Jeremiahchapter 4
31 verses · BSBJeremiah book hub →
Speaks with:Jeremiah 5×7Isaiah 22×3Lamentations 1×3Luke 8×2Jeremiah 8×2Jeremiah 6×2
Summary
Chapter summary
A summons to real repentance: 'Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns' (4:3); circumcise the foreskins of your heart. Then the alarm. Blow the trumpet, flee into the fortified cities, for evil comes from the north like a lion out of his thicket, like clouds, with chariots as the whirlwind. The chapter's astonishing center is an un-creation vision: 'I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void; and the heavens, and they had no light' (4:23). Mountains trembling, no man left, the birds fled. Yet mercy holds the line: 'yet will I not make a full end.'
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–9 Break Up Your Fallow Ground; Circumcise Your Hearts
- B. 10–18 A Hot Wind from the Bare Heights of the Wilderness
- C. 19–31 My Anguish, My Anguish! The Earth Waste and Void Again
The outline
A.Break Up Your Fallow Ground; Circumcise Your Heartsvv. 1 to 9
Read vv. 1 to 9 →B.A Hot Wind from the Bare Heights of the Wildernessvv. 10 to 18
Read vv. 10 to 18 →C.My Anguish, My Anguish! The Earth Waste and Void Againvv. 19 to 31
Read vv. 19 to 31 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 4The history
Judah's early-warning system was simple and it worked. Lookouts on high points watched the northern approaches; a ram's-horn blast and a raised signal — a pole, a banner, or fire and smoke at night — passed the alarm from ridge to ridge. Villagers then abandoned their houses and ran for the nearest fortified town, driving animals ahead of them.
An invading army in that age moved like weather. Chariots and cavalry ranged ahead, the countryside was stripped of standing grain and fruit trees for fuel and fodder, and the villages that could not be defended were burned to keep the defenders from using them.
The chapter uses two farming pictures against the hearers. Break up your fallow ground means take a mattock to soil that has gone hard and thorny and turn it before you sow, or you waste the seed. The other picture is a woman applying eye paint and fine clothes to meet men who have come to kill her — a city dressing up for a siege.
The vision at the centre reverses the creation account step by step: the land goes back to being formless and empty, the light goes out of the sky, the hills shake, the birds are gone, the farmland is desert. That is deliberate.
What it meant to them
For the first hearers this was not poetry about the end of the world. It was a briefing about the road from the north, and it told them the walls they were counting on would not hold.
The demand underneath it is the hardest line in the chapter: circumcise your hearts. The nation's covenant mark was in their flesh already. They were being told the mark had never reached the place that mattered.
Sources cited
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- John Bright, Jeremiah (Anchor Bible)
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 4. 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.