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Jeremiah 16: What the Passage Says

80 claims across 21 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Jeremiah 16 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Jeremiah not to marry or have children in this place, not to enter a house of mourning, and not to join a feast, because death is coming and the usual customs of grief and celebration will stop. When the people ask what they have done wrong, Jeremiah is to answer that their ancestors abandoned the LORD for other gods and that this generation has done worse, so they will be exiled to a land they do not know. The chapter also says the LORD will bring the people back from the land of the north, that he will send fishermen and hunters to find them, and that he will repay their sin double. Jeremiah speaks of nations coming from the ends of the earth to admit their fathers inherited lies, and asks whether a man can make gods for himself; the LORD answers that this time he will make them know his hand and his might, and that his name is the LORD.

Claim by Claim

  1. 16:1
    • The word of the LORD came to Jeremiah.
    • The LORD spoke to him, saying the following.
  2. 16:2
    • The LORD commanded him not to take a wife for himself.
    • The LORD commanded that he not have sons or daughters in this place.
  3. 16:3
    • The LORD spoke concerning the sons and the daughters born in this place.
    • The LORD spoke concerning the mothers who bore those children.
    • The LORD spoke concerning the fathers who begot them in this land.
  4. 16:4
    • They will die deaths caused by deadly diseases.
    • They will not be lamented.
    • They will not be buried.
    • They will lie like dung on the surface of the ground.
    • They will be finished off by the sword and by famine.
    • Their corpses will be food for the birds of the sky and for the beasts of the earth.
  5. 16:5
    • The LORD commanded him not to enter a house where a mourning feast for the dead is held.
    • The LORD commanded him not to go to lament.
    • The LORD commanded him not to show sympathy for them.
    • The LORD says he has withdrawn his peace from this people.
    • What the LORD has withdrawn includes his steadfast love and his compassion.
  6. 16:6
    • Both great and small will die in this land.
    • They will not be buried.
    • No one will lament for them.
    • No one will cut himself for them.
    • No one will make himself bald for them.
  7. 16:7
    • No one will break bread for the mourners to comfort them over the dead.
    • No one will give them the cup of consolation to drink for a person's father or mother.
  8. 16:8
    • The LORD commanded him not to enter a house where feasting is held.
    • He is not to sit with them to eat and to drink.
  9. 16:9
    • The LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, speaks.
    • The LORD will cause to cease from this place the sound of joy and the sound of gladness.
    • The LORD will cause to cease from this place the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.
    • This will happen before their eyes and in their days.
  10. 16:10
    • Jeremiah will tell this people all these words.
    • The people will then ask him why the LORD has pronounced all this great disaster against them.
    • The people will ask what their iniquity is.
    • The people will ask what their sin is that they have committed against the LORD their God.
  11. 16:11
    • Jeremiah is to answer them.
    • The reason is that their fathers forsook the LORD.
    • The LORD declares this.
    • Their fathers walked after other gods.
    • Their fathers served those gods.
    • Their fathers bowed down to those gods.
    • Their fathers forsook the LORD.
    • Their fathers did not keep the LORD's law.
  12. 16:12
    • They have acted more wickedly than their fathers.
    • Each of them walks after the stubbornness of his own evil heart.
    • They do this so as not to listen to the LORD.
  13. 16:13
    • The LORD will hurl them out of this land.
    • The LORD will cast them into a land they have not known.
    • Neither they nor their fathers have known that land.
    • There they will serve other gods day and night.
    • The LORD will show them no favor there.
  14. 16:14
    • Days are coming, declares the LORD.
    • In those days people will no longer say, 'As the LORD lives, who brought the children of Israel up out of the land of Egypt.'
  15. 16:15
    • Instead people will say, 'As the LORD lives, who brought the children of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them.'
    • The LORD will bring them back to their own land.
    • The LORD gave that land to their fathers.
  16. 16:16
    • The LORD will send for many fishermen.
    • The LORD declares this.
    • The fishermen will catch them.
    • Afterward the LORD will send for many hunters.
    • The hunters will hunt them from every mountain and every hill.
    • The hunters will hunt them out of the clefts of the rocks.
  17. 16:17
    • The LORD's eyes are on all their ways.
    • Their ways are not hidden from the LORD's face.
    • Their iniquity is not concealed from the LORD's eyes.
  18. 16:18
    • The LORD will first repay their iniquity and their sin double.
    • The reason is that they have defiled the LORD's land with the carcasses of their detestable idols.
    • They have filled the LORD's inheritance with their abominations.
  19. 16:19
    • The LORD is the speaker's strength.
    • The LORD is the speaker's fortress.
    • The LORD is the speaker's refuge in the day of distress.
    • Nations will come to the LORD from the ends of the earth.
    • The nations will say that their fathers inherited nothing but falsehood.
    • The nations will say what their fathers inherited was worthless.
    • The nations will say there is no profit in those things.
  20. 16:20
    • The question is asked whether a man can make gods for himself.
    • Those made things are not gods.
  21. 16:21
    • Therefore the LORD will make them know.
    • This time the LORD will make them know his hand and his might.
    • They will know that the LORD's name is Yahweh.

