Jeremiah 9: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Jeremiah grieves over his people and says he would leave them if he could, because they lie to and betray each other; the LORD says he will refine and test them, and asks whether he should not punish such a nation. A lament follows over the ruined land, and the LORD explains that the ruin comes because the people abandoned his law and followed the Baals, so he will feed them bitterness, scatter them among nations, and send war after them. Mourning women are called to teach wailing, since death has climbed into the houses and bodies lie ungathered in the fields. The chapter ends with a call to boast only in knowing the LORD, and a warning that the LORD will punish circumcised nations, Judah among them, because all Israel is uncircumcised in heart.

Claim by Claim

1. 9:1
   • The speaker wishes his head were water.
   • The speaker wishes his eyes were a fountain of tears.
   • The speaker wishes this so that he could weep day and night.
   • The weeping would be for the slain of the daughter of his people.
2. 9:2
   • The speaker wishes he had a travelers' lodging place in the wilderness.
   • The speaker wishes he could leave his people and go away from them.
   • The reason given is that they are all adulterers.
   • The reason given is that they are a band of treacherous men.
3. 9:3
   • They bend their tongue as their bow for lies.
   • They have not grown strong for truth in the land.
   • They go on from evil to evil.
   • They do not know the speaker.
   • The LORD says this.
4. 9:4
   • Each person is told to beware of his neighbor.
   • They are told not to trust any brother.
   • Every brother deals deceitfully and supplants.
   • Every neighbor goes about slandering.
5. 9:5
   • Each one deceives his neighbor.
   • They do not speak the truth.
   • They have taught their tongue to speak lies.
   • They weary themselves committing iniquity.
6. 9:6
   • The one addressed dwells in the midst of deceit.
   • Through deceit they refuse to know the speaker.
   • The LORD says this.
7. 9:7
   • The LORD of hosts speaks.
   • The LORD says he will refine them by melting them.
   • The LORD says he will test them.
   • The LORD asks what else he can do because of the daughter of his people.
8. 9:8
   • Their tongue is a lethal arrow.
   • Their tongue speaks deceit.
   • With his mouth a man speaks peace to his neighbor.
   • In his heart he sets an ambush for him.
9. 9:9
   • The LORD asks whether he should not punish them for these things.
   • The LORD says this.
   • The LORD asks whether he should not avenge himself on such a nation as this.
10. 9:10
    • The speaker will take up weeping and wailing for the mountains.
    • The speaker will take up a lamentation for the pastures of the wilderness.
    • They have been burned up and laid waste.
    • No one passes through them.
    • The sound of cattle is not heard.
    • The birds of the heavens have fled.
    • The beasts have fled.
    • They are gone.
11. 9:11
    • The LORD will make Jerusalem heaps of ruins.
    • The LORD will make Jerusalem a lair of jackals.
    • The LORD will make the cities of Judah desolate.
    • The cities of Judah will be without an inhabitant.
12. 9:12
    • The question is asked who is the wise man that can understand this.
    • The question is asked to whom the mouth of the LORD has spoken so that he can declare it.
    • The question is asked why the land is ruined and burned up like a wilderness.
    • No one passes through the land.
13. 9:13
    • The LORD says the reason is that they have forsaken his law.
    • The LORD set that law before them.
    • They have not obeyed his voice.
    • They have not walked in it.
14. 9:14
    • They have walked after the stubbornness of their own heart.
    • They have walked after the Baals.
    • Their fathers taught them the Baals.
15. 9:15
    • The LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, speaks.
    • The LORD will feed this people wormwood.
    • The LORD will give them poisoned water to drink.
16. 9:16
    • The LORD will scatter them among the nations.
    • Neither they nor their fathers have known those nations.
    • The LORD will send a sword after them.
    • The LORD will send it until he has consumed them.
17. 9:17
    • The LORD of hosts speaks.
    • He tells them to consider.
    • He tells them to call for the mourning women to come.
    • He tells them to send for the skilled women to come.
18. 9:18
    • The women are to hurry and take up a wailing for us.
    • The purpose is that our eyes may run down with tears.
    • The purpose is that our eyelids may gush with water.
19. 9:19
    • A sound of wailing is heard from Zion.
    • The wailing says we are ruined.
    • The wailing says we are greatly ashamed.
    • The reason given is that we have forsaken the land.
    • The reason given is that our dwellings have cast us out, though the wording can also mean that our dwellings have been thrown down.
20. 9:20
    • The women are told to hear the word of the LORD.
    • The women are told to let their ear receive the word of his mouth.
    • The women are told to teach their daughters wailing.
    • Each woman is told to teach her neighbor a lamentation.
21. 9:21
    • Death has come up into our windows.
    • Death has entered our fortified houses.
    • Death comes to cut off the children from outside.
    • Death comes to cut off the young men from the streets.
22. 9:22
    • The command is given to speak.
    • The LORD says this.
    • The corpses of men will fall like dung on the open field.
    • They will fall like a swath of cut grain behind the reaper.
    • No one will gather them.
23. 9:23
    • The LORD speaks.
    • The wise man is not to boast in his wisdom.
    • The mighty man is not to boast in his might.
    • The rich man is not to boast in his riches.
24. 9:24
    • The one who boasts is to boast in this: that he understands and knows the LORD.
    • The LORD is the one who exercises lovingkindness in the earth.
    • The LORD is the one who exercises justice in the earth.
    • The LORD is the one who exercises righteousness in the earth.
    • The LORD delights in these things.
    • The LORD says this.
25. 9:25
    • The LORD says days are coming.
    • In those days the LORD will punish all who are circumcised along with the uncircumcised.
26. 9:26
    • Egypt is named.
    • Judah is named.
    • Edom is named.
    • The children of Ammon are named.
    • Moab is named.
    • All those who clip the hair at their temples are named.
    • Those who clip the hair at their temples dwell in the wilderness.
    • All these nations are uncircumcised.
    • All the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart.

