Jeremiah 8: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD declares that the bones of Judah's kings, officials, priests, prophets and people will be pulled from their graves and spread out before the sun, moon and stars they worshiped, and that the survivors he has scattered will choose death over life. He asks why Jerusalem keeps turning away and refuses to come back, and charges the scribes with writing lies and the prophets and priests with greed and false comfort, saying "Peace, peace," when there is no peace. He announces an invading army heard from Dan, poisoned water, and snakes that cannot be charmed. The chapter ends with the prophet's own grief over the wound of his people and the question of whether there is balm in Gilead.

Claim by Claim

1. 8:1
   • The LORD declares that at that time the bones of the kings of Judah will be brought out of their graves.
   • The bones of Judah's officials will be brought out of their graves.
   • The bones of the priests will be brought out of their graves.
   • The bones of the prophets will be brought out of their graves.
   • The bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem will be brought out of their graves.
2. 8:2
   • The bones will be spread out before the sun, the moon, and all the host of heaven.
   • The people had loved the host of heaven.
   • The people had served the host of heaven.
   • The people had walked after the host of heaven.
   • The people had sought the host of heaven.
   • The people had worshipped the host of heaven.
   • The bones will not be gathered up.
   • The bones will not be buried.
   • The bones will become dung on the surface of the ground.
3. 8:3
   • Death will be chosen rather than life by all the remnant that remains of this evil family.
   • The remnant remains in all the places to which the LORD has driven them.
   • The LORD of hosts declares this.
4. 8:4
   • The LORD tells the prophet to say this to them.
   • The LORD asks whether men fall and do not get up again.
   • The LORD asks whether one turns away and does not return.
5. 8:5
   • The LORD asks why this people of Jerusalem has turned away in a perpetual turning away.
   • They hold fast to deceit.
   • They refuse to return.
6. 8:6
   • The LORD listened and heard.
   • They do not speak what is right.
   • No one repents of his wickedness by asking what he has done.
   • Everyone turns back to his own course.
   • Their course is like a horse charging into battle.
7. 8:7
   • The stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons.
   • The turtledove keeps the time of her coming.
   • Two other migratory birds, whose exact species is uncertain, keep the time of their coming.
   • The LORD's people do not know the ruling of the LORD.
8. 8:8
   • The LORD asks how they can say they are wise and that the law of the LORD is with them.
   • The LORD declares that it has been turned into a falsehood.
   • The pen of the scribes is a pen of falsehood.
   • It is not stated clearly who did the making that produced the falsehood.
9. 8:9
   • The wise men are put to shame.
   • The wise men are dismayed.
   • The wise men are captured.
   • They have rejected the word of the LORD.
   • The LORD asks what wisdom is in them.
10. 8:10
    • Therefore the LORD will give their wives to other men.
    • The LORD will give their fields to those who will take possession of them.
    • From the least of them to the greatest, everyone is greedy for unjust gain.
    • From prophet to priest, everyone practices falsehood.
11. 8:11
    • They have healed the wound of the daughter of the LORD's people superficially.
    • They say, 'Peace, peace.'
    • There is no peace.
12. 8:12
    • The LORD asks whether they were ashamed when they committed abomination.
    • They were not ashamed at all.
    • They did not know how to blush.
    • Therefore they will fall among those who fall.
    • At the time of their punishment they will be brought down.
    • The LORD says this.
13. 8:13
    • The LORD declares that he will make a full end of them, or gather them away; the wording carries both senses.
    • There will be no grapes on the vine.
    • There will be no figs on the fig tree.
    • The leaf will wither.
    • What the LORD gave them will pass away from them.
14. 8:14
    • The people ask why they are sitting still.
    • They call one another to assemble.
    • They call one another to enter the fortified cities.
    • They say they will be silent, or perish, there.
    • They say the LORD their God has silenced them, or doomed them.
    • They say the LORD has given them poisoned water to drink.
    • They say this is because they have sinned against the LORD.
15. 8:15
    • They looked for peace, but no good came.
    • They looked for a time of healing, but terror came instead.
16. 8:16
    • The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan.
    • The whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his stallions.
    • They came and devoured the land and everything in it.
    • They devoured the city and those who dwell in it.
17. 8:17
    • The LORD declares that he will send serpents among them.
    • The serpents are venomous vipers.
    • The vipers cannot be charmed.
    • The vipers will bite them.
    • The LORD says this.
18. 8:18
    • The speaker seeks relief against sorrow, though the wording is obscure and may mean his sorrow is beyond relief.
    • The speaker's heart is faint within him.
19. 8:19
    • The cry of the daughter of the speaker's people is heard from a distant land.
    • They ask whether the LORD is not in Zion.
    • They ask whether her king is not in her.
    • The LORD asks why they provoked him to anger with their carved images.
    • The LORD asks why they provoked him with foreign worthless idols.
20. 8:20
    • The harvest is past.
    • The summer is ended.
    • They are not saved.
21. 8:21
    • The speaker is broken because of the brokenness of the daughter of his people.
    • The speaker is darkened, that is, he mourns.
    • Horror has seized the speaker.
22. 8:22
    • The question is asked whether there is no balm in Gilead.
    • The question is asked whether there is no physician there.
    • The question is asked why the healing of the daughter of the speaker's people has not come.

