Jeremiah2chapter 2

The chapter is built like a court case. A man with a grievance would state the history, call witnesses, and lay out the charge in public, and that is exactly the shape here — God recites the wilderness years, calls heaven and the coastlands to listen, and files a complaint.

The picture of the two waters is the sharpest thing in the book, and it is plain engineering. A spring gives running water, cold and self-renewing, and costs nothing to keep. A cistern is a pear-shaped pit cut into limestone under the courtyard, plastered to hold winter runoff. Plaster cracks. A cracked cistern is months of digging that holds nothing by August.

The worship being described happened on high ground and under leafy trees — a raised platform, a standing stone, a wooden pole, an altar. Fertility rites promised rain and harvest and children, which is precisely what farmers on marginal rainfall lie awake about.

The politics are in the water too. Drinking the waters of the Nile and of the great river means running to Egypt for protection one decade and to Assyria the next. Judah was a small state on the land bridge between two empires and had spent two hundred years playing them off each other.