Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Two Baskets of Figs
Jeremiah 24:1-10
1 Yahweh showed me, and behold, two baskets of figs were set before Yahweh’s temple, after Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the princes of Judah, with the craftsmen and smiths, from Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon. · WEB
The exiles already carried off are the good fruit and those still living in Jerusalem are the rotten, which reverses everything the survivors assumed about themselves.
The vision is dated after the first great deportation, when Jeconiah, the princes, the craftsmen and the smiths had been taken to Babylon. That detail sets up the whole reversal. Everyone left in Jerusalem could look at the empty houses and draw the obvious conclusion. Those who went were under judgment; those who remained were spared. The two baskets are set in front of the temple, one of first-ripe figs and one of fruit too rotten to eat, and the assignment is the opposite of the obvious one.
The exiles are the good figs, and the language used of them is deliberately warm: I will set my eyes on them for good. The six verbs of the call return, with the constructive pair kept and the destructive pair explicitly denied — build and not pull down, plant and not pluck up Jeremiah 1:10. Everything the nation had been told was coming is here promised in reverse to the people who had already lost everything.
The reason they are good is worth reading slowly, because it is not a reason found in them. They are regarded as good, and then they are given something: I will give them a heart to know me, that I am Yahweh. The knowing comes after the regarding, and the heart is issued rather than developed. This is the same remedy the new covenant will describe Jeremiah 31:33, stated here in its shortest form. Its order rules out the reading that the deportees were selected because they were the better sort. The whole-hearted return in the next clause is the result of the gift, not its price.
The bad basket holds Zedekiah, his princes, the remnant left in Jerusalem, and those who had gone down to Egypt — which covers every person who had avoided the deportation by staying or by fleeing. What they are given is dispersal with no promise attached: tossed among the kingdoms, a reproach and a proverb, pursued by sword, famine and pestilence. The arrangement makes a point the book keeps making about where safety is. The people in the temple's own city are the rotten fruit. The people in Babylon are being watched over for good. Location has stopped meaning anything at all.
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