Jeremiah 11: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Jeremiah to proclaim the terms of the covenant made when Israel came out of Egypt, and to announce a curse on anyone who does not obey it. Because Judah and Jerusalem have gone back to the sins of their ancestors and burned incense to Baal, God says he will bring a disaster they cannot escape, and he tells Jeremiah not to pray for them. In the second half, Jeremiah learns that men from Anathoth are plotting to kill him to silence his prophesying; he asks God to judge them, and God answers with a sentence of punishment on the men of Anathoth.

Claim by Claim

1. 11:1
   • A word came to Jeremiah from the LORD.
2. 11:2
   • The command was given to hear the words of this covenant.
   • Jeremiah was told to speak these words to the men of Judah.
   • Jeremiah was told to speak these words to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
3. 11:3
   • Jeremiah was told to say to them what follows.
   • The message is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says.
   • Cursed is the man who does not obey the words of this covenant.
4. 11:4
   • The LORD commanded this covenant to their fathers.
   • The LORD commanded it on the day he brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt.
   • Egypt is called an iron furnace.
   • The LORD told them to obey his voice.
   • The LORD told them to do the words of the covenant according to all that he commanded them.
   • If they obeyed, they would be the LORD's people.
   • If they obeyed, the LORD would be their God.
5. 11:5
   • The purpose was that the LORD might carry out the oath he swore to their fathers.
   • The oath was to give them a land flowing with milk and honey.
   • That land is theirs as it is this day.
   • Jeremiah answered and said, Amen, LORD.
6. 11:6
   • The LORD said to Jeremiah to proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah.
   • The LORD said to proclaim them in the streets of Jerusalem.
   • The proclamation is to hear the words of this covenant.
   • The proclamation is to do the words of this covenant.
7. 11:7
   • The LORD earnestly warned their fathers.
   • The warning began on the day he brought them up out of the land of Egypt.
   • The warning continued until this day.
   • The LORD warned them persistently, rising early.
   • The content of the warning was to obey his voice.
8. 11:8
   • They did not obey.
   • They did not incline their ear.
   • Each one walked in the stubbornness of his evil heart.
   • Therefore the LORD brought upon them all the words of this covenant.
   • The LORD had commanded them to do these words.
   • They did not do them.
9. 11:9
   • The LORD said to Jeremiah that a conspiracy is found among the men of Judah.
   • The conspiracy is also found among the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
10. 11:10
    • They have turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers.
    • Their forefathers refused to hear the LORD's words.
    • They have gone after other gods to serve them.
    • The house of Israel has broken the LORD's covenant.
    • The house of Judah has broken the LORD's covenant.
    • The LORD made that covenant with their fathers.
11. 11:11
    • Therefore this is what the LORD says.
    • The LORD will bring evil upon them.
    • They will not be able to escape from that evil.
    • They will cry out to the LORD.
    • The LORD will not listen to them.
12. 11:12
    • The cities of Judah will go and cry out to the gods.
    • The inhabitants of Jerusalem will go and cry out to the gods.
    • They burn incense to those gods.
    • Those gods will not save them at all in the time of their trouble.
13. 11:13
    • Judah's gods are as many as its cities.
    • They have set up altars as many as the streets of Jerusalem.
    • Those altars are altars to the shameful thing.
    • Those altars are for burning incense to Baal.
14. 11:14
    • Jeremiah is told not to pray for this people.
    • Jeremiah is told not to lift up a cry or prayer for them.
    • The LORD will not listen at the time they call to him because of their trouble.
15. 11:15
    • The LORD asks what his beloved is doing in his house.
    • It is asked as a reproach, and the verse is obscure: she has carried out schemes with many, or many have carried out lewdness.
    • The question is whether holy flesh can be taken away from her or can avert her doom.
    • She rejoices at the time of her evil, or when the evil comes.
16. 11:16
    • The LORD called her name a green olive tree, beautiful with well-formed fruit.
    • With the sound of a great roar he has set fire to it.
    • Its branches are broken.
17. 11:17
    • The LORD of hosts planted her.
    • The LORD of hosts has pronounced evil against her.
    • The reason is the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah.
    • They did that evil against themselves.
    • They did it to provoke the LORD to anger.
    • They provoked him by burning incense to Baal.
18. 11:18
    • The LORD made it known to Jeremiah.
    • Jeremiah knew it.
    • Then God showed Jeremiah their deeds.
19. 11:19
    • Jeremiah was like a tame lamb, or a lamb or an ox, led to the slaughter.
    • Jeremiah did not know they had devised plots against him.
    • They said, Let us destroy the tree with its fruit.
    • They said, Let us cut him off from the land of the living.
    • They said, so that his name may be remembered no more.
20. 11:20
    • The LORD of hosts judges righteously.
    • The LORD tests the inward parts and the heart.
    • Jeremiah asks to see the LORD's vengeance on them.
    • Jeremiah has revealed his cause to the LORD.
21. 11:21
    • Therefore this is what the LORD says concerning the men of Anathoth.
    • The men of Anathoth seek Jeremiah's life.
    • They say, Do not prophesy in the name of the LORD.
    • They say, so that you do not die by our hand.
22. 11:22
    • Therefore this is what the LORD of hosts says.
    • The LORD will punish them.
    • The young men will die by the sword.
    • Their sons and their daughters will die by famine.
23. 11:23
    • There will be no remnant of them.
    • The LORD will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth.
    • That evil comes in the year of their visitation.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

11:1

Jeremiah was a prophet. A prophet was someone God gave messages to, who then told those messages to everyone else. Jeremiah lived in Judah about 600 years before Jesus was born.

