Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
They Speak a Vision of Their Own Heart
Jeremiah 23:9-24
9 Concerning the prophets: My heart within me is broken. All my bones shake. I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine has overcome, because of Yahweh, and because of his holy words. · WEB
The prophets are tested not by their sincerity but by their effect, and the test is whether anyone turned from evil after hearing them.
Jeremiah's own state is given first, and it is physical: his heart broken, his bones shaking, like a man overcome with wine. He is not describing indignation at colleagues. The cause he names is because of Yahweh, and because of his holy words. What he has been shown has produced something closer to shock than to anger. The chapter that follows is the most sustained attack in the book on his own profession.
The comparison he draws is the one that stings. The prophets of the northern kingdom prophesied by Baal, and that is called folly. What is happening in Jerusalem is called a horrible thing, and it is worse, because these men use the right name. A false god at least announces itself. A false word in the true name cannot be detected by its label, and it is found, the text says, in God's own house.
What they say is quoted, and it is aimed with precision at people who need to hear something else: to those who despise God, You will have peace; to everyone walking in the stubbornness of his own heart, No evil will come on you. Two audiences, both told the one thing that would let them continue. And the operational charge is the one worth carrying away, because it does not require access to anyone's motives — they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one returns from his wickedness. A message is being judged by what it made possible.
The test is then made explicit, and it is a test of results rather than of credentials. Who has stood in the council of Yahweh? If they had stood in my council, then they would have caused my people to hear my words, and would have turned them from their evil way. Nobody can verify another man's private experience, and this verse does not ask anyone to try. It says that a real word does a specific work. It turns people. Where the turning is absent, the standing in the council was absent too. That is a usable test, and it is the one the book applies to itself.
The chapter closes the escape route these men were relying on. Am I a God at hand, and not a God afar off? Can anyone hide himself in secret places so that I can't see him? Don't I fill heaven and earth? Local gods have jurisdictions and blind spots. A prophet inventing messages behaves as though this one does too. The answer is not a threat but a description of scale, and it removes the possibility that anything said in Yahweh's name was said out of earshot.
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