The Bride Who Forgot
1 Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, 2 “Go and proclaim in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Yahweh says, “I remember for you the kindness of your youth, your love as a bride, how you went after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. 3 Israel was holiness to Yahweh, the first fruits of his increase. All who devour him will be held guilty. Evil will come on them,”’ says Yahweh.” 4 Hear Yahweh’s word, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel! 5 Yahweh says, “What unrighteousness have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from me, and have walked after worthless vanity, and have become worthless? 6 They didn’t say, ‘Where is Yahweh who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a land that no one passed through, and where no man lived?’ 7 I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruit and its goodness; but when you entered, you defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination. 8 The priests didn’t say, ‘Where is Yahweh?’ and those who handle the law didn’t know me. The rulers also transgressed against me, and the prophets prophesied by Baal and followed things that do not profit. 9 “Therefore I will yet contend with you,” says Yahweh, “and I will contend with your children’s children. 10 For pass over to the islands of Kittim, and see. Send to Kedar, and consider diligently, and see if there has been such a thing. 11 Has a nation changed its gods, which really are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which doesn’t profit. 12 “Be astonished, you heavens, at this and be horribly afraid. Be very desolate,” says Yahweh. 13 “For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut out cisterns for themselves: broken cisterns that can’t hold water.
The indictment opens not with an accusation but with a memory of affection, and the charge it builds is that Judah left a God who had given them no reason to.
The first words of the case for the prosecution are tender, and that is deliberate. Yahweh remembers the kindness of your youth, your love as a bride, how you went after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. The wilderness is recalled as a honeymoon, which is a startling reading of a period the earlier books describe as forty years of complaint. What is remembered is not that Israel behaved well. It is that Israel followed, into country where nothing grew and no living was possible except from God's hand.
From that memory the question falls: What unrighteousness have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from me? The charge is not that Judah rebelled against a hard master. It is that no grievance exists. And the verse that follows names the failure exactly: they did not ask where Yahweh was. The wilderness itinerary is rehearsed in one long clause of deserts, pits, drought and darkness. Its point is that every mile of it was survived by rescue nobody thought to remember afterward.
Then the indictment moves through the professions, and it is comprehensive. The priests did not ask where Yahweh was; those who handled the law did not know him; the rulers transgressed; the prophets prophesied by Baal. Four groups, and between them they hold every channel by which the knowledge of God was supposed to reach the nation. This is not a corrupt people with sound institutions. It is not sound people with corrupt leaders. The apparatus itself had stopped working, and the book will keep returning to that.
The argument then does something no other prophet quite does: it appeals to the nations as witnesses for the prosecution. Send to the western islands, send to the Arabian tribes, and see whether such a thing has ever happened. Has a nation changed its gods, which really are no gods? Pagan loyalty is held up as the standard Judah has failed. Nations that worship nothing real keep faith with it. Judah, which had something real, did not. The comparison is meant to sting, and the point survives translation into any age. Religious constancy is not the rare thing. Constancy to the true God is.
The charge is summed up in one image with two halves, and the halves are not equal. They have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut out cisterns for themselves: broken cisterns that can't hold water. A spring produces water without being maintained. A cistern only ever holds what was poured into it, and this one leaks. In a country where the difference between a spring and a cistern was the difference between security and anxiety, the picture is not decorative. It is the whole book's account of idolatry. The offense is not the choice of a different god. It is immense labor spent quarrying something that cannot do what the abandoned thing did for free.
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