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Jeremiah 5: What the Passage Says

122 claims across 31 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Jeremiah 5 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Jeremiah to search Jerusalem for one honest person, and says the people, both the poor and the leaders, have broken away from him and refused correction. Because of their idol worship, adultery, and false oaths, God announces that he will bring a distant nation with a strange language to eat up their harvests and break their fortified cities, though he says he will not make a full end of them. The chapter closes with a picture of rich men who trap their neighbors and ignore orphans and the poor, and of prophets who speak lies while priests rule by their own power and the people like it that way.

Claim by Claim

  1. 5:1
    • A command is given to run back and forth through the streets of Jerusalem.
    • A command is given to look and to know.
    • A command is given to search in Jerusalem's broad squares.
    • The search is to see whether a single man can be found.
    • The search is for anyone who does justice and seeks faithfulness.
    • The LORD says that if such a person is found, he will pardon the city.
  2. 5:2
    • The people say, 'The LORD lives.'
    • Even so, they swear falsely.
  3. 5:3
    • The speaker asks the LORD whether his eyes are not upon faithfulness.
    • The LORD struck them.
    • They felt no pain at being struck.
    • The LORD consumed them.
    • They refused to receive correction.
    • They made their faces harder than rock.
    • They refused to return.
  4. 5:4
    • The speaker said that these are only the poor.
    • The speaker said they are foolish.
    • The speaker said they do not know the way of the LORD.
    • The speaker said they do not know the judgment of their God.
  5. 5:5
    • The speaker resolved to go to the great men.
    • The speaker resolved to speak to the great men.
    • The speaker said the great men know the way of the LORD and the judgment of their God.
    • But they too, all together, had broken the yoke.
    • They had burst the bonds.
  6. 5:6
    • Therefore a lion out of the forest will strike them down.
    • A wolf of the desert plains will ravage them.
    • A leopard will lie watching over their cities.
    • Everyone who goes out from those cities will be torn in pieces.
    • The reason is that their transgressions are many.
    • The reason is that their backslidings are numerous.
  7. 5:7
    • The LORD asks how he could pardon her for this.
    • Her children have forsaken the LORD.
    • Her children have sworn by what are not gods.
    • The LORD fed them to the full.
    • They then committed adultery.
    • They thronged together at the house of a prostitute.
  8. 5:8
    • They were like well-fed horses, roaming at large.
    • Each one neighed after his neighbor's wife.
  9. 5:9
    • The LORD asks whether he should not punish for these things.
    • This is declared by the LORD.
    • The LORD asks whether his soul should not be avenged on such a nation as this.
  10. 5:10
    • A command is given to go up among her vine rows and destroy.
    • A command is given not to make a full end.
    • A command is given to strip away her branches.
    • The reason given is that they do not belong to the LORD.
  11. 5:11
    • The house of Israel has dealt utterly treacherously against the LORD.
    • The house of Judah has dealt utterly treacherously against the LORD.
    • This is declared by the LORD.
  12. 5:12
    • They have denied the LORD.
    • They said, 'It is not he.'
    • They said no evil will come upon us.
    • They said we will not see sword or famine.
  13. 5:13
    • The prophets will become wind.
    • The word is not in them.
    • Thus it will be done to them.
  14. 5:14
    • Therefore the LORD God of hosts says this.
    • The reason given is that they speak this word.
    • The LORD will make his words in the prophet's mouth fire.
    • The LORD will make this people wood.
    • The fire will devour them.
  15. 5:15
    • The LORD is bringing a nation upon them from far away.
    • This is addressed to the house of Israel.
    • This is declared by the LORD.
    • It is an enduring, mighty nation.
    • It is an ancient nation.
    • It is a nation whose language you do not know.
    • You will not understand what they say.
  16. 5:16
    • Their quiver is like an open grave.
    • They are all mighty men.
  17. 5:17
    • They will devour your harvest and your bread.
    • It is ambiguous whether your sons and daughters are the ones who would have eaten that food or are themselves devoured.
    • They will devour your flocks and your herds.
    • They will devour your vines and your fig trees.
    • They will beat down with the sword your fortified cities in which you trust.
  18. 5:18
    • Even in those days the LORD will not make a full end with them.
    • This is declared by the LORD.
  19. 5:19
    • The people will ask why the LORD their God has done all these things to them.
    • The prophet is to answer them.
    • The answer is that they forsook the LORD.
    • The answer is that they served foreign gods in their own land.
    • So they will serve strangers in a land that is not theirs.
  20. 5:20
    • A command is given to declare this in the house of Jacob.
    • A command is given to proclaim it in Judah.
  21. 5:21
    • A command is given to a foolish people to hear this.
    • The people are without understanding.
    • They have eyes but do not see.
    • They have ears but do not hear.
  22. 5:22
    • The LORD asks whether they do not fear him.
    • This is declared by the LORD.
    • The LORD asks whether they will not tremble before him.
    • The LORD placed the sand as the boundary for the sea.
    • He did so by a perpetual decree.
    • The sea cannot pass that boundary.
    • The waves toss themselves but cannot prevail.
    • The waves roar but cannot pass over it.
  23. 5:23
    • This people has a stubborn and rebellious heart.
    • They have turned aside and gone away.
  24. 5:24
    • They do not say in their heart, 'Let us fear the LORD our God.'
    • The LORD gives the rain, both the early and the latter rain, in its season.
    • The LORD keeps for them the appointed weeks of harvest.
  25. 5:25
    • Their iniquities have turned these things away.
    • Their sins have withheld good from them.
  26. 5:26
    • Wicked men are found among the LORD's people.
    • They lie in wait as fowlers crouch.
    • They set a destroying trap.
    • They catch men.
  27. 5:27
    • Their houses are full of deceit as a cage is full of birds.
    • Therefore they have become great.
    • They have become rich.
  28. 5:28
    • They have grown fat and sleek.
    • They overpass the deeds of the wicked.
    • They do not judge the cause of the fatherless.
    • It is ambiguous whether the prospering refers to them prospering or to the orphan being made to prosper.
    • They do not judge the right of the needy.
  29. 5:29
    • The LORD asks whether he should not punish for these things.
    • This is declared by the LORD.
    • The LORD asks whether his soul should not be avenged on such a nation as this.
  30. 5:30
    • An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land.
  31. 5:31
    • The prophets prophesy falsely.
    • The priests rule by their own authority.
    • The LORD's people love to have it so.
    • The LORD asks what they will do at the end of it.

