Jeremiah 4: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD calls Israel to come back to him and tells Judah and Jerusalem to break up their hard ground and circumcise their hearts before his anger breaks out. Then the alarm sounds: an army is coming from the north to leave the land in ruins, and the prophet cries out in pain at what he sees and hears. He looks and sees the earth empty and dark, the mountains shaking, the people and birds gone. The LORD says the whole land will be a wasteland, yet he will not destroy it completely, and the chapter ends with Zion crying like a woman in labor.

Claim by Claim

1. 4:1
   • The LORD says that if Israel will return, Israel should return to the LORD
   • The LORD says that if Israel will remove its detestable idols from the LORD's sight, then Israel will not wander
   • The words are declared by the LORD
2. 4:2
   • Israel is to swear the oath 'The LORD lives' in truth
   • Israel is to swear in justice
   • Israel is to swear in righteousness
   • Then the nations will bless themselves in him
   • The nations will glory in him
3. 4:3
   • The LORD speaks to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem
   • The LORD tells them to plow up unplowed ground for themselves
   • The LORD tells them not to sow among thorns
4. 4:4
   • The LORD tells the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to circumcise themselves to the LORD
   • The LORD tells them to remove the foreskins of their heart
   • Otherwise the LORD's fury will go out like fire
   • The fury will burn with no one to quench it
   • The reason is the evil of their deeds
5. 4:5
   • A command is given to declare it in Judah
   • A command is given to proclaim it in Jerusalem
   • A command is given to blow the ram's horn in the land
   • A command is given to cry aloud
   • A command is given to gather together
   • The message is to assemble and go into the fortified cities
6. 4:6
   • A command is given to raise a signal banner toward Zion
   • A command is given to flee for safety
   • A command is given not to stand still
   • The LORD is bringing disaster from the north
   • The LORD is bringing a great destruction
7. 4:7
   • A lion has gone up from his thicket
   • A destroyer of nations has set out
   • He has gone out from his place
   • His purpose is to make your land a desolation
   • Your cities will be ruined and left without an inhabitant
8. 4:8
   • Because of this, a command is given to gird on sackcloth
   • A command is given to lament and wail
   • The fierce anger of the LORD has not turned back from us
9. 4:9
   • The LORD declares that in that day the heart of the king will perish
   • The heart of the officials will perish
   • The priests will be appalled
   • The prophets will be astonished
10. 4:10
    • The speaker said, Ah, Lord GOD
    • The speaker said that God has utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem
    • The deception was by saying, You shall have peace
    • The sword reaches to the soul
11. 4:11
    • At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem
    • A scorching wind from the bare heights in the wilderness blows toward the daughter of my people
    • The wind is not for winnowing
    • The wind is not for cleansing
12. 4:12
    • A wind too full for these things will come for the LORD
    • The LORD says that now he also will pronounce judgments against them
13. 4:13
    • He will come up like clouds
    • His chariots are like a whirlwind
    • His horses are swifter than eagles
    • The people cry, Woe to us
    • The people say they are ruined
14. 4:14
    • Jerusalem is told to wash the evil from her heart
    • The purpose is that she may be saved
    • The question is asked how long her wicked thoughts will lodge within her
15. 4:15
    • A voice declares from Dan
    • A voice proclaims iniquity from the hill country of Ephraim
16. 4:16
    • A command is given to make mention to the nations
    • A command is given to proclaim against Jerusalem
    • Besiegers are coming from a distant land
    • They raise their voice against the cities of Judah
17. 4:17
    • They are around her like keepers of a field
    • The reason is that she has rebelled against the LORD
    • This is declared by the LORD
18. 4:18
    • Your way and your deeds have brought these things upon you
    • This is your evil
    • It is bitter
    • It has reached to your heart
19. 4:19
    • The speaker cries out about his inward parts
    • The speaker writhes in pain at the walls of his heart
    • The speaker's heart makes a noise within him
    • The speaker cannot keep silent
    • The reason is that the speaker's soul has heard the sound of the ram's horn
    • The speaker has heard the alarm of war
20. 4:20
    • Destruction upon destruction is proclaimed
    • The whole land is laid waste
    • The speaker's tents are suddenly destroyed
    • The speaker's curtains are destroyed in a moment
21. 4:21
    • The speaker asks how long he must see the signal banner
    • The speaker asks how long he must hear the sound of the ram's horn
22. 4:22
    • The LORD says his people are foolish
    • They have not known the LORD
    • They are stupid children
    • They have no understanding
    • They are skilled at doing evil
    • They do not know how to do good
23. 4:23
    • The speaker looked at the earth
    • The earth was formless and void
    • The speaker looked at the heavens
    • The heavens had no light
24. 4:24
    • The speaker looked at the mountains
    • The mountains were quaking
    • All the hills were swaying
25. 4:25
    • The speaker looked
    • There was no man
    • All the birds of the heavens had fled
26. 4:26
    • The speaker looked
    • The fruitful land was a wilderness
    • All its cities were torn down
    • The cities were torn down before the LORD
    • The cities were torn down before his fierce anger
27. 4:27
    • The LORD says the whole land will be a desolation
    • The LORD says he will not make a full end
28. 4:28
    • Because of this the earth will mourn
    • The heavens above will grow dark
    • The LORD has spoken it
    • The LORD has purposed it
    • The LORD will not relent
    • The LORD will not turn back from it
29. 4:29
    • The whole city flees at the noise of the horseman and the archer
    • They go into the thickets
    • They climb up on the rocks
    • Every city is forsaken
    • No man dwells in them
30. 4:30
    • The devastated one is asked what she will do
    • She may clothe herself with crimson
    • She may adorn herself with ornaments of gold
    • She may enlarge her eyes with paint
    • She makes herself beautiful in vain
    • Her lovers despise her
    • They seek her life
31. 4:31
    • The speaker has heard a voice like a woman in labor
    • The speaker has heard anguish like a woman bearing her first child
    • It is the voice of the daughter of Zion
    • She gasps for breath
    • She spreads out her hands
    • She says, Woe is me now
    • She says her soul is faint because of murderers

