Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Heart Above All Things
Jeremiah 17:1-18
1 “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond. It is engraved on the tablet of their heart, and on the horns of your altars. · WEB
Judah's sin is described as engraved where it cannot be erased, and the heart itself is diagnosed as incurable — with the one who searches it named in the next breath.
The opening image is about permanence. The sin is written with a pen of iron and the point of a diamond, on two surfaces: the tablet of the heart, and the horns of the altars. The second is the sharper of the two. Blood was applied to the horns of the altar as the ritual act by which guilt was dealt with Leviticus 4:7, so the record is described as cut into the very place where its removal was supposed to happen. Where a covenant people wrote its law on tablets, this people has written its sin on the one instrument of forgiveness, and the engraving is not a stain that can be washed but a groove.
The chapter then sets two men side by side. One trusts in man and relies on the strength of flesh, and is a bush in the desert who will not see when good comes — the sharpest clause in the picture, since it says the failure is not that good is withheld but that the man is not positioned to register it. The other trusts in Yahweh and is a tree by water, whose leaf stays green in the heat and which does not stop bearing in a year of drought. Neither man is promised the absence of drought. What differs is where the roots are, and the whole comparison turns on that single variable.
The diagnosis follows, and it is the most quoted sentence in the book: The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt. Who can know it? Two words carry it. The first, 'aqob `H6121`, is built on the root behind the name Jacob and behind what he did to his brother — the heart is a supplanter, and the trickery it works is on its owner. The second, 'anash `H605`, means incurable, and it is the word used of the wound Judah cannot heal Jeremiah 30:12. The organ that is supposed to do the trusting is itself the untreatable injury, which is why every remedy in this book eventually has to be applied there.
The question at the end of that verse is often quoted as though it were despairing, and the verse after it answers immediately: I, Yahweh, search the mind. I try the heart. Nobody can know the heart, including the person who has one — and one party can, and does, and gives to each according to his ways. That turns an unanswerable question into a statement about who holds the file. It is comfort and warning in the same clause, and the book leaves both edges on it.
The closing prayer is Jeremiah's, and it uses the vocabulary of the diagnosis on himself: Heal me, O Yahweh, and I will be healed. Save me, and I will be saved. He does not claim to be the tree by the water; he asks for the treatment the nation's incurable wound needs. What he is defending himself against is the taunt in the streets — where is the word of Yahweh, let it come — thrown at a man whose predictions had not yet arrived. His reply is that he never wanted the day he announced and never hurried after it, and the request that follows is honest about what he does want, which is to see the people making the taunt disappointed instead of himself.
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