Jeremiah5chapter 5

The chapter begins with a search through the city's streets and open squares. The square inside a city gate was the courthouse, the market, and the news exchange all at once — elders sat there to settle disputes, and business was done in the open in front of witnesses. To hunt through the gate square for one honest man is to say the justice system itself has failed.

The three animals named — lion, desert wolf, leopard — were all real hazards. Lions lived in the thickets along the Jordan into the Middle Ages, wolves worked the dry margins at dusk, and leopards took livestock from the hill country.

Two images describe the rich. They are sleek and fat like stall-fed animals, and they are like a cage full of birds — the trapper's basket where captured birds were kept alive until market. The men are the trappers; their neighbours are the stock.

Against all of that stands the sea and the sand. The Mediterranean pounds a shoreline of loose sand and never gets past it, because it was given a boundary it cannot cross. The point of the picture is that a heap of sand obeys and a covenant nation does not.