Though Moses and Samuel Stood Before Me
1 Then Yahweh said to me, “Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind would not turn toward this people. Cast them out of my sight, and let them go out! 2 It will happen when they ask you, ‘Where shall we go out?’ then you shall tell them, ‘Yahweh says: “Such as are for death, to death; such as are for the sword, to the sword; such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for captivity, to captivity.”’ 3 “I will appoint over them four kinds,” says Yahweh: “the sword to kill, the dogs to tear, the birds of the sky, and the animals of the earth, to devour and to destroy. 4 I will cause them to be tossed back and forth among all the kingdoms of the earth, because of Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, for that which he did in Jerusalem. 5 For who will have pity on you, Jerusalem? Who will mourn you? Who will come to ask of your welfare? 6 You have rejected me,” says Yahweh. “You have gone backward. Therefore I have stretched out my hand against you and destroyed you. I am weary of showing compassion. 7 I have winnowed them with a fan in the gates of the land. I have bereaved them of children. I have destroyed my people. They didn’t return from their ways. 8 Their widows are increased more than the sand of the seas. I have brought on them against the mother of the young men a destroyer at noonday. I have caused anguish and terrors to fall on her suddenly. 9 She who has borne seven languishes. She has given up the spirit. Her sun has gone down while it was yet day. She has been disappointed and confounded. I will deliver their residue to the sword before their enemies,” says Yahweh.
The refusal of intercession is stated by naming the two men whose intercession had worked, and the sentence is traced back to a king fifty years dead.
Two names are chosen with care. Moses had stood between God and a nation that had just made a calf, and the judgment was turned aside Exodus 32:11–14. Samuel had cried for Israel and been answered, and had treated the failure to pray as a sin in itself 1 Samuel 12:23. Both are named here as men whose presence would now make no difference. The point is not that prayer is weak. It is that the two clearest historical cases of successful intercession are placed on the table and declared insufficient for this. That is the most exact way of saying the situation has passed the stage prayer addresses.
The answer given to those asking where they should go is arranged as a grim sorting — death, sword, famine, captivity, each group to its own destination. Everyone is assigned somewhere and nobody is left out, and the four kinds appointed afterward continue the pattern with sword, dogs, birds and animals. The vocabulary is that of an administrator rather than of an angry man, and that is what makes it cold.
The reason given is a name from two generations back: because of Manasseh, for what he did in Jerusalem. That king had filled the city with innocent blood and set idolatry inside the temple itself 2 Kings 21:16, and the record of the fall names the same cause 2 Kings 24:3–4. This has to be read against the book's own insistence that a son does not die for his father's iniquity Jeremiah 31:29–30. What resolves it is stated in the next chapter, where the same audience is told that they have done evil more than their fathers Jeremiah 16:12. Manasseh set a course. The generations after him were free to leave it. They were called to leave it for forty years, and went further along it instead. The sentence dates from his reign because that is when the road was chosen, and it falls on people who kept walking.
Then the clause that is harder than the sentence itself: I am weary of showing compassion. The book has already recorded God weeping over the pastures and calling Judah the beloved of his soul, so the weariness is not indifference arriving at last. It is the exhaustion of a long refusal, stated in the first person by the one refused. The images that follow describe a loss of future rather than a punishment of a past: a woman who has borne seven sons gives up the spirit, and her sun goes down while it is still day. In that country seven sons was the mark of complete blessing, and the passage kills it at noon.
held with reason What this mark means