Words Worth Explaining

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

5:1
The "broad places" were the open squares inside a city's gates, which served as market and as courtroom: cases were argued there in public, in front of witnesses. Looking there for one person who "does what is just" means looking in the very place where justice was supposed to be on display. The search also echoes Abraham's bargaining over Sodom in Genesis 18, where a handful of righteous people would have spared the city.
5:2
"As surely as the LORD lives" was the standard formula for a binding oath, used in courts and contracts. It called God in as witness and as the one who would punish the swearer if the words were false, so swearing it falsely was not a slip of speech but a serious crime.
5:3
KJV "thou hast consumed them" does not mean burned up; the sense is worn out, finished off. "They have not grieved" means they felt no pain. "Refused to return" is the standard Hebrew idiom for refusing to turn back to God, the word usually translated "repent."
5:4
The poor here are ordinary working people, who had little access to formal instruction in the law and might plausibly be excused as simply not knowing it. "The judgment of their God" means the rulings God has laid down, what he requires, not a coming judgment.
5:5
The "great men" are the leading families, officials and landowners, the class expected to know the law and administer it. A yoke was the wooden crossbar laid over the necks of plow oxen, held on by leather straps or cords; it was the standard image for the obligations a god or a king laid on a people. Breaking the yoke and snapping the straps is the picture of a draft animal throwing off its driver and bolting.
5:6
The Hebrew word behind KJV "of the evenings" has the same consonants as the word for the desert plain, so the phrase can be read either as "wolf of the dusk" or "wolf of the steppe"; translations divide. Lions, wolves and leopards were real hazards on the edges of Judean towns, not just figures of speech, though here they stand for an attacking army.
5:7
To swear by a god was to name that god as the witness who would enforce the oath; swearing by "things that are not gods" means treating those powers as though they could. From here to verse 8 the language of adultery and prostitution runs in two directions at once: it describes sexual conduct, and it is also the prophets' habitual image for a people abandoning their own God for other gods. The Hebrew keeps both in play.
5:8
The Hebrew of KJV "as fed horses in the morning" is uncertain; the likeliest sense is well-fed, roaming stallions. The image is of animals in rut, driven by appetite and beyond control.
5:9
KJV "visit" is the old legal sense: to come to someone in order to deal with them, here, to punish. "My soul" translates a Hebrew word that commonly stands for the person himself, so the line means simply "shall I not avenge myself."
5:10
The Hebrew can be read two ways, and translations split. One reading takes it of a vineyard: go up its rows, strip off its shoots, but do not destroy the vine. The other, which KJV follows, takes it of a city: climb her walls and pull down her battlements. The consonants are the same either way, and the ambiguity is in the text, not in the translating.
5:11
After Solomon's death the kingdom split in two. The northern kingdom, called Israel, was destroyed by Assyria about a century before Jeremiah spoke; the southern kingdom, Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital, is the one he is addressing. Naming both means the charge covers the whole people, north and south.
5:12
KJV "belied the LORD" means told lies about him. "It is not he" is a flat denial, roughly, "he is not the one; he will not act." "Sword nor famine" is a stock pair for what invasion brings: killing in the field, then starvation inside a besieged city.
5:13
The Hebrew word for wind is also the word for breath and for spirit, the thing prophets claimed to speak by. Calling the prophets "wind" is a deliberate pun: what they claim as the spirit of God is only air.
5:14
