Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
The Prophet Forbidden to Marry
Jeremiah 16:1-13
1 Then Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Jeremiah is barred from marriage, from funerals and from parties, so that his own life becomes the announcement before he says anything.
Three prohibitions are laid on him, and together they remove a man from the whole social calendar of his village. He may not marry or have children. He may not enter a house of mourning to lament or comfort. He may not go into a house of feasting to eat and drink. Whatever else these cost him, they mean that his neighbors encounter the message every time an ordinary human occasion occurs without him.
The first is the heaviest, and the reason attached to it is not asceticism. Children born in this place will die grievous deaths and lie unburied, so the celibacy is a mercy withheld from being turned into a bereavement. That should govern how the requirement is read. It is not a claim that marriage is a lesser state; the book of the law treats offspring as blessing throughout, and God is the one who told him he was known before he was formed in a womb Jeremiah 1:5. What is being said is that the coming years are not years in which to start a family, and the prophet is required to live as though he believes his own message.
The ban on funerals says something further. Mourning rites in that culture were communal obligations, and to stay away was an insult; so the sign is deliberately offensive. What it dramatizes is stated plainly — I have taken away my peace from this people... even loving kindness and tender mercies — and it works by removing the human comforts that would ordinarily soften a death. No lamenting, no breaking of bread for the bereaved, no cup of consolation. A society that cannot bury and cannot comfort has lost the last thing it had.
Then comes the question the sign is designed to provoke, and it is asked in three forms: why has Yahweh pronounced all this evil against us, what is our iniquity, what is our sin? The bewilderment sounds genuine, and it is the strongest evidence in the chapter. Sixteen chapters of specific charges have produced a people who cannot name a single one of them. The answer given puts them past their fathers rather than level with them — you have done evil more than your fathers — and ends with the exile described as a granted wish: in that unknown land they will serve other gods day and night. They wanted them; they will have nothing else.
settled What this mark means