Biblion Bible Commentary
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Yahweh, You Have Persuaded Me
Jeremiah 20:7-18
7 Yahweh, you have persuaded me, and I was persuaded. You are stronger than I, and have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day. Everyone mocks me. · WEB
The last and most violent of Jeremiah's laments swings from accusation to praise and then to a curse on his own birth, and the book leaves the three side by side without resolving them.
The opening word is the difficulty. Yahweh, you have persuaded me, and I was persuaded — and the Hebrew verb has a range that runs from persuading to enticing to deceiving, which is why the English translations divide over it and why some render it far more sharply. Nothing here settles the question, and the sentence that follows makes the register plain enough: you are stronger than I, and have prevailed. He is describing a contest he lost, entered into by someone with more power, and the result of losing it is that he is laughed at all day.
What he cannot do is stop. He states the alternative he has tested: say nothing, never mention the name again. Then he reports what happened when he tried. There was a burning fire shut up in his bones, and I am weary with holding it in. I can't. This is the most useful sentence in the book for understanding the man. He is not sustained by conviction or by success, both of which he lacks. He continues because silence turned out to be more painful than the mockery. That is a considerably less inspiring reason, and a considerably more durable one.
Then his own phrase is thrown back at him. Terror on every side! — the name he had given Pashhur one paragraph earlier — is now the taunt in the mouths of his familiar friends, who are watching for his fall and waiting for him to be persuaded so they can take revenge. The word for persuaded is the same one he used of God in verse 7. He has been worked on from both sides, and he says so using one verb for both.
And then, without transition, three verses of confidence: Yahweh is with him as an awesome mighty one, the persecutors will stumble, and the section ends in a command to sing and praise, for he has delivered the soul of the needy from the hand of evildoers. Nothing in his circumstances has changed between one verse and the next. He has been beaten, publicly humiliated, and is being hunted by his own friends, and the deliverance is spoken of in the past tense.
What follows the praise is the reason this passage is unlike anything else in the prophets. He curses the day he was born, curses the man who carried the news to his father, and wishes his mother's womb had been his grave. The order is not an accident of editing to be tidied up by putting the lament before the praise. The book puts the darkest lines last and offers no comment on them. The honest reading is that both are true of him at once. A man can mean the praise on Tuesday and the curse on Wednesday without either being a lie. The final question — why did I come out of the womb to see labor and sorrow — is never answered anywhere in the book. The one thing that is certain is that Jeremiah kept going for another thirty years after asking it.
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