They Have Dug a Pit for My Soul
13 Therefore Yahweh says: “Ask now among the nations, ‘Who has heard such things?’ The virgin of Israel has done a very horrible thing. 14 Will the snow of Lebanon fail from the rock of the field? Will the cold waters that flow down from afar be dried up? 15 For my people have forgotten me. They have burned incense to false gods. They have been made to stumble in their ways in the ancient paths, to walk in byways, in a way not built up, 16 to make their land an astonishment, and a perpetual hissing. Everyone who passes by it will be astonished, and shake his head. 17 I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy. I will show them the back, and not the face, in the day of their calamity. 18 Then they said, “Come! Let’s devise plans against Jeremiah; for the law won’t perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, and let’s strike him with the tongue, and let’s not give heed to any of his words.” 19 Give heed to me, Yahweh, and listen to the voice of those who contend with me. 20 Should evil be recompensed for good? For they have dug a pit for my soul. Remember how I stood before you to speak good for them, to turn away your wrath from them. 21 Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, and give them over to the power of the sword. Let their wives become childless and widows. Let their men be killed and their young men struck by the sword in battle. 22 Let a cry be heard from their houses when you bring a troop suddenly on them; for they have dug a pit to take me and hidden snares for my feet. 23 Yet, Yahweh, you know all their counsel against me to kill me. Don’t forgive their iniquity. Don’t blot out their sin from your sight, Let them be overthrown before you. Deal with them in the time of your anger.
Nature is called as a witness to constancy, and the men who plot against Jeremiah reason that the institutions will go on producing guidance without him.
The argument from nature is put as two questions with obvious answers. Does the snow of Lebanon leave the rock; do the cold streams that come down from far off ever dry up? Mountain snow and the water it feeds are the most reliable things in that landscape. The comparison is not decorative. It establishes that constancy is the norm everywhere except in the one nation given every reason for it. What Judah has done is called horrible enough that the nations should be asked whether they have heard of anything like it.
The road imagery that follows is exact. They have been made to stumble in the ancient paths and now walk in byways, in a way not built up — an unmade track rather than a highway. Ancient paths in this book are not nostalgia. They are the route already surveyed and graded, offered earlier as the way to rest for the soul Jeremiah 6:16. Leaving a built road for open country is not liberation. It is extra work and worse footing, and the destination named for it is a land people will pass by and shake their heads at.
The plot against Jeremiah is then quoted, and the reasoning inside it is the most revealing thing in the chapter. The law won't perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Three offices are listed, and the argument is that all three will continue to function whatever happens to this man. It is an appeal to institutional continuity. The machinery is sound, the supply of guidance is guaranteed, and therefore the one voice saying otherwise is dispensable. Every charge the book has laid says that those three offices had already stopped working Jeremiah 2:8. That is why they could contemplate silencing the one man still doing their work.
The method chosen is let's strike him with the tongue, and the prayer that answers it is the harshest thing Jeremiah ever says: famine for their children, widowhood for their wives, and a request that God not forgive and not blot out their sin. It should not be softened, and it should not be taken as instruction. What the passage gives is the ground he stands on — Remember how I stood before you to speak good for them, to turn away your wrath from them — and that sentence is remarkable, because he had twice been forbidden to do exactly that Jeremiah 14:11. He had interceded anyway, for the men now digging the pit. The collapse of that intercession into this is recorded without comment. The book does not present his prayer as a model. It presents it as what happened to a man asked to love people who were trying to kill him. And it leaves the request in God's hands rather than in his.
held with reason What this mark means