Jeremiah5chapter 5

Jeremiah 5:1-3

if ye can find a man: The search for one righteous man in Jerusalem's own streets echoes Abraham's bargaining for Sodom, the bench notes, but here the Lord himself sends the search party and sets the bar at a single name, not fifty or ten, and even that single name cannot be produced. The false oath, The Lord liveth, surely they swear falsely, shows religion's outward form surviving the truth it was built to guard, and Jeremiah's own complaint, thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved, names a people discipline itself cannot soften, their faces made harder than a rock.

Jeremiah 5:4-6

Surely these are poor; they are foolish: Jeremiah tries a charitable excuse for the poor, ignorance, then turns to the great men expecting better instruction and finds the same rebellion at a higher rank, they have altogether broken the yoke, and burst the bonds, corruption running the whole social ladder rather than pooling at its bottom. The three beasts sent against them, lion, wolf, and leopard, are drawn from the same stock of images the surrounding prophets use for imperial armies, judgment matched to the size of the transgression the same verse names, their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased.

Jeremiah 5:7-9

sworn by them that are no gods: The pardon question turns rhetorical the moment it is asked, thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods, spiritual adultery named as the covenant's own word for idolatry rather than a metaphor added after the fact. Full feeding produces the opposite of gratitude, when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and the fed horses neighing after another man's wife make the point in an image no one in an agricultural society could miss, appetite with no restraint left in it.

Jeremiah 5:10-13

but make not a full end: The command to destroy carries its own limit inside it, make not a full end, the same restraint 4:27 already named, judgment authorized and bounded in the same sentence rather than left open-ended. House of Israel and house of Judah are named together as equally treacherous, the false confidence exposed at verse 12, it is not he, neither shall evil come upon us, met by its own verdict at verse 13, the prophets shall become wind, and the word is not in them, empty men speaking an empty comfort.

Jeremiah 5:14-17

I will make my words in thy mouth fire: The false prophets' empty wind is answered by turning Jeremiah's own preaching into the opposite element, fire in his mouth against a people made wood, the word doing what the false word only pretended to avert. The nation summoned from far is described entirely by what a hearer in Jerusalem could not do, a language thou knowest not, an ancient nation whose quiver is as an open sepulchre, and its harvest is Judah's own bread, flocks, vines, and fenced cities eaten out from under the people who trusted in them.

Jeremiah 5:18-19

I will not make a full end with you: The restraint named twice already in this book is repeated a third time, I will not make a full end with you, before the exile is explained in the measure it fits, forsaking the Lord for strange gods answered by serving strangers in a strange land, the punishment shaped exactly to the crime rather than chosen at random. The bench reads the coming question, wherefore doeth the Lord our God all these things, as the exile generation's own question, and this verse as the answer Jeremiah leaves them to carry into captivity.

Jeremiah 5:20-25

Declare this in the house of Jacob: The charge shifts from history to nature, eyes that see not and ears that hear not answered by a Lord who set the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, an order the ocean itself has never broken while the people he made have broken every one. Rain withheld and harvest lost are named as the direct result of the same rebellion, your iniquities have turned away these things, the created order's obedience contrasted with the covenant people's refusal, one keeping its bounds and the other refusing to keep its own.

Jeremiah 5:26-29

they lay wait, as he that setteth snares: The indictment turns to the traps set by the people's own wicked men, houses full of deceit as a cage is full of birds, wealth built on exactly the kind of predation the law existed to forbid, the cause of the fatherless and the right of the needy left unjudged by men grown fat prospering from it. Shall I not visit for these things repeats the question already asked at verse 9, the same charge and the same certainty of an answer returning before the chapter closes.

Jeremiah 5:30-31

A wonderful and horrible thing: The chapter's last verdict names three failures in one sentence, prophets prophesying falsely, priests ruling by their means rather than the Lord's, and a people who love to have it so, corruption chosen rather than merely suffered from above. The closing question, what will ye do in the end thereof, is left open rather than answered here, the bench noting it as the hinge into the siege oracle chapter 6 begins to describe.