Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Broken Jar at the Potsherd Gate
Jeremiah 19:1-15
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; · WEB
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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