The Broken Jar at the Potsherd Gate
1 Thus said Yahweh, “Go, and buy a potter’s earthen container, and take some of the elders of the people and of the elders of the priests; 2 and go out to the valley of the son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the gate Harsith, and proclaim there the words that I will tell you. 3 Say, ‘Hear Yahweh’s word, kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem: Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel says, “Behold, I will bring evil on this place, which whoever hears, his ears will tingle. 4 Because they have forsaken me, and have defiled this place, and have burned incense in it to other gods that they didn’t know—they, their fathers, and the kings of Judah—and have filled this place with the blood of innocents, 5 and have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I didn’t command, nor speak, which didn’t even enter into my mind. 6 Therefore, behold, the days come,” says Yahweh, “that this place will no more be called ‘Topheth’, nor ‘The Valley of the son of Hinnom’, but ‘The valley of Slaughter’. 7 “‘“I will make the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem void in this place. I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies, and by the hand of those who seek their life. I will give their dead bodies to be food for the birds of the sky and for the animals of the earth. 8 I will make this city an astonishment and a hissing. Everyone who passes by it will be astonished and hiss because of all its plagues. 9 I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters. They will each eat the flesh of his friend in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies, and those who seek their life, will distress them.”’ 10 “Then you shall break the container in the sight of the men who go with you, 11 and shall tell them, ‘Yahweh of Armies says: “Even so I will break this people and this city as one breaks a potter’s vessel, that can’t be made whole again. They will bury in Topheth until there is no place to bury. 12 This is what I will do to this place,” says Yahweh, “and to its inhabitants, even making this city as Topheth. 13 The houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah, which are defiled, will be as the place of Topheth, even all the houses on whose roofs they have burned incense to all the army of the sky and have poured out drink offerings to other gods.”’” 14 Then Jeremiah came from Topheth, where Yahweh had sent him to prophesy, and he stood in the court of Yahweh’s house, and said to all the people: 15 “Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel says, ‘Behold, I will bring on this city and on all its towns all the evil that I have pronounced against it, because they have made their neck stiff, that they may not hear my words.’”
The clay returns, but fired this time, and the difference between a pot on the wheel and a pot out of the kiln is the whole distance the nation has traveled.
The two potter chapters have to be read together, because the material is the same and its condition is not. In the workshop the clay was wet, on the wheel, and a marred vessel could be made again. Here Jeremiah is told to buy a finished earthen container and take it out to be smashed, and the verdict spoken over the pieces is exact: I will break this people and this city as one breaks a potter's vessel, that can't be made whole again. Nothing has changed about the potter. What has changed is that the clay has been through the fire and set. A fired pot has no second shape available to it. The offer of chapter 18 was refused in chapter 18, and this is what refusing it cost.
The staging is deliberate at every point. Elders of the people and elders of the priests are taken along, which makes the act legally witnessed rather than merely dramatic. The site is the valley of Hinnom, where the children had been burned. And the gate named at its entrance is the one associated with potsherds, the place broken pottery was thrown. The jar is smashed at the municipal tip for shattered vessels, which is where the city itself is being told it belongs.
The charges rehearsed there are the ones already laid, with the same threefold denial attached to the child sacrifice: which I did not command, nor speak, which didn't even enter into my mind. What is added is a description of the siege, and it is unbearable. Parents eat their own children. Neighbors eat each other. That is not rhetoric. The record of the fall states plainly that it happened Lamentations 4:10, and the law had named this precise horror centuries earlier as the end of a road Deuteronomy 28:53. Jeremiah is announcing a fulfillment that was published before the nation entered the land.
The last stroke widens the ruin from a valley to a city. The houses of Jerusalem and of the kings will be as the place of Topheth. The rooftops where incense had been burned to the host of heaven become the same defiled ground as the burning place in the ravine. Then Jeremiah walks back up from the valley and repeats the whole thing in the temple court, in public, to everyone. He had been told to speak it to elders in a ravine, and he takes it to the courtyard. The arrest in the next verses follows directly from that decision, and nothing in the text suggests he did not know it would.
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