Words Worth Explaining

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

4:1

"Israel" can mean the northern kingdom, wiped out by Assyria about a century before Jeremiah spoke, or the whole people descended from Jacob; here it is deliberately broad. The Hebrew verb behind "return" (shuv) covers both turning around physically and turning back to God, and it sounds four times in this short verse. The last clause is genuinely unclear in Hebrew: it can mean "you will not be dislodged from your land" (the King James "thou shalt not remove") or "you will not stray again."

4:2

"As surely as the LORD lives" was the standard opening of a formal oath, the equivalent of swearing on something unshakeable. The point is not the words but whether the person saying them tells the truth. "The nations will be blessed through him" repeats the wording of the old promise to Abraham that through his descendants all nations would find blessing.

4:3

Fallow ground is a field left unplowed long enough that the surface has baked hard and grown over. Seed scattered on it is wasted; the crust has to be broken first. Sowing among thorns is the companion image: seed dropped into uncleared ground that will be choked out.

4:4

Circumcision, the cutting of the foreskin from a male infant, was the physical mark that a man belonged to the people bound to God by covenant. Jeremiah applies the same surgical image to the heart, which in Hebrew usage means the mind and will rather than the emotions: cut away what is coarse and unresponsive there.

4:5

The horn is a shofar, a ram's horn hollowed out and blown like a trumpet. It carried a long way and was the ordinary way of sounding a public alarm. "Cities with strong walls" were the fortified towns where country people fled when an army approached.

4:6

A signal flag, or standard, was a banner raised on a pole or hilltop to rally troops or point refugees toward safety. Zion was originally the fortified hill in Jerusalem and came to stand for the city itself. Invaders from Mesopotamia always arrived "from the north" because the desert made a direct approach from the east impossible; armies followed the arc of farmland north and came down through Syria.

4:7

The destroyer is not named anywhere in the chapter. Later in the book the northern enemy turns out to be Babylon, but here the threat is kept faceless. Where the King James has "Gentiles," the Hebrew simply means "nations", foreign peoples in general, with no religious sense attached.