Words Worth Explaining

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

9:1

In Hebrew Bibles this verse is numbered 8:23, so chapter and verse numbers here run one behind those in Hebrew editions from this point. "Daughter of my people" is a Hebrew way of speaking of a whole community as a single woman, an affectionate, grieving way of naming the nation, not a reference to any individual. The speaker through verse 2 is the prophet Jeremiah, whose ministry ran through the last decades of the kingdom of Judah before Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC.

9:2

In the prophets, "adultery" carries two senses at once: literal unfaithfulness between husband and wife, and the nation's abandoning of the LORD for other gods, since the bond between God and Israel was routinely pictured as a marriage. Both are likely in view here.

9:3

"The LORD" printed in capitals stands for the four-letter Hebrew personal name of God (YHWH), which Jewish readers traditionally did not pronounce, saying "the Lord" instead; English translations have followed that custom ever since. Ancient bows were strung and drawn by bracing them with the foot and pulling, "bending" the bow, so the image is of a deliberate, forceful act of aiming, not a careless word.

9:4

The Hebrew verb behind "cheats and trips up" is built on the same root as the name Jacob, who was called a heel-grabber and supplanter for taking his brother's place. To Hebrew ears the line says something like "every brother acts the Jacob." "Neighbour" here means a fellow member of the community, a friend or associate, not merely the person next door.

9:5

"Iniquity" is an old word for doing wrong on purpose.

9:7

"The LORD of hosts" translates a title meaning "the LORD of armies," picturing God at the head of heaven's forces. Refining is metalworking language: ore was heated until it liquefied so the impurities could be skimmed off, and the same operation both purified the metal and revealed what it was actually worth. The single Hebrew process covers both "melt" and "test."

9:8

"He layeth his wait" means he sets an ambush, hiding to attack someone who does not know he is there.

9:9

In older English "visit" means to come and inspect with consequences following, here, to call to account and punish. It has nothing to do with a friendly call.

