Jeremiahchapter 12
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Speaks with:Jeremiah 9×2Jeremiah 23×2Jeremiah 49×2Malachi 3×1Psalms 92×1Psalms 37×1
Summary
Chapter summary
The first of Scripture's great honest complaints: 'Righteous art thou, O Jehovah, when I contend with thee; yet would I reason the cause with thee: wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?' (12:1). Thou hast planted them, and they take root and bring forth fruit. God's answer refuses comfort and offers commission instead: 'If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses?' His heritage has become to him a lion in the forest, a speckled bird set upon. Yet even the plucked-up neighbor nations are promised compassion if they learn to swear by his name.
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–6 Why Does the Way of the Wicked Prosper?
- B. 7–13 My Heritage Become as a Speckled Bird of Prey
- C. 14–17 Plucking Up and Planting Again the Evil Neighbours
The outline
A.Why Does the Way of the Wicked Prosper?vv. 1 to 6
Read vv. 1 to 6 →B.My Heritage Become as a Speckled Bird of Preyvv. 7 to 13
Read vv. 7 to 13 →C.Plucking Up and Planting Again the Evil Neighboursvv. 14 to 17
Read vv. 14 to 17 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 12The history
The chapter opens as a lawsuit filed in the other direction. Jeremiah says he will state his case to God and then asks the oldest question there is: why does the way of the wicked prosper. He gets no explanation. He gets a harder assignment.
God's answer uses two pictures from ordinary life. Foot-racing was how messages moved; a royal runner covered long distances at speed, and horses were another category entirely. If you are winded by men on foot, how will you keep up with cavalry. And if you only feel safe in a peaceful country, what will you do in the thickets of the Jordan — the dense tangle of tamarisk and reed along the river where lions actually denned. Both are ways of saying: this was the easy part.
The land itself is described the way a farmer would describe a ruined season. Wheat sown and thorns reaped, a pleasant portion trodden into a desert, shepherds trampling the vineyard, and nobody bothering to mourn it.
At the end the neighbouring nations appear — evil neighbours who have grabbed at Israel's land. They are told that they too will be uprooted, and then, surprisingly, that if they will learn the ways of God's people they will be built up among them.
What it meant to them
For first hearers the value of this chapter is that the question is in the Bible at all. A prophet asks God straight out why the crooked are comfortable, and it is preserved rather than edited away.
The answer they got was not a solution to the problem of evil. It was a warning that the ground was about to get rougher and a promise that the God who uproots also plants — including, one day, the neighbours doing the looting.
Sources cited
- John Bright, Jeremiah (Anchor Bible)
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 12. 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.