Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Rachel Weeping for Her Children
Jeremiah 31:1-22
1 “At that time,” says Yahweh, “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they will be my people.” · WEB
The restoration is promised first to the tribes lost a century earlier, and the mother weeping over the deportation road is told her work will be paid.
The chapter opens with a memory of the wilderness as the place where a people who survived the sword found favor, which is where the book began its case Jeremiah 2:2. And then the sentence the whole section rests on: I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore I have drawