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Jeremiah 46: What the Passage Says

126 claims across 28 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Jeremiah 46 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter begins a set of messages from the LORD about the nations, starting with Egypt. The first message pictures Pharaoh Neco's army being routed at Carchemish by the Euphrates, where Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon defeated it. The second announces that Babylon will come against Egypt itself, against its cities, its Pharaoh, its gods and its kings, and says Egypt will be lived in again afterward. The chapter closes with words to Jacob: he is not to be afraid, because God will bring him back from captivity and will correct him in measure rather than make a full end of him.

Claim by Claim

  1. 46:1
    • The word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet.
    • This word concerned the nations.
  2. 46:2
    • The word concerned Egypt.
    • The word concerned the army of Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt.
    • That army was at the river Euphrates at Carchemish.
    • Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon struck that army.
    • The striking happened in the fourth year of Jehoiakim king of Judah.
    • Jehoiakim was the son of Josiah.
  3. 46:3
    • A command is given to make ready the small shield and the large shield.
    • A command is given to advance to battle.
  4. 46:4
    • A command is given to harness the horses.
    • A command is given to the horsemen to mount up.
    • A command is given to take position wearing helmets.
    • A command is given to polish the spears.
    • A command is given to put on the coats of armor.
  5. 46:5
    • The speaker asks why he sees them terrified.
    • They are retreating backward.
    • Their warriors are beaten down.
    • They flee in headlong flight.
    • They do not turn back to look.
    • Terror is on every side.
    • This is the declaration of the LORD.
  6. 46:6
    • The swift one is not to flee.
    • The warrior is not to escape.
    • In the north by the river Euphrates they stumble.
    • In the north by the river Euphrates they fall.
  7. 46:7
    • A question is asked: who is this that rises like the Nile?
    • The waters of this one churn like the rivers.
  8. 46:8
    • Egypt rises like the Nile.
    • Egypt's waters churn like the rivers.
    • Egypt said it would rise up.
    • Egypt said it would cover the earth.
    • Egypt said it would destroy the city and those who dwell in it.
  9. 46:9
    • A command is given to the horses to go up.
    • A command is given to the chariots to drive furiously.
    • A command is given for the warriors to go out.
    • Cush and Put handle the shield.
    • The men of Lud handle and bend the bow.
  10. 46:10
    • That day belongs to the Lord GOD of hosts.
    • That day is a day of vengeance.
    • On that day he avenges himself on his adversaries.
    • The sword will devour.
    • The sword will be satisfied.
    • The sword will be drunk with their blood.
    • The Lord GOD of hosts has a sacrifice in the land of the north by the river Euphrates.
  11. 46:11
    • The virgin daughter of Egypt is told to go up to Gilead.
    • The virgin daughter of Egypt is told to take balm.
    • Her many remedies are used in vain.
    • There is no healing for her.
  12. 46:12
    • The nations have heard of her shame.
    • Her cry has filled the earth.
    • Warrior stumbled against warrior.
    • Both of them fell together.
  13. 46:13
    • The LORD spoke a word to Jeremiah the prophet.
    • That word was about Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon coming to strike the land of Egypt.
  14. 46:14
