Jeremiahchapter 25
38 verses · BSBJeremiah book hub →
Speaks with:Jeremiah 25×5Jeremiah 51×5Jeremiah 1×5Jeremiah 46×4Jeremiah 7×3Jeremiah 4×3
Summary
Chapter summary
In Jehoiakim's fourth year Jeremiah tallies twenty-three years of unheeded preaching ('ye have not hearkened') and speaks the number that will shape Daniel's prayer and the exile's calendar: 'these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years' (25:11), after which Babylon herself is called to account. Then the vision widens to the whole earth: the cup of the wine of wrath taken from Jehovah's hand and made to be drunk by nation after nation, Jerusalem first and Sheshach last. Jehovah roars from on high like one that treads the grapes; the slain shall be from one end of the earth to the other; and the shepherds of the flock are told to howl and wallow.
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–14 Twenty-Three Years of Warning; Seventy Years in Babylon
- B. 15–29 The Wine Cup of Fury Passed Among the Nations
- C. 30–38 The LORD Roars from on High; No Way to Flee for the Shepherds
The outline
A.Twenty-Three Years of Warning; Seventy Years in Babylonvv. 1 to 14
Read vv. 1 to 14 →B.The Wine Cup of Fury Passed Among the Nationsvv. 15 to 29
Read vv. 15 to 29 →C.The LORD Roars from on High; No Way to Flee for the Shepherdsvv. 30 to 38
Read vv. 30 to 38 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 25The history
The chapter dates itself with unusual care, and the date is the hinge of the age. In 605 BC the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Egyptian army at Carchemish on the upper Euphrates, chased the survivors south, and then took the throne when his father died. The Babylonian Chronicle, a court record now in the British Museum, describes that campaign and the accession in the same year.
Jeremiah opens by counting: twenty-three years of preaching, from Josiah's thirteenth year to this one, with no result. That is a man doing the arithmetic on his own career in public.
Then comes the number that shaped the next century of Jewish life. These nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years, and then Babylon itself will be punished. Later readers, Daniel among them, counted from this text.
The second half hands round a cup. Ancient kings really did compel a defeated ruler to drink at a victory banquet, and the cup of wine passed from nation to nation here is a list of the whole known world in geographical order — Egypt, the Philistine cities, Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Sidon, the Arabian tribes, Elam, Media, and last of all Babylon under a code name formed by swapping its letters.
What it meant to them
The first hearers had just watched the balance of the world change in a single campaign season. This chapter told them what it meant: the empire everyone was now negotiating with was God's instrument, and even called his servant.
The seventy years did two things at once. It made the disaster certain and it made it finite. There was an end date, and Babylon was on the list of nations that would drink the same cup.
Sources cited
- The Babylonian Chronicle, in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament
- Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 25. 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.