Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
A Vine Turned Degenerate
Jeremiah 2:14-25
14 Is Israel a slave? Is he born into slavery? Why has he become a captive? · WEB
Judah's political disasters are traced back to its own choices, and the two great powers it keeps running to are described as two rivers it goes out of its way to drink from.
The section opens with a question about status. Is Israel a slave, born into slavery? The expected answer is no — this is a son and an heir — and the question therefore makes the plundering that follows unaccountable. Lions have roared over him, his cities are burned and empty, and the sons of two Egyptian cities have broken the crown of his head. The northern kingdom had already gone, and Judah had watched it go.
Verse 17 supplies the missing cause and does it as a question rather than a statement: has this not been brought on by the abandonment itself? The book will make this argument repeatedly, and it is worth being precise about its shape. The invasions are not arbitrary punishments dropped on a nation for a religious offense. They are what happens to a small country that has stopped trusting the only power that ever protected it, and has started shopping for others.
The shopping is then named. Going to Egypt to drink the waters of the Shihor, going to Assyria to drink the waters of the River. Two superpowers are reduced to two rivers, and the sarcasm is in the word for drinking. Judah has a spring of living water at home, which is exactly what the previous verses called Yahweh. And it is walking hundreds of miles in either direction for a mouthful of somebody else's Nile. The foreign policy of the last century of the kingdom is summarized in one sentence, and it is judged as a theological act rather than a diplomatic one.
Two images then say what the condition is. The first is horticultural: I had planted you a noble vine, a pure and faithful seed. How then have you turned into the degenerate branches of a foreign vine to me? A vine does not choose its stock, and cultivated stock reverting to wild is a slow, unnoticed process. That is the force of it. Nobody in Judah decided to become this. The second image is chemical and blunt. Lye and soap will not remove the stain, because the mark is not on the surface. Both say that the problem has gone below the level where effort reaches. That is the diagnosis the whole book works from, and the reason its remedy will eventually have to be a new heart rather than a new policy.
The last image is the coarsest, and the section is honest about how far the will has gone. A young camel running loose; a wild donkey in heat that no one needs to chase, because she will come to them. Appetite has replaced choice. And then the closing exchange, which is the most chilling thing in the chapter. She is told to spare her feet and her throat, to stop running until she is barefoot and parched. The answer comes back: It is in vain. No, for I have loved strangers, and I will go after them. This is not a people caught out and denying it. It is a people who have heard the case, conceded it, and refused the remedy anyway.
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