"Hosts" in KJV means armies. The title pictures God as commander of overwhelming forces, both Israel's fighting men and the armies of heaven. The rendering "God of Armies" is the same phrase in modern words.
5:15
Judah's neighbors spoke languages close enough to Hebrew to be broadly understood, Moabite, Phoenician, Aramaic. An army whose speech you could not follow meant no negotiation, no terms, no chance of talking your way out. Jeremiah does not name the nation here; later in the book it is Babylon.
5:16
A quiver is the case an archer carries arrows in. Comparing it to an open grave means that every arrow drawn from it puts a person in the ground, and an open grave was a disturbing image in itself, since contact with a dead body made an Israelite ritually unclean.
5:17
KJV "fenced cities" means fortified cities, ringed with defensive walls, not fields marked off with fences. KJV "impoverish" translates a verb meaning to batter down or shatter, the walls are broken, not merely made poor.
5:19
KJV "strange gods" means foreign gods, gods belonging to other peoples; it does not mean odd. The sentence turns on one Hebrew verb used twice: they served foreign gods, so they will serve foreigners. The punishment is worded to mirror the offense exactly.
5:20
Jacob was the ancestor who was also given the name Israel; "the house of Jacob" is a standard way of saying the whole nation descended from him.
5:21
KJV "without understanding" is literally "without heart." In Hebrew the heart is the seat of thought, judgment and decision, much closer to what English calls the mind than to the feelings. The same word carries the same sense in verses 23 and 24.
5:22
In the ancient Near East the sea was the standard image of a raw force that has to be held in check, and a shoreline of loose sand holding back the whole ocean was a deliberately absurd-sounding boundary. "Decree" here is the word for a royal edict: a fixed limit set by command and not renegotiated.
5:23
"Revolting" in the King James Version means rebelling or turning away. It carries none of the modern sense of disgusting.
5:24
The land had two rain seasons and no rain at all through the summer. The "former" rains came in autumn, around October and November, softening baked ground so it could be plowed and sown; the "latter" rains came in spring, around March and April, filling out the grain before harvest. Miss either and the crop failed. The "appointed weeks of the harvest" are the fixed run of weeks from the barley harvest through the wheat harvest, whose start and end were marked by festivals.
5:25
"Iniquities" is an old word for wrongs a person does knowingly, on purpose.
5:26
A fowler caught birds by hiding a net or a spring-snare on the ground, scattering bait, then crouching out of sight until something came near enough to take. The point of the comparison is the concealment and the patience, not the violence.
5:27
A fowler kept the birds he had taken alive in a woven cage or basket, packed tight, to be carried to market. The houses of these men are stuffed the same way with what they have trapped out of other people.
5:28
To "judge the cause" of someone is to take up their lawsuit and argue it. Orphans and widows had no adult male relative to represent them at the city-gate court, so the law made it the duty of judges and elders to plead their case for them; refusing to do so left them with no legal standing at all. The clause KJV renders "yet they prosper" is grammatically difficult in Hebrew and may instead mean "so that the orphan might prosper": that is, they will not act so that things go well for him.
5:30
KJV "wonderful" does not mean delightful. In 1611 it meant something that causes amazement, and here the amazement is horror, the pair of words means appalling and stomach-turning.
5:31
Prophets and priests were the two recognized religious offices: prophets delivered messages claimed to come from God, priests ran the temple and gave authoritative rulings on the law. KJV "bear rule by their means" translates a Hebrew phrase meaning literally "rule by their hands," which may mean the priests rule on their own authority, or that they rule under the direction of the false prophets; both readings are defended and the Hebrew does not settle it.

Read Jeremiah 5