Words Worth Explaining

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

16:1
"The LORD" printed in capital letters stands for God's own personal name, the one he gave to Israel. English Bibles use this title instead of spelling the name out.
16:2
In ancient Israel virtually every adult married and had children; a man without them had no one to carry his name or bury him. Jeremiah's enforced singleness was itself a public sign, prophets were regularly told to act out their message so people would ask what it meant.
16:4
Proper burial in the family tomb, and formal mourning by relatives, were owed to everyone who died. To lie unburied and be eaten by scavenging birds and animals was the most shameful end imaginable, and appears as a standard curse in ancient treaties and warnings.
16:5
The Hebrew names a specific kind of house: one holding a funeral gathering, where neighbors and relatives ate and drank with the bereaved family. "Faithful love" translates Hebrew *hesed*, the loyal, committed kindness owed within a family or a binding agreement, not a passing feeling.
16:6
Gashing the skin and shaving the head or beard were widespread mourning customs in the region, ways of making grief visible on the body. Other parts of Israel's law forbade the practices, but they clearly went on.
16:7
The Hebrew of the first line is uncertain. The traditional text reads something like "break for them," which many take as breaking bread, the meal neighbors brought to a grieving household; older English versions understood it as tearing or gashing oneself in grief. The "cup of comfort" was the drink handed to mourners at that meal.
16:8
A "house of feasting" means a wedding or celebration meal. Between verses 5 and 8 Jeremiah is barred from both ends of ordinary social life, funerals and parties, so his absence at every gathering in town becomes the message.
16:9
"LORD of Hosts" is a title meaning roughly "the LORD of armies," picturing God at the head of vast forces. The voices of bridegroom and bride stand for weddings, the loudest, most public sign that ordinary life is still going on.
16:10
"Evil" in the King James usually means disaster or calamity, not wickedness; the people are asking why God has announced this catastrophe, not accusing him of doing wrong. "Iniquity" means guilt or crookedness, a wrong committed rather than a feeling of shame.
16:11
"Walked after other gods" is an idiom drawn from a servant walking behind a master. It describes worship as allegiance, choosing whose household you belong to, rather than as private belief.
16:12
"Imagination" in 1611 English meant a plan, scheme or fixed intention, not daydreaming. "Heart" in Hebrew means the mind and will, the place where decisions get made, so the phrase describes deliberate stubbornness rather than emotion.
16:13
Gods were commonly thought of as belonging to particular lands and peoples. To be deported was to live surrounded by another nation's worship with no say in the matter, serving other gods "day and night" describes the situation as much as the choice.
16:14
"As surely as the LORD lives" was the standard opening of a solemn oath, like swearing on something unbreakable. Israelites habitually completed it by naming the rescue from Egypt, the event that had defined them as a people.
16:15
Babylon lay to the east, but its armies reached Israel by the northern road around the desert, so invasion and exile are regularly spoken of as coming from the north.
16:16
Fishermen sweeping a lake with nets and hunters flushing game out of its hiding places are images of a search nobody escapes. Whether these figures are the ones who drag people off into exile or the ones who track them down to bring them home is left open here.
16:18
The word translated "double" can mean twice as much, or a matching full measure, an amount equal to what was done; interpreters divide over which is meant. The word for the idols is related to the word for corpses: Jeremiah calls them dead bodies, so that they pollute the land the way an unburied corpse made a person ritually unclean.
16:19
"The nations" (KJV "Gentiles") means all the peoples who are not Israel, the outsiders, whose own inherited gods are what the speech goes on to dismiss.
16:21
LORD printed in capitals stands in for the personal name of Israel's God, written with four Hebrew letters (YHWH), which Jews later avoided pronouncing aloud. To "know the name" is to know the one who bears it, recognized by what he does.

Read Jeremiah 16