Jeremiahchapter 15
21 verses · BSBJeremiah book hub →
Speaks with:Ezekiel 14×2Leviticus 26×2Jeremiah 17×2Luke 21×2Ezekiel 3×2Jeremiah 14×1
Summary
Chapter summary
'Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind would not be toward this people' (15:1): the two great intercessors named, and the door still shut, because of what Manasseh did in Jerusalem. Then Jeremiah turns inward: 'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife,' a man neither lending nor borrowing yet cursed by everyone. His joy and his wound are the same thing: 'Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy words were unto me a joy and the rejoicing of my heart' (15:16). God answers with a condition and a promise: if thou return, I will bring thee again; I will make thee a fortified brazen wall.
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–9 Though Moses and Samuel Stood Before Me
- B. 10–14 Woe Is Me, My Mother, That Thou Hast Borne Me
- C. 15–21 Thy Words Were Found and I Did Eat Them — a Brazen Wall
The outline
A.Though Moses and Samuel Stood Before Mevv. 1 to 9
Read vv. 1 to 9 →B.Woe Is Me, My Mother, That Thou Hast Borne Mevv. 10 to 14
Read vv. 10 to 14 →C.Thy Words Were Found and I Did Eat Them — a Brazen Wallvv. 15 to 21
Read vv. 15 to 21 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 15The history
Moses and Samuel are named because they were the two men in the national memory who had talked God out of judgment. Moses stood between God and the nation after the golden calf; Samuel prayed and thunder came in the wheat harvest. Saying that even those two standing before him would not move him is the strongest possible way of saying the case is closed.
The four destroyers listed — sword, dogs, birds and beasts — form a curse that appears almost word for word in Assyrian treaty documents of that century. The horror is not just death but what follows: the body torn by scavenging dogs in the street, and the birds and wild animals finishing what is left, with no burial at all.
The guilt is pinned on Manasseh, the king who had reigned fifty-five years, filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and set up altars inside the temple courts. He had died decades earlier. A whole generation was being told it was living in the wreckage of an old man's choices.
Then the chapter turns inward. Jeremiah says he never sat in the circle of merrymakers, that he was under God's hand alone, and that his pain is unceasing. He accuses God of being like a brook that runs in the rains and dries up in summer — the deceitful stream that fails a traveller who counted on it.
What it meant to them
The first hearers learned that intercession has a limit. That was new. Their whole religious instinct was to find the right man to pray, and they are told there is no such man left.
The prophet's own complaint is preserved without being cleaned up. He calls God unreliable to his face, and the answer he gets is not comfort but a condition — if you return, I will restore you — and a renewed promise that he will be a fortified bronze wall the nation cannot break.
Sources cited
- Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 15. 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.