9:10

The "habitations of the wilderness" are the open grazing lands beyond the farmed areas, where shepherds pastured flocks. The silence of the cattle is the point: these were noisy, inhabited places, and now nothing is there.

9:11

The KJV's "dragons" translates a Hebrew word for jackals, wild scavenging dogs that took over abandoned ruins. Ruined cities collapsed into mounds of rubble that were left standing for centuries, so "heaps" describes a recognisable landscape feature, not just wreckage.

9:13

"My law" translates torah, which means teaching or instruction as much as legislation, the whole body of direction God had given Israel, not a legal code alone.

9:14

Baal was the Canaanite storm god, credited with rain and so with crops, herds and fertility. "The Baals" is plural because each local shrine had its own version of him, and worship of these gods was long established in the land alongside worship of the LORD.

9:15

Wormwood is a shrub of the region whose leaves are intensely bitter; it was proverbial for anything bitter to endure, and was not itself deadly. The word behind "gall" or "poisoned water" names some bitter, toxic plant, possibly hemlock or the poppy, and stands for poison generally. Together they describe food and drink that punish rather than nourish.

9:16

"Heathen" in the KJV simply means the nations, foreign peoples other than Israel, without the modern overtone of savagery. Scattering among the nations is the language of forced deportation: conquering empires routinely broke up defeated populations and resettled them far from home. "A sword after them" means war pursuing them even into exile.

9:17

Professional mourners were a recognized trade in the ancient Near East. Women were hired to attend a funeral and lead the formal weeping and chanting, and the best of them were valued for skill in composing and performing laments, which is what the KJV's "cunning" means here: expert, not sly. The word has reversed its sense since 1611.

9:19

Zion was originally the fortified hill David captured, and came to stand for Jerusalem as a whole. "Spoiled" means plundered and laid waste, and "confounded" means publicly shamed and humiliated, for an ancient community, defeat was disgrace as much as loss.

9:20

The lament was a craft handed down from mother to daughter, like any other trade. God telling the women to start training the next generation means the dying is expected to go on long enough that a new set of professional mourners will be needed.

9:21

Death is pictured as a burglar or besieger climbing through the windows, the one opening a fortified house could not seal. Some scholars hear behind this an echo of Canaanite stories of Mot, the god of death, who entered through a window. "Palaces" translates a word for large fortified buildings, the strongest places in a city.

9:22

Corpses left unburied on open ground were among the worst horrors an Israelite could imagine; proper burial was a basic obligation to the dead. The second image is from harvesting: the reaper cut the grain and dropped it in handfuls behind him, and binders followed to gather it into sheaves. Here no one follows, so the cut grain simply lies where it fell.

9:23

"Glory" here is a verb meaning to boast or to stake your identity on something. Wisdom, military strength and wealth were the three things a person in that world could build a reputation on.

9:24

"Lovingkindness" translates hesed, a Hebrew word with no single English equivalent: loyal, committed care shown to someone you are bound to, going beyond what obligation strictly requires. "Judgment" here means justice, deciding cases and governing rightly, rather than condemnation.

9:25

Circumcision, the cutting away of the foreskin of male infants, was the physical mark of Israel's covenant with God. The point of the line is that Israel's neighbors practiced it too, so the mark alone distinguished no one; the Hebrew is compressed and says, roughly, "all the circumcised in foreskin."

9:26

Egypt, Edom, Ammon and Moab were Judah's neighboring kingdoms; Edom, Ammon and Moab were reckoned as blood relations of Israel in the ancestral traditions, and all of them practiced circumcision. The last group is described by a phrase meaning literally "clipped at the edge," which the KJV took as living in the far corners of the desert, while most modern translations take it as a distinctive haircut, Arabian tribes trimmed the hair at the temples for religious reasons. The Hebrew genuinely permits both. "Uncircumcised in heart" is a standing Israelite idiom for being closed off and unresponsive, the inward counterpart of the outward mark.