Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Righteous Branch
Jeremiah 23:1-8
1 “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” says Yahweh. · WEB
After four failed kings a shepherd is promised who is raised rather than crowned, and the name he is given belongs to God.
The woe is pronounced on shepherds who destroy and scatter. The charge against them is a failure to visit: they have not looked after the flock. Then the sentence turns on that word — Behold, I will visit on you the evil of your doings. The visiting the shepherds neglected is the visiting they receive. What follows is a promise God takes into his own hands. He gathers the remnant himself, from every country he had driven them to, before he sets any shepherds over them at all.
The promise then narrows to one figure, and every verb about him is God's. I will raise to David a righteous Branch — a shoot from a stock, which is how a tree survives being cut down, and the appropriate image for a dynasty just declared finished. He is not crowned by a court or produced by a succession. He is grown, and the growing is done by someone else.
What he does is described in the exact terms the kings of chapter 22 failed: he reigns as king, deals wisely, and executes justice and righteousness in the land. Nothing exotic is claimed for him. The qualifications for the ideal king are the same ones Josiah met and Jehoiakim did not. The difference is that this one will not fail at them, which is why the passage can promise in the same sentence that Judah will be saved and Israel dwell safely.
The name is the extraordinary part: This is his name by which he will be called: Yahweh our righteousness. The reigning king at the time was Zedekiah, whose own name is built from the same two elements — the divine name and righteousness — and means that Yahweh is his righteousness. The book gives that king a full record of what he actually did. The coming one carries the elements as a title rather than as a hope. The righteousness in it is not his people's, and not his own achievement. It is Yahweh's, held out as belonging to us. A king is being given a name that makes a claim about where righteousness comes from, and the same name is later given to the city as well Jeremiah 33:16. The people are called by what their king is.
And the section ends by measuring the whole thing against the exodus, as chapter 16 did. The oath by which people swear will change: no longer by the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, but by the God who brought them out of the north country. The founding act of the nation is going to be displaced in its own liturgy by what is coming.
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