Jeremiahchapter 10
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Speaks with:Psalms 135×3Psalms 115×3Leviticus 18×2Psalms 96×2Deuteronomy 32×2Jeremiah 31×2
Summary
Chapter summary
Idol-making as satire: a tree cut out of the forest, worked with the axe, decked with silver and gold, fastened with nails so it will not topple; the images are like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, unable to speak or walk, 'they must needs be borne, because they cannot go.' Against them stands the incomparable God ('Jehovah is the true God; he is the living God, and an everlasting King') whose wrath makes the earth tremble, who made the earth by his power and stretched out the heavens by his understanding. A single Aramaic verse (10:11) sentences the false gods to perish. Jeremiah closes praying, 'I know that the way of man is not in himself.'
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–16 A Tree Cut from the Forest, Fastened with Hammer and Nails
- B. 17–25 Gather Up Thy Wares: the Way of Man Is Not in Himself
The outline
A.A Tree Cut from the Forest, Fastened with Hammer and Nailsvv. 1 to 16
Read vv. 1 to 16 →B.Gather Up Thy Wares: the Way of Man Is Not in Himselfvv. 17 to 25
Read vv. 17 to 25 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 10The history
The chapter walks through idol manufacture as though standing in the shop. A tree is felled in the forest. A craftsman shapes it with a cutting tool. It is plated with beaten silver and gold — Tarshish and Uphaz named as the sources, the way we would name a country of origin. Then it is fastened down with hammer and nails so that it will not fall over.
That last step is the joke. A god that has to be nailed to its stand cannot walk. The chapter finishes the picture with a scarecrow in a cucumber field: upright, human-shaped, silent, and completely unable to do anything but stand there.
The warning about the signs of the heavens is aimed at Babylon in particular. Babylonian scholars kept the most sophisticated sky records in the ancient world, watched eclipses and planetary positions, and read national omens off them. Exiles arriving in that culture would meet astrology at the level of state policy.
One line in this chapter is written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, the everyday international language of the region. It reads like a sentence handed to exiles to say to their neighbours: the gods who did not make the heavens and the earth will perish from under these heavens.
What it meant to them
The point for the first hearers is not that other peoples were stupid. It is that they were about to be a small, defeated minority in a magnificent city whose gods paraded through the streets on festival days, and they needed to know in advance what those images were made of.
Set against the workshop is a God who made the earth by his power, whose voice is thunder and rain, and who is not the work of anybody's hands. That contrast was survival equipment for the exile that was coming.
Sources cited
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: Jeremiah
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 10. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.