Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
The Time of Jacob's Trouble
Jeremiah 30:1-11
1 The word that came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying, · WEB
The book of consolation opens with an order to write it down, and its first promise concerns a distress with no equal that Jacob comes out of alive.
The section begins with an instruction that appears almost nowhere else in the book: Write all the words that I have spoken to you in a book. Most of Jeremiah's material is spoken and only later dictated to a scribe. This is commanded into writing at the moment it is given. The reason follows immediately. What is promised is a return that the people who most needed it would not live to see, and a promise for a later generation has to be written down or it dies with the hearers.
The distress itself is described by a picture that is deliberately wrong. Every man is seen with his hands on his waist like a woman in labor, and the text asks whether a man travails with child. The impossibility is the point: what is coming produces in men a condition that does not belong to them. And then it is named — the time of Jacob's trouble — with two clauses that have to be held together, that no day is like it, and that he will be saved out of it. Not spared it. Brought through it.
The formula of a trouble with no equal recurs in a later prophet, again attached to the deliverance of a people written in a book Daniel 12:1. The two passages say the same kind of thing about a distress at the end of a long road. What this book grounds it in is concrete: a broken yoke, burst bonds, no more foreign masters. Whatever wider reach the words have, they are first spoken to people about to spend seventy years under one.
What replaces the foreign master is stated in one line that pairs two rulers: they will serve Yahweh their God, and David their king, whom I will raise up to them. David was four centuries dead. The verb is the one used of the Branch Jeremiah 23:5, and the promise is not that a dynasty resumes but that a king is raised, which is what the closing chapters of the previous section had said the dynasty could no longer supply.
The last verse holds the whole book's balance in a single sentence. God will make a full end of the nations among whom they were scattered, and will not make a full end of you; but I will correct you in measure, and will in no way leave you unpunished. Three things are said at once. The exile is real punishment. The punishment is measured rather than unlimited. And the difference between Israel and the nations is not that Israel is spared, but that Israel is not finished. That is also the exact answer to a prayer offered twenty chapters earlier, which asked to be corrected gently, lest there be nothing left Jeremiah 10:24.
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