Jeremiah16chapter 16

Jeremiah 16:1-4

The word of the Lord came also unto me: The command not to marry or have children in this place turns Jeremiah's own life into a sign-act, his celibacy a living sermon on a coming devastation so total that the ordinary comforts of family will only add to the grief. The children who would have been born here face grievous deaths, unlamented and unburied, carcases left for the fowls of heaven and the beasts of the earth. Keil and Gill read the command as prophecy dramatized on the prophet's own body, the disaster announced in his person before it is described in his words.

Jeremiah 16:5-9

Enter not into the house of mourning: The prohibition runs in both directions: Jeremiah may not enter the house of mourning to comfort the bereaved, and he may not enter the house of feasting to celebrate with the living, because peace, lovingkindness, and mercies have already been withdrawn from this people before the sword arrives. Henry reads the withheld comfort as itself a sermon, no one troubling to console mourners when the dying are past counting, so that the ordinary rites of grief, the cutting, the shaving, the cup of consolation, will have no occasion left to be performed. Gill notes that the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, names an ordinary wedding only to announce its silence.

Jeremiah 16:10-13

when thou shalt shew this people all these words: When the people ask what is our iniquity, the answer indicts the present generation past the fathers: ye have done worse than your fathers, walking after the imagination of his evil heart instead of the law that was given them. Clarke reads the escalation as the book's own diagnosis, each generation outdoing the last until exile becomes the only argument left to make. The sentence fits the crime exactly, a land unknown to serve gods unknown, day and night, in payment for forsaking the one God who was always known to them.

Jeremiah 16:14-15

the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said: A new formula replaces the old: the days come when Israel will swear not by the Lord that brought them up out of Egypt but by the Lord that brought them from the land of the north and from all the lands where he had driven them. Keil reads this as the greater exodus overtaking the first in the nation's own memory, the return from exile becoming the new measure by which later generations will recall the Lord's power. Set inside a chapter of unbroken judgment, the promise shows that even the scattering has a homecoming folded into it.

Jeremiah 16:16-18

I will send for many fishers: The fishers and hunters sent for Israel in every mountain, hill, and rock-hole picture the thoroughness of the coming exile, no hiding place sufficient, for the Lord's eyes are on all their ways and their iniquity is not hid from his sight. Gill reads fishers and hunters as the two methods of capture, net and chase together, covering a population wherever it scatters. The double recompense of verse 18 answers the double defilement of the land with detestable and abominable things, judgment measured out in the same proportion the sin was committed.

Jeremiah 16:19-21

O Lord, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge: Jeremiah's own voice breaks into the oracle with a confession of faith, O Lord, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge, followed by a startling turn, the Gentiles themselves coming from the ends of the earth to confess that their fathers inherited only lies and vanity and things wherein there is no profit. Henry reads the prophet's private prayer opening onto a hope for the nations planted inside a chapter otherwise given to Judah's judgment, their idols exposed as no gods at all. The chapter closes on the Lord's own resolve, I will cause them to know mine hand and my might, and they shall know that my name is The Lord, the very knowledge withheld from idols now given as the point of the judgment that has run through the whole chapter.