Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
What Is the Straw to the Wheat
Jeremiah 23:25-40
25 “I have heard what the prophets have said, who prophesy lies in my name, saying, ‘I had a dream! I had a dream!’ · WEB
Dreams and the word of God are separated the way chaff is separated from grain, and a phrase people had turned into a joke is taken away from them.
The complaint is quoted with its repetition intact — I had a dream! I had a dream! — and the repetition is the tell, as the temple slogan's was. What the dreams are said to accomplish is not a mistake but an intention. They cause the people to forget God's name, exactly as their fathers forgot it because of Baal. A steady supply of religious experience is doing the work idolatry used to do, and doing it under the right name.
The separation offered is not a ban on dreams. The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream; and he who has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. Both may be spoken; what may not happen is the confusion of the two. Then the question that settles it: what is the straw to the wheat? Straw and wheat come off the same field in the same harvest and are not distinguished by origin. They are distinguished by whether anyone can live on them.
What the genuine word does is then described in two images that agree on one thing. It is like fire, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces. Both destroy before they do anything else, and neither is comfortable to be near. Set against a message that strengthens the hands of evildoers, the contrast is exact. A word from God is recognizable partly because it breaks something. Three declarations of hostility follow, and they catalog how the counterfeit is produced. Men steal words from one another. Men use their own tongues and attach He says to the result. Men tell lying dreams.
The last section turns on a single word. The people, the priests and the prophets keep asking about the burden of Yahweh — a term meaning an oracle, which also means a load, and the English translations divide over which sense to bring across. The phrase had evidently become a piece of mockery in the streets, since the answer given plays on it: what burden? I will cast you off. They are then forbidden the expression altogether, and the reason is stated flatly: every man's own word has become his message. When everyone's opinion is announced as revelation, the vocabulary of revelation has stopped meaning anything, and it is confiscated. The penalty attached is an everlasting reproach that will not be forgotten. It falls on the misuse of the words rather than on the doctrine, which says something about how seriously the book takes speech about God.
settled What this mark means