    • A command is given to declare it in Egypt.
    • A command is given to proclaim it in Migdol.
    • A command is given to proclaim it in Memphis and in Tahpanhes.
    • The message to be spoken is: take your stand and prepare yourself.
    • The reason given is that the sword has devoured those around you.
  15. 46:15
    • A question is asked: why was your mighty one swept away?
    • It is unclear whether the one swept away is a single mighty one or the mighty ones together.
    • He did not stand.
    • The LORD thrust him down.
  16. 46:16
    • He made many stumble.
    • A man fell against his fellow.
    • They said: arise, and let us return to our own people.
    • They said: let us return to the land of our birth.
    • They said this because of the oppressing sword.
  17. 46:17
    • They cried out there.
    • They said Pharaoh king of Egypt is only a noise.
    • They said he let the appointed time pass by.
  18. 46:18
    • The King swears by his own life.
    • The name of the King is the LORD of hosts.
    • One will come who is like Tabor among the mountains.
    • One will come who is like Carmel by the sea.
  19. 46:19
    • The daughter dwelling in Egypt is told to make herself baggage for exile.
    • Memphis will become a desolation.
    • Memphis will be burned and left without inhabitant.
  20. 46:20
    • Egypt is a very beautiful heifer.
    • Something is coming against her from the north.
    • It is unclear whether the thing coming from the north is a stinging gadfly or destruction.
  21. 46:21
    • Her hired men in her midst are like fattened calves.
    • They too have turned back.
    • They have fled together.
    • They did not stand.
    • The day of their calamity has come upon them.
    • The time of their punishment has come.
  22. 46:22
    • Her sound goes like a serpent.
    • They march with an army.
    • They come against her with axes.
    • They come like men who chop wood.
  23. 46:23
    • They cut down her forest.
    • This is the declaration of the LORD.
    • Her forest cannot be searched through.
    • They are more numerous than locusts.
    • They are without number.
  24. 46:24
    • The daughter of Egypt is put to shame.
    • She is given into the hand of the people of the north.
  25. 46:25
    • The LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, speaks.
    • He is about to punish Amon of Thebes.
    • It is unclear whether the object of punishment is the god Amon of Thebes or the multitude of Thebes.
    • He will punish Pharaoh.
    • He will punish Egypt.
    • He will punish Egypt's gods.
    • He will punish Egypt's kings.
    • He will punish those who trust in Pharaoh.
  26. 46:26
    • He will give them into the hand of those who seek their life.
    • He will give them into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon.
    • He will give them into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar's servants.
    • Afterward Egypt will be inhabited as in the days of old.
    • This is the declaration of the LORD.
  27. 46:27
    • Jacob the servant of the LORD is told not to fear.
    • Israel is told not to be dismayed.
    • The LORD will save him from far away.
    • The LORD will save his offspring from the land of their captivity.
    • Jacob will return.
    • Jacob will be quiet and at ease.
    • No one will make him afraid.
  28. 46:28
    • Jacob the servant of the LORD is told not to fear.
    • This is the declaration of the LORD.
    • The LORD is with him.
    • The LORD will make a full end of all the nations where he has driven Jacob.
    • The LORD will not make a full end of Jacob.
    • The LORD will discipline Jacob in just measure.
    • The LORD will not leave Jacob entirely unpunished.