Words Worth Explaining

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

8:1

Burial was a duty owed to the dead, and to be left unburied was the worst disgrace imaginable in ancient Judah. Conquering armies did break open royal tombs, both to loot the valuables buried there and to humiliate the defeated. The list (kings, officials, priests, prophets) names the leading classes of the city, so the whole ruling order is being dragged out of the ground.

8:2

The host of heaven means the sun, moon and stars, worshiped as gods. This was widespread in Judah's last century, largely borrowed from Assyrian and Babylonian practice; "asked for guidance" refers to reading the heavens for omens. The five verbs (loved, served, followed, consulted, worshiped) are the standard vocabulary of loyalty to a god.

8:3

"LORD of Armies" translates a title usually printed as "LORD of hosts": the LORD who commands the armies of heaven. "Family" here does not mean a household but the whole nation, thought of as one extended clan descended from a common ancestor.

8:4

In Hebrew, one verb covers turning away, turning back, and repenting. Verses 4 to 6 turn that single word over and over: they turned away, they will not turn back, they refuse to return. English needs several words where the original keeps hammering one.

8:5

Verses 4 and 5 turn on a single Hebrew verb, shuv, which means both "turn away" and "turn back." It is also the ordinary word for repenting. The argument is a pun: people who fall get up, people who turn away turn back, but this people has turned away and will not turn back.

8:6

A warhorse in a charge runs straight ahead and will not turn or slow down. That is the picture: people rushing on without ever stopping to think.

8:7

Migratory birds arriving on schedule were a proverbial example of creatures that keep to a fixed order. The exact species behind three of the four Hebrew names are uncertain; older translations guessed "turtle, crane and swallow," and any list of small migrating birds gives the sense.

8:8

Scribes were the professional copyists and teachers who wrote out the law and taught what it meant, the nearest thing Judah had to a class of lawyers. The Hebrew charge is open to two readings that ancient hearers could take either way: that the scribes falsified the written text as they copied it, or that their handling and teaching of a true text turned it into a lie.

8:10

Wives handed to other men and fields handed to new owners is a description of military defeat and deportation, not a punishment invented for the occasion. When a population was conquered, land changed hands and households were broken up.

8:11

"My dear people" renders a Hebrew phrase, "the daughter of my people," which speaks of the nation as a woman, a standard way of personifying a city or a people. The image in the verse is medical: binding up a serious wound carelessly, as if a scratch. "Peace" is Hebrew shalom, meaning safety and wholeness generally, not only the absence of war.

8:12

"These disgusting things" translates a word normally used for idol worship and the practices that went with it, the standard term for what was intolerable in Israel's religion.

8:13

The vine and the fig tree were the two ordinary signs of a settled, prosperous household in Judah; their failure was shorthand for ruin. The opening line is obscure in Hebrew: it can be read as "I will gather them in", as at harvest, or as "I will make an end of them," and the wordplay may be deliberate.

8:14

The walled cities were the fortified towns where country people took shelter when an army came through. "Be silent" translates a Hebrew verb that also means "perish"; both senses are live here, which is why some translations read "let us perish there." "Poisoned water" is literally water of a bitter, poisonous plant, probably hemlock or something like it, the standard image for a draft forced on someone as punishment.

8:16

Dan was the northernmost town of the land, so an invading army coming down from the north was heard there first. To say a sound is heard "from Dan" is to say the alarm has reached the whole country from one end to the other.

8:17

Snake charming was a familiar trade in the ancient Near East, and the point is that these snakes are immune to it. The KJV's "cockatrice" was a legendary serpent whose look could kill; the Hebrew word names a real venomous snake, though which species is unknown.

8:19

Zion is the hill Jerusalem stood on, and by extension the city and its temple. "From a land far away" is ambiguous in Hebrew: it can mean the cry comes from a people already carried off into exile, or that it rises because of an enemy from far off. "Her king" is likewise open: it may mean the LORD as Zion's king, or the human king of David's line.

8:20

A proverb about the farming year. Grain was cut in late spring, summer fruit gathered before autumn; once both are in, nothing more will come from the fields until the following year. To have passed both without rescue is to have run out of chances.

8:21

The Hebrew says literally "I am darkened." It can mean wearing the dark, coarse clothing of a mourner, or the darkening of the face that goes with grief; ancient readers heard both.

8:22

Gilead was the highland region east of the Jordan, known for an aromatic resin tapped from local trees and traded as an ointment for wounds, the region's most famous export and a byword for reliable medicine. The questions are rhetorical: the medicine exists, and the patient is still not healed.