Jeremiah 3: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Speaking through Jeremiah in the days of King Josiah, the LORD uses the picture of a broken marriage: Israel and Judah have gone after other gods on the hills and under the green trees, and Judah, who watched the northern kingdom be divorced and sent away, did the same and turned back only in pretense. The LORD then calls faithless Israel in the north to return, promising mercy, shepherds who teach, a Jerusalem where the nations gather, and Judah and Israel coming back together to the land. The chapter ends with the people's own words of return and their confession of shame.

Claim by Claim

1. 3:1
   • The following words are introduced as something said.
   • It is asked: if a man sends his wife away, and she leaves him and becomes another man's wife, may he return to her again.
   • It is asked whether that land would not be utterly defiled.
   • The one addressed has played the harlot with many lovers.
   • The Hebrew closing phrase is ambiguous: it either commands the harlot to return to the LORD or asks whether she may return to him.
   • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
2. 3:2
   • The one addressed is told to lift up her eyes to the bare heights.
   • The one addressed is told to look.
   • It is asked where she has not been lain with.
   • She sat waiting for them by the roadsides.
   • She sat like an Arab in the wilderness.
   • She has defiled the land with her whoredoms.
   • She has defiled the land with her wickedness.
3. 3:3
   • The showers have been withheld.
   • There has been no latter rain.
   • The one addressed had the forehead of a whore.
   • The one addressed refused to be ashamed.
4. 3:4
   • It is asked whether from this time she will call to him, 'My father.'
   • She calls him the companion of her youth.
5. 3:5
   • It is asked whether he will keep his anger forever.
   • It is asked whether he will keep it to the end.
   • The one addressed has spoken this.
   • The one addressed has done evil things.
   • The one addressed was able to do them.
6. 3:6
   • The LORD spoke to the prophet.
   • The LORD spoke in the days of Josiah the king.
   • Josiah was king.
   • The LORD asked whether the prophet had seen what backsliding Israel had done.
   • Israel went up on every high hill.
   • Israel went under every green tree.
   • Israel played the harlot there.
7. 3:7
   • The LORD said that after she had done all these things she would return to him.
   • The King James renders this as a command to her to return.
   • She did not return.
   • Her treacherous sister Judah saw it.
8. 3:8
   • The LORD saw it.
   • Backsliding Israel committed adultery.
   • For all these causes the LORD sent Israel away.
   • The LORD gave Israel a bill of divorce.
   • Her treacherous sister Judah did not fear.
   • Judah went and played the harlot also.
9. 3:9
   • Through the lightness of her whoredom she defiled the land.
   • She committed adultery with stone and with wood.
10. 3:10
    • For all this, her treacherous sister Judah did not return to the LORD with her whole heart.
    • Judah returned only in falsehood.
    • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
11. 3:11
    • The LORD spoke to the prophet.
    • The LORD said backsliding Israel had shown herself more righteous than treacherous Judah.
12. 3:12
    • The prophet is told to go and proclaim these words toward the north.
    • The prophet is told to say: Return, backsliding Israel.
    • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
    • The LORD will not let his face fall in anger upon them.
    • The LORD is merciful.
    • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
    • The LORD will not keep anger forever.
13. 3:13
    • The one addressed is told only to acknowledge her iniquity.
    • She has transgressed against the LORD her God.
    • She has scattered her ways to strangers.
    • She did this under every green tree.
    • They have not obeyed the LORD's voice.
    • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
14. 3:14
    • Backsliding children are told to return.
    • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
    • The LORD says he is husband and master to them, the Hebrew word carrying both senses.
    • The LORD will take them, one from a city and two from a family.
    • The LORD will bring them to Zion.
15. 3:15
    • The LORD will give them shepherds according to his own heart.
    • Those shepherds will feed them with knowledge and understanding.
16. 3:16
    • They will be multiplied and increased in the land in those days.
    • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
    • They will no longer say, 'The ark of the covenant of the LORD.'
    • It will not come to mind.
    • They will not remember it.
    • They will not visit it.
    • It will not be made again.
17. 3:17
    • At that time they will call Jerusalem the throne of the LORD.
    • All the nations will be gathered to it.
    • They will be gathered to the name of the LORD, to Jerusalem.
    • They will no longer walk after the stubbornness of their evil heart.
18. 3:18
    • In those days the house of Judah will walk with the house of Israel.
    • They will come together out of the land of the north.
    • They will come to the land the LORD gave as an inheritance to their fathers.
19. 3:19
    • The LORD said, 'How shall I set you among the sons?'
    • The LORD said he would give her a desirable land.
    • That land is a goodly heritage among the hosts of nations.
    • The LORD said she would call him 'My father.'
    • The LORD said she would not turn away from following him.
20. 3:20
    • A wife deals treacherously in leaving her husband.
    • So the house of Israel has dealt treacherously with the LORD.
    • The LORD is named as the speaker of this.
21. 3:21
    • A voice was heard on the bare heights.
    • It was the weeping and supplications of the children of Israel.
    • They have perverted their way.
    • They have forgotten the LORD their God.
22. 3:22
    • Backsliding children are told to return.
    • The LORD will heal their backslidings.
    • The people answer that they come to him.
    • The people say he is the LORD their God.
23. 3:23
    • The hills and the tumult of the mountains are falsehood, the Hebrew leaving it open whether the point is that the noise there is a lie or that salvation is hoped for from them in vain.
    • The salvation of Israel is in the LORD their God.
24. 3:24
    • The shameful thing has devoured the labour of their fathers from their youth.
    • It devoured their flocks and their herds.
    • It devoured their sons and their daughters.
25. 3:25
    • They lie down in their shame.
    • Their disgrace covers them.
    • They have sinned against the LORD their God.
    • Both they and their fathers have sinned.
    • They have sinned from their youth until this day.
    • They have not obeyed the voice of the LORD their God.