Words Worth Explaining

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

46:1
"The nations" (KJV "the Gentiles") means simply the peoples other than Israel. This verse opens a block of messages about foreign nations that runs through chapter 51. Where LORD appears in capitals it stands in for the personal name of Israel's God, which the KJV translators avoided pronouncing.
46:2
Pharaoh Neco ruled Egypt and had marched north through Judah a few years earlier, killing King Josiah. Carchemish was a city on the upper Euphrates in what is now southern Turkey; the battle there, in about 605 BC, broke Egypt's control of Syria and left Babylon dominant. "Nebuchadrezzar" is a spelling closer to the Babylonian form of the name usually written Nebuchadnezzar; it is the same king.
46:3
"Buckler and shield" means two sizes of shield: a small round one strapped to the arm for close fighting, and a large one, sometimes body length, that a soldier could crouch behind or that a shield bearer carried for an archer.
46:4
"Furbish" meant to polish or grind bright, which is what was done to a spear point before battle. A "brigandine" was the 1611 word for a coat of body armor, small metal plates riveted inside a cloth or leather jacket. The orders in verses 3 and 4 are shouted as if to Egypt's own troops, mustering them for the battle the rest of the poem shows them losing.
46:5
"Terror on every side" is a stock phrase of Jeremiah's, used elsewhere in the book as a cry of alarm and even as a nickname.
46:6
Carchemish lay far to the north of both Egypt and Judah, so an Egyptian army fighting there was fleeing northward, away from home, when it broke.
46:7
The image is the Nile, which floods every year and covers the land, the picture of Egypt swelling out beyond its borders.
46:9
These are the foreign troops Egypt hired or drafted: Cush (the KJV's "Ethiopians"), the region south of Egypt in modern Sudan; Put ("Libyans"), a people west of Egypt in North Africa; and Lud ("Lydians"), archers, either from western Asia Minor or from a North African people of the same name.
46:10
"Lord GOD of hosts" means the Lord who commands armies, heavenly ones as well as earthly. A "sacrifice" here is battlefield imagery: the slaughter of an army is described as if it were animals killed at an altar, with the sword doing the killing and drinking the blood.
46:11
Gilead, east of the Jordan, was known for a resin used as a medicine and traded widely. Calling a nation a "virgin daughter" is standard prophetic speech for a country or city pictured as a young woman, "virgin" meaning never yet taken by an enemy.
46:14
Migdol and Tahpanhes were frontier towns on Egypt's north-eastern edge; Noph is Memphis, the old capital near modern Cairo. Judean refugees had settled in all three (see chapters 43-44), so the announcement reaches them as well as the Egyptians.
46:15
The Hebrew of this line is difficult, and the ancient Greek translation read it not as a question about soldiers but as "Why has Apis fled?", Apis being the sacred bull of Memphis. That reading fits the cattle images that follow in verses 20 and 21.
46:16
The men speaking are Egypt's hired foreign soldiers. In the collapse they give up the fight and head for the countries they came from. "The land of our nativity" means the land where we were born.
46:17
The Hebrew of this taunt is obscure and has been read in several ways: as calling Pharaoh mere noise or empty boasting, and possibly as a mocking play on a royal title. "He hath passed the time appointed" means he let his moment to act slip by.
46:18
Mount Tabor is a rounded hill that rises abruptly and alone out of the plain in northern Israel; Mount Carmel is a ridge running out into the Mediterranean. Both stand out unmistakably from their surroundings, which is the point of the comparison, the invader will loom like that.
46:19
Deporting a defeated population was ordinary imperial policy: survivors were marched off to live somewhere else in the empire, which destroyed a nation's ability to organize a rebellion. Telling Egypt to pack means telling it to expect that treatment.
46:20
Cattle imagery suited Egypt, where bulls and cows were sacred animals. The Hebrew word for what comes from the north is disputed: it can mean a stinging gadfly, the kind that torments cattle, or simply destruction. The KJV took the second sense.
46:21
Egypt's army relied heavily on paid foreign soldiers. "Fatted bullocks" are calves being fed up for slaughter, so the comparison is not a compliment. "The time of their visitation" is the KJV's phrase for the moment when accounts are called in and punishment falls.
46:22
The sense here is disputed. The KJV reads the sound Egypt makes as the hiss of a snake gliding away; the picture then shifts to woodcutters, with Egypt's people as trees to be felled.
46:23
"Grasshoppers" here means locusts, which swarmed in numbers beyond counting and stripped whole regions bare, the standard biblical image for an army too large to number.
46:24
"Confounded" today suggests being confused. In 1611 it meant disgraced, publicly humiliated, which is the sense here.
46:25
No is Thebes, the great southern Egyptian city. The Hebrew word the KJV renders "multitude" is the same string of letters as Amon, the chief god of Thebes, so the line can be read either as "the crowds of Thebes" or as "Amon, god of Thebes." Modern translations usually take the second.
46:26
"Those that seek their lives" means those out to kill them. Conquest here is not final: the promise is that Egypt will be settled and populated again afterwards.
46:27
Jacob and Israel are two names for the same people, descended from the man called both. "Thy seed" in the KJV means descendants. The scene shifts abruptly from Egypt to Judah's own exiles.
46:28
"Correct thee in measure" means discipline that is proportioned and limited, as opposed to the "full end", total destruction, announced for the other nations.

Read Jeremiah 46