Jeremiah 19: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Jeremiah to buy a clay jar, take elders of the people and leading priests to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, and announce disaster on Jerusalem, because the people have burned incense to other gods, filled the place with innocent blood, and burned their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal. The valley will be renamed the Valley of Slaughter; the city will be ruined, its people killed and starved in a siege, and its dead buried in Tophet until there is no room left. Jeremiah is to smash the jar in front of the men with him as a sign that God will break this people and this city so that they cannot be mended. He then goes back to the courtyard of the temple and repeats the message to all the people.

Claim by Claim

1. 19:1
   • The LORD speaks this message.
   • The LORD commands the prophet to go and buy a clay jar from a potter.
   • The LORD commands him to take some of the elders of the people.
   • The LORD commands him to take some of the elders of the priests.
2. 19:2
   • The LORD commands him to go out to the Valley of the son of Hinnom.
   • That valley is at the entrance of the Potsherd Gate.
   • The LORD commands him to proclaim there the words the LORD will speak to him.
3. 19:3
   • He is to say: hear the word of the LORD, kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem.
   • The LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, speaks this message.
   • The LORD says he is bringing disaster on this place.
   • The LORD says that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.
4. 19:4
   • The reason is that they have forsaken the LORD.
   • They have made this place foreign to him.
   • They have burned incense in this place to other gods.
   • Neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah had known those gods.
   • They have filled this place with the blood of innocent people.
5. 19:5
   • They have built the high places of Baal.
   • They built them to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal.
   • The LORD did not command this.
   • The LORD did not speak of this.
   • This did not come into the LORD's mind.
6. 19:6
   • The LORD declares that days are coming.
   • This place will no longer be called Topheth.
   • This place will no longer be called the Valley of the son of Hinnom.
   • This place will be called the Valley of Slaughter.
7. 19:7
   • The LORD will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place.
   • The LORD will make them fall by the sword before their enemies.
   • The LORD will make them fall by the hand of those who seek their lives.
   • The LORD will give their corpses as food to the birds of the sky.
   • The LORD will give their corpses as food to the beasts of the earth.
8. 19:8
   • The LORD will make this city a desolation.
   • The LORD will make this city an object of hissing.
   • Everyone who passes by it will be appalled.
   • Everyone who passes by it will hiss at all its wounds.
9. 19:9
   • The LORD will make them eat the flesh of their sons.
   • The LORD will make them eat the flesh of their daughters.
   • Each man will eat the flesh of his neighbor.
   • This will happen in the siege and the distress.
   • Their enemies and those who seek their lives will press them with that distress.
10. 19:10
    • The prophet is to break the jar before the eyes of the men who go with him.
11. 19:11
    • He is to say to them that the LORD of hosts speaks this message.
    • The LORD will break this people and this city in the same way.
    • The breaking is like one breaking a potter's vessel that can never be repaired again.
    • They will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no place left to bury.
12. 19:12
    • The LORD declares he will do this to this place.
    • The LORD declares he will do this to the inhabitants of this place.
    • The LORD will make this city like Topheth.
13. 19:13
    • The houses of Jerusalem will be defiled like the place of Topheth.
    • The houses of the kings of Judah will be defiled like the place of Topheth.
    • This is because of all the houses on whose roofs they burned incense to all the host of heaven.
    • On those roofs they poured out drink offerings to other gods.
14. 19:14
    • Jeremiah came from Topheth.
    • The LORD had sent him to Topheth to prophesy.
    • Jeremiah stood in the court of the house of the LORD.
    • Jeremiah spoke to all the people.
15. 19:15
    • The LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, speaks this message.
    • The LORD is bringing on this city and on all its towns all the evil he pronounced against it.
    • The reason is that they have hardened their necks.
    • They hardened their necks so as not to hear the LORD's words.

Words Worth Explaining

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

19:1

The Hebrew word for the jar, *baqbuq*, is thought to imitate the gurgling sound of liquid poured from a narrow-necked flask. The detail that matters is that it is fired pottery: unlike wet clay on the wheel, a baked jar cannot be reworked, and once broken it cannot be mended (verse 11). The "elders of the people" were the heads of leading families who settled community affairs, and the "leading priests" were senior temple officials, between them, the men whose word would be believed. They are brought along as witnesses.

