Jeremiahchapter 7
34 verses · BSBJeremiah book hub →
Speaks with:Jeremiah 7×4Jeremiah 26×4Jeremiah 32×4Isaiah 1×3Jeremiah 6×3Jeremiah 19×3
Summary
Chapter summary
The Temple Sermon, preached in the gate: 'Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of Jehovah, the temple of Jehovah, the temple of Jehovah, are these' (7:4). Amend your ways; do not steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and then stand in this house and say, We are delivered. 'Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?'. The line Jesus takes up when he cleanses the temple. Go see Shiloh. Cakes are baked for the queen of heaven; children burned in Topheth, a thing God says he never commanded, 'neither came it into my mind.'
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–15 Stand in the Gate: The Temple of the LORD, the Temple of the LORD
- B. 16–20 Cakes for the Queen of Heaven — Pray Not for This People
- C. 21–28 I Spake Not of Burnt Offerings, but of Obedience
- D. 29–34 Topheth and the Valley of Slaughter
The outline
A.Stand in the Gate: The Temple of the LORD, the Temple of the LORDvv. 1 to 15
Read vv. 1 to 15 →B.Cakes for the Queen of Heaven — Pray Not for This Peoplevv. 16 to 20
Read vv. 16 to 20 →C.I Spake Not of Burnt Offerings, but of Obediencevv. 21 to 28
Read vv. 21 to 28 →D.Topheth and the Valley of Slaughtervv. 29 to 34
Read vv. 29 to 34 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 7The history
This is a sermon preached at the door. A speaker in the temple gate faced everyone entering the courts, and the crowd could not get past him without hearing it. Chapter 26 tells the story of what it cost him; this chapter gives the sermon itself.
The chant he mocks — the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD — was a real conviction, not a joke. A century earlier Assyria had besieged Jerusalem and gone home without taking it. From that survival, many concluded that God's house in the city made the city untouchable.
His counter-argument is a ruined site anyone could visit. Shiloh, up in the hill country of Ephraim, had housed the tabernacle for generations before the ark was captured in Samuel's day. Excavation at the site shows a violent destruction and burning in that era. The lesson was on the ground, twenty miles north: God had let his own sanctuary be flattened before.
Two practices are named. Cakes were being baked for the queen of heaven — a goddess of love and war worshipped across the region, and a household devotion in which whole families took part. And in the valley of Hinnom, just outside the south-west wall, at a place called Topheth, children were being burned in sacrifice. The Law had forbidden it in the plainest words available.
What it meant to them
The first hearers were being handed a test they could run themselves: go and look at Shiloh. A sanctuary is not a charm. It is a place where God agreed to meet a people who kept covenant, and it can be abandoned.
The hardest word in the chapter is spoken to the preacher, not the crowd — do not pray for this people. For a nation that had always relied on someone standing in the gap, that was the sound of the door closing.
Sources cited
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 7. 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.