4:8

Sackcloth was coarse, dark cloth woven from goat hair, the material used for grain sacks. Wearing it next to the skin was a public, visible sign of grief or dread, like a black armband but far more uncomfortable.

4:9

In Hebrew the heart is the seat of thought, nerve and decision, not feeling; for the king's heart to "perish" is for his nerve and judgment to fail him. The "princes" of the King James are court officials and nobles, not royal sons. The priests ran the temple and the prophets here are the professional court prophets, the men whose job was to know what was coming.

4:10

The Hebrew is as blunt as the King James makes it: Jeremiah accuses God outright of misleading the people, because other prophets had been announcing peace in God's name. Ancient and modern translators have sometimes softened it. "The sword reaches to the soul" uses a Hebrew word (nephesh) that means throat, breath, life, hence "a sword at our throats."

4:11

The wind is the sirocco, a scorching wind off the desert that shrivels crops and makes people ill. It is contrasted with the light breeze a farmer needs for winnowing: grain was tossed into the air with a fork so a steady wind carried off the light chaff and left the heavy kernels. This wind is no use for that; it simply strips the threshing floor bare. "Daughter of my people" is an affectionate Hebrew idiom for the population as a whole, pictured as a single young woman.

4:12

The King James says, "now also will I give sentence." A sentence is what a judge says when he decides what happens next.

4:13

"Spoiled" in the King James means plundered and laid waste, not gone rotten. It has that older sense everywhere it appears in this chapter.

4:15

Dan was the northernmost town in the land and Ephraim the hill country just north of Jerusalem. Naming them in that order tracks the invader's advance: the news is already at the border, then already in the hills an hour's ride away.

4:16

The King James "watchers" translates a word for besiegers, troops that take up position around a city and keep it under observation until it falls.

4:17

Fields at harvest were ringed with hired watchmen posted in huts to keep off thieves and animals. The image is of a city encircled at close intervals, with no gap left to slip through.

4:19

The King James "my bowels" is literal: Hebrew locates strong feeling in the internal organs, roughly where English says "gut" or "heart." It is not clear, in Hebrew, whether the speaker here is Jeremiah himself or the city crying out through him, and the text does not settle it.

4:20

Tents and tent curtains stand for homes generally, a way of speaking left over from the people's herding past. The curtains are the woven panels that form a tent's walls; cutting them is how you destroy a household in seconds.

4:21

A flag was raised high on a pole to call soldiers together. When people saw it, they knew a battle was coming.

4:22

The King James "sottish" once meant dull, stupefied, the way a drunk is slow-witted, not stubborn or wicked. It has dropped out of ordinary English since 1611.

4:23

"Without form, and void" reproduces exactly the two Hebrew words used of the earth before creation in Genesis 1:2, and the four "I looked" visions that follow undo the order of the creation account step by step: light, land, living creatures, human beings. A reader who knew the opening of Genesis would hear it immediately.

4:26

"The fruitful place" is farmland, orchard and vineyard country: the land that fed everyone. Its turning into desert is not scenery but starvation.

4:27

"I will not make a full end" is a set phrase for stopping short of total annihilation, devastation, but not extinction.

4:28

"Repent" in the King James means to change one's mind or reverse a decision. It carries no sense of being sorry for wrongdoing here.

4:29

The thickets and rock faces are the standard hiding places of a countryside under invasion: dense scrub in the valleys and limestone caves in the hills. People are abandoning walled towns for them, which reverses verse 5, where the walls were the safe place to run to.

4:30

Crimson cloth was dyed with an expensive insect-based dye and signaled wealth. Widening the eyes with paint means outlining them with kohl, a black powder that made them look larger. "Thy lovers" continues an image used throughout the book, in which the nation is a wife who has taken other partners: the foreign powers she courted as allies, and the gods she took up with them. The picture is of a woman dressing to attract men who now want her dead.

4:31

"Daughter of Zion" is the standard Hebrew idiom for Jerusalem and its people pictured as a woman; it does not refer to an individual. Spreading out the hands was the gesture of someone pleading for help or surrendering. "My soul faints" again uses the word for throat and breath: she cannot get air.