Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Though Moses and Samuel Stood Before Me
Jeremiah 15:1-9
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! · WEB
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