Words Worth Explaining

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

3:1

The chapter opens by quoting a rule from Israel's law (Deuteronomy 24:1–4): a man who divorced his wife could not take her back once she had married another man, and doing so was said to defile the land. The point of quoting it is that what follows breaks it.

3:2

The "bare hilltops" (the King James "high places") were open-air shrines on hills outside the towns, where the local Canaanite gods were worshiped; the rites there included sexual acts, which is why the prophets describe the practice as a wife's adultery. Throughout this chapter Israel is spoken of as the LORD's wife. The "desert nomad" of the comparison is not merely waiting but lying in wait beside a trade route to seize whoever passes.

3:3

In this climate rain fell only in a wet season. The "latter" or spring rains, in March and April, swelled the grain just before harvest; without them the crop failed.

3:4

The Hebrew word behind "close friend since I was young" means a trusted companion, and is also used of the husband a woman married in her youth, so the marriage image continues inside the words the people are quoted as saying.

3:5

Verses 4 and 5 are Jeremiah quoting back what the people themselves say: the affectionate words to God, then the calculation that his anger will blow over. Verse 5 ends with God's own comment on the gap between the words and the behavior.

3:6

Josiah ruled Judah from about 640 to 609 BC. "Israel" in verses 6–11 means specifically the northern kingdom: after Solomon's death the country split in two, the northern tribes keeping the name Israel and the south becoming Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom in 722 BC, about a century before Jeremiah spoke these words. "Every high hill and every green tree" is the standard phrase for the places where shrines to other gods stood.

3:7

Green trees, especially big shady ones, were favorite spots for altars to other gods. That is why the phrase keeps coming back in this chapter.

3:8

A written notice of divorce was a legal document that released a wife from the marriage and left her free to remarry. Here the divorce stands for what had already happened in history: the destruction of the northern kingdom and the deportation of its people by Assyria.

3:9

The stone and wood are the objects that stood at the hilltop shrines, upright stone pillars and carved wooden poles representing the gods.

3:10

Judah's "pretending" refers to the reforms of King Josiah, who by royal order in about 622 BC had the shrines and their objects destroyed. Jeremiah's charge is that the change was official rather than genuine.

3:11

"More in the right" is a comparison, not a verdict of innocence: Israel sinned without having seen the consequences, while Judah had watched Israel's destruction and still went the same way.

3:12

North is the direction of Assyria, where the people of the northern kingdom had been deported. The message is being called out toward people who are no longer in the land.

3:13

"The strangers" means foreign gods, and "scattered thy ways" pictures spreading your attentions around among many of them. "Iniquity" is guilt, the wrong itself rather than the feeling about it.

3:14

The Hebrew word here means both "husband" and "master or owner", and it is also the name Baal, the god worshiped at the hilltop shrines, so the claim is pointed. A "family group" is a clan, the extended kinship unit between a household and a tribe. Zion was originally the ridge Jerusalem was built on, and came to stand for the city itself and its temple.

3:15

"Shepherds" (the King James "pastors") was the ordinary term across the ancient Near East for kings and rulers, not for religious teachers; the picture is of leaders responsible for a people the way a herdsman is for a flock.

3:16

The ark of the covenant was a gold-covered wooden chest holding the stone tablets of the agreement made at Sinai. It stood in the innermost room of the temple, was carried on poles, and was treated as the place where God was present with Israel. "Visit it" in the King James means to go and attend to it, to care about it.

3:17

The cover of the ark was spoken of as the LORD's throne, with the chest as his footstool. Saying Jerusalem itself will be called the throne puts the whole city in the place the chest once held.

3:18

"The land of the north" is the region the exiles were taken to, Assyria and later Babylon; the road home ran north and then south, since the desert lay directly between. An inheritance here means land held permanently and passed down within a family, not a one-off gift.

3:19

The Hebrew says "among the sons." Land passed by inheritance to sons, so this is legal language about being given the standing of an heir, not just an expression of affection.

3:21

The weeping is heard on the same bare hilltops where the shrines stood, which is the point of naming the location.

3:23

The Hebrew of the first line is obscure and has been read in different ways: either that the noise and crowds on the hills are a lie, or that what comes from the hilltop shrines is deception and uproar. Either way the hills are the shrine sites of verse 2.

3:24

"That shameful thing" translates a Hebrew word, *bosheth*, that writers substituted for the name Baal so as not to say it. What it "ate up" is meant literally: the animals sacrificed at the shrines, and, in the practice condemned elsewhere in Jeremiah, children offered as sacrifices.

3:25

Lying down and being covered is the posture of mourning, sitting or lying on the ground with dust or a garment over the head, used here as an image of public disgrace.