11:2

"Covenant" is the formal, binding agreement made at Mount Sinai after the escape from Egypt, of the kind a king made with a subject people: it set out obligations, and it listed the rewards for keeping them and the penalties for breaking them. The book of Deuteronomy is the version of it Jeremiah's wording echoes throughout this chapter.

11:3

"Thus saith the LORD" is the standard opening a messenger used when delivering a ruler's words verbatim; it marks what follows as quoted speech, not the speaker's own. The "curse" is not a magic spell but the penalty clause of the agreement, the named consequence a party accepted in advance if he broke the terms.

11:4

"The iron furnace" is a smelting furnace, in which ore was heated until the metal ran out of it, a standing image for the crushing forced labor of Egypt. "You will be my people, and I will be your God" is legal contract language, close to the wording used in ancient marriage and treaty documents.

11:5

"A land flowing with milk and honey" is a set phrase for a fertile country: milk from herds and flocks that always have pasture, and honey most likely wild honey and syrup from dates and figs rather than anything kept in hives. Jeremiah's answer, "So be it," is the Hebrew word *amen*, the formal reply by which a person publicly accepted the terms just read out, including the penalties (see Deuteronomy 27, where the people answer "amen" to each curse in turn).

11:7

"Rising early" is a Hebrew idiom for doing something urgently and repeatedly, the way a person who cares about a task gets up at dawn to do it; it is not a statement about the time of day. "Protested" here has its older legal sense of solemnly warning someone, not objecting.

11:9

"Conspiracy" translates a word for a sworn political plot, the kind used of officials banding together to assassinate a king. The point is that the abandonment of the agreement is not scattered private failure but something organized and shared.

11:10

After Solomon's death the kingdom split in two: the northern kingdom, called Israel, and the southern kingdom, called Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital. The north had already been destroyed by Assyria about a century before Jeremiah spoke, which is why naming both together is pointed.

11:11

In 1611 English "evil" covered disaster and misfortune as well as wickedness, and that is its sense here and in verses 17 and 23: the calamity being brought, not moral badness.

11:12

Burning incense was a routine act of worship, not an extra: aromatic gum resin was set alight on an altar so the smoke rose as an offering. To say a city "burns incense" to a god is simply to say it worships that god.

11:13

"That shameful thing" renders the Hebrew word *bosheth*, "shame," which scribes and speakers used as a deliberate substitute for the name Baal, much as one might avoid saying a name outright. Baal, the word means "lord" or "master", was the Canaanite storm god held to give rain, crops and offspring, and so the obvious god to appeal to in a farming country.

11:14

A prophet was expected to plead with God on the people's behalf; intercession was part of the job, as Moses' and Samuel's stories assume. The instruction not to pray is therefore an order to stop performing the office's normal function.

11:15

"My house" is the temple in Jerusalem. "The one I love" is feminine in Hebrew, the nation pictured as a wife, and the "shameful things" she has done are described with the vocabulary of adultery, the standard image for worshiping other gods. "Holy flesh" is meat from an animal sacrifice: portions of many offerings were cooked and eaten by the worshipers as a shared meal. The Hebrew of this verse is damaged and unclear at several points, and ancient translators already disagreed about it; any rendering involves guesswork.

11:16

An olive tree was among the most valuable things a family could own: slow to mature, productive for centuries, and the source of oil for cooking, lamps and trade. Olive wood is also full of oil and burns fiercely, which is what makes the reversal in the second half of the verse bite.

11:17

"The LORD of hosts", hosts meaning armies, is a title picturing God as commander of massed forces, the armies of heaven. It appears wherever the text stresses power to carry out what has been announced.

11:18

From here to the end of the chapter, Jeremiah is speaking about himself and his own danger.

11:19

The Hebrew word behind "or an ox" also means "tame" or "docile," which is why some translations read "a gentle lamb" and others, like the King James, take it as a second animal; the ambiguity is in the original. "Let us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof" appears to be a proverb for wiping out a man together with his offspring. Wiping out a name mattered because a person survived socially through descendants who bore it and remembered him; to be "cut off" without a name left was the most complete erasure available.

11:20

"The reins" is the old English word for the kidneys. Hebrew located the deepest emotions and impulses in the kidneys and the reasoning will in the heart, so the pair means something like the whole inner person, feelings and intentions alike. "I have revealed my cause" is courtroom language: to lay out one's lawsuit before a judge and leave the verdict to him. "Vengeance" here likewise means a judge's redress, not private revenge.

11:21

Anathoth was Jeremiah's home village, about three miles northeast of Jerusalem, and a town assigned to priests, Jeremiah is introduced in chapter 1 as coming from a priestly family there. The threat is therefore from his own townspeople and relatives.

11:22

Death "by the sword" and "by famine" are the two standard outcomes of a siege: fighting men killed in the assault, and the rest starving inside the walls while the city is cut off.

11:23

"Visitation" here means an official coming to inspect and settle accounts, the moment an authority arrives to review conduct and impose consequences, not a friendly visit. "No remnant" means no survivors left to carry the community on.