becoming accustomed to their idolatrous worship, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven, filled with the fear which caused the Gentile nations to associate various perils with the movements of comets, with the occurrence of eclipses, and other phenomena; for the heathen are dismayed at them, since they revered supernatural powers in the various constellations. This warning is now further substantiated by a description of idolatrous customs.
v. 3. For the customs of the people are vain, literally, "the precepts of the nations," what they fix for people to follow, "are breath, nothingness"; for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, literally, "for wood is it," that is what the object of their worship amounts to, "hewn out of the forest," the work of the hands of the workman, with the ax. That is a fair sample of the objects of worship chosen by the heathen—a log felled in the woods and fashioned by an ax.
v. 4. They deck it with silver and with gold, with ornaments of precious metals; they fasten it with nails and with hammers that it move not, for that is the only way in which the idol, supposed to be a god, can retain his upright position.
v. 5. They, the idols, are upright as the palm-tree, they are like a statue of turned work, resembling a palm-tree, but speak not, Psa 115:5, for all their possessing a mouth; they must needs be borne, carried about from one place to another, because they cannot go, they are unable to walk. Be not afraid of them, standing in awe of any power which they are said to possess; for they cannot do evil, they can do no one any harm, neither also is it in them to do good, they cannot bring blessings or benefits upon any of their worshipers, since they are simply dead. Cf Isa 41:7-10.
v. 6. Forasmuch as there is none like unto Thee, O Lord, literally, "not a particle of anything," this being the strongest possible denial of any power in any other god besides Jehovah; Thou art great, and Thy name is great in might, His essence is made known in works of His almighty power.
v. 7. Who would not fear Thee, O King of nations? For to Thee doth it appertain, to Him alone does it properly pertain, namely, that He is to be feared, is to be respected and revered by all men, forasmuch as among all the wise men of the nations and in all their kingdoms there is none like unto Thee. No matter where a person searches for a god who might stand a comparison with Jehovah, the quest will be useless: He alone is the one becoming object of worship.
v. 8. But they are altogether brutish and foolish, the heathen are all alike in their stupidity, they have sunk to the level of brutes because they have severed their connection with the true God; the stock is a doctrine of vanities, or, "the instruction of vanities is—wood"; the very idols from whom, according to their lights, they hope to receive instruction are wood and therefore unable to give understanding.
v. 9. Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish, from Tartessus in Spain, whose gold mines were well known in the ancient world, and gold from Uphaz, or Ophir, 1Ki 9:27, the work of the workman, beaten into the form of a thin covering by the goldsmith, and of the hands of the founder, the artist in precious metals; blue and purple is their clothing, made of the finest cloth, Exo 25:4; they are all the work of cunning men, of craftsmen possessing a very high degree of skill. The thought evidently is this: No matter how the idolaters strive to give their statues the semblance of living and mighty beings by ornamenting them in this fashion, they still remain idols and cannot be elevated to the position of gods.
v. 10. But the Lord, Jehovah, the covenant God, is the true God, His whole essence being truth over against the nothingness of the idols, and an everlasting King, Ruler of the universe forever; at His wrath the earth shall tremble, shrinking back in terror before His living wrath, and the nations shall not be able to abide His indignation, to endure even the smallest expression of His anger.
v. 11. Thus shall ye say unto them, the Jews being given an argument in the very tongue of Aramaic idolaters who were trying to seduce them to commit idolatry, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, those upon whom the heathen relied in their foolishness, even they shall perish from the earth, disappear into nothingness, and from under these heavens. The import, then, of the Lord’s warning is this: not only should the Jews feel no fear of the heathen idols, but they should declare to the Gentiles that their supposed gods would soon be forgotten. Over against the weakness and nothingness of the heathen idols the almighty power of the one true God is now once more proclaimed,
v. 12. He hath made the earth by His power, He hath established the world by His wisdom, Psa 136:5-6; Psa 93:1, and hath stretched out the heavens by His discretion, spreading out the firmament by His unlimited skill and understanding.
v. 13. When He uttereth His voice, when He causes it to thunder, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, or, "a heaving of waters in the heavens," as the clouds come rolling along in heavy masses, and He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth, to form the clouds of the storm; He maketh lightnings with rain and bringeth forth the wind out of His treasures, out of His storehouses. Thus thunder, lightning, clouds, rain, and storm are named as evidences of Jehovah’s almighty powers in the tempest.
v. 14. Every man is brutish in his knowledge, they are all stupid in their skill and understanding, as they fashion their idols; every founder is confounded by the graven image, every artist who makes idols is put to shame by the work of his own hands; for his molten image is falsehood, their casting, what they fashion, is a lie, and there is no breath in them, they lack all evidence of life.
v. 15. They are vanity, a vapor, nothingness, and the work of errors, of deceit and mockery, causing their worshipers to be mocked and derided when the nothingness of the idols becomes evident; in the time of their visitation they shall perish, that is, when God shall punish the idol-worshipers, the idols themselves shall likewise perish.
v. 16. The Portion of Jacob is not like them, that is, Jehovah, the Portion of the true Church forever, does not in any way resemble the dead idols against which He warns His people; for He is the Former of all things, the Fashioner of the universe, and Israel is the rod of His inheritance, the tribe or nation which He has chosen as His possession. "The Lord of hosts" is His name, He alone is the almighty God, to whom the armies of the heavens, the angels and all the heavenly host, are subject, the Lord and Ruler of the whole world from everlasting to everlasting.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 General Information:
General Information:
Yahweh has just reminded the people of Judah, as well as Egypt, Edom, Ammon, Moab and all people, that they will be punished.
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Hear the word
"Hear the message"
house of Israel
Here the "house" of Israel represents the people of Israel. AT: "people of Israel" (See: Metonymy)
Do not learn the ways of the nations
"Do not act like the other nations act"
dismayed
worried or upset
by the signs in the heavens
"by strange things in the sky"
for the nations are dismayed by these
Here "the nations" refer to the people who live in them. This can be written in active form. AT: "for the people of the nations are afraid of the strange things they see in the sky" (See: Active or Passive and Metonymy)
translationWords
word
Yahweh
house
Israel
nation
sign
heaven
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 10:1-25 This poetic passage has three parts. The first…
10:1-25 This poetic passage has three parts. The first is a contrast between the Lord and pagan idols (10:1-16). The second is a two-part reflection on the destruction that lay ahead for the idol worshipers (10:17-18, 19-22). The third part is a prayer for God to act with restraint in the coming judgment and not to allow the pagan nations to go unpunished (10:23-25).
10:1-16 This poetic passage severely criticizes idol worship and strongly affirms the unity and majesty of the one true God. It is neither a rational discussion of divinity in nature nor a carefully crafted statement about God’s attributes; rather, it is a poem about the foolishness of worshiping idols that the worshipers themselves have made, along with vigorous affirmations of faith that boldly declare who God is.
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10:1 As usual, Jeremiah identified the source of his message and urged his audience not simply to hear, but to pay careful attention to the word of the Lord. In Hebrew thought, the person who does not respond has not truly heard.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.