19:2

The Valley of the Son of Hinnom (Hebrew *ge ben-hinnom*) is the ravine running along the south and west sides of Jerusalem, just outside the walls. Its name, shortened to *ge-hinnom*, later passed into Greek as "Gehenna." The gate name is uncertain in the Hebrew: the word *harsith* resembles both the word for a broken piece of pottery (a potsherd) and the word for the sun, which is why the King James translators rendered it "the east gate" while modern translations read "Potsherd Gate", probably a rubbish gate near where the potters worked and dumped their broken ware.

19:3

"The LORD of Armies" (King James "LORD of hosts") translates a title meaning the LORD who commands vast forces (armies on earth, and the sun, moon and stars, spoken of in verse 13 as "the host of heaven." "Kings of Judah" in the plural, addressed as though present, most likely means the royal house as an institution) the reigning king together with his court and dynasty. Ears ringing is an idiom for news so shocking that a person is left stunned, as after a blow to the head.

19:4

Burning incense was not decoration or atmosphere; it was an act of worship, the offering of a costly aromatic gum on a small altar. The Hebrew behind "made this place foreign to me" is difficult and has been read two ways: that they made the place alien or unrecognizable to the LORD, or that they handed it over to foreign gods.

19:5

"High places" were open-air worship sites, often on a hilltop or a raised stone platform, with an altar and a sacred pillar (the ordinary form of local worship in the region, used for the LORD and for other gods alike. Baal was the Canaanite storm and fertility god, worshiped for rain and harvest; the word itself simply means "lord" or "owner." A "burnt offering" was a sacrifice burned whole on the altar, with no portion kept back for the worshiper to eat) which is what makes the phrase so appalling here.

19:6

Tophet was the specific site in this valley where children were burned. The name may derive from a word for a hearth or fire-pit; in the Hebrew text as it has come down to us it carries the vowels of the word for "shame," a way scribes marked a name they refused to pronounce respectfully. Renaming a place announced what had happened there. "Valley of Slaughter" plays on the sound of the old name and replaces a name meaning nothing much with one that states plainly what the place will become.

19:7

"I will ruin the plans" translates a Hebrew verb meaning to empty out or pour out (the same consonants as *baqbuq*, the jar in Jeremiah's hand. The sign and the sentence are a pun on each other: he empties the flask, and their plans are emptied. To be left unburied and eaten by scavengers was, in that world, the worst fate imaginable for the dead, worse than death itself) hence the repeated threat, and hence the force of "no room left to bury" in verse 11.

19:8

The scoffing is a specific gesture: passers-by would whistle or hiss through the teeth at the sight of a ruined city, a sound of shock and derision that ancient writers mention often. "Wounds" translates a word used for blows or plague-strokes, the injuries the city has been dealt.

19:9

Parents eating their children under siege is stock language in ancient curses and treaty threats, and appears in the older law collections as one of the punishments for breaking faith. It is also literal: siege warfare worked by starving a walled city out, and ancient accounts record it happening.

19:10

Prophets regularly acted their message out, wearing a yoke, burying a belt, lying on one side for months. Such an act was not a visual aid tacked onto the words; performing it was understood to be part of putting the thing in motion. Smashing the jar before witnesses is the sentence being pronounced, not merely pictured.

19:11

Burying the dead in Tophet compounds the disaster: it was a place already regarded as polluted, and corpses made it more so. The point is not the choice of a cemetery but that there will be so many dead that the most defiled ground in the region gets used and still fills up.

19:13

Houses had flat roofs used as extra living space, for sleeping, drying produce, and, as here, setting up altars in the open air facing the sky. "The host of heaven" means the sun, moon, planets and stars, worshiped as deities; the same word for a marshalled army stands behind the title "LORD of Armies." A "drink offering" was wine poured out on or beside an altar, a standard accompaniment to sacrifice throughout the region. "Made unclean" is a ritual term, not a comment on dirt: it means rendered unfit for any sacred use until cleansed.

19:14

The "LORD's house" is the temple, and its courtyard was the open area where ordinary people gathered, a public space, and the one place in Jerusalem where a prophet could address the largest possible crowd at once.

19:15

"Stiffened their necks" is drawn from plowing: an ox that braces its neck against the yoke and refuses to be steered. The image is of deliberate resistance to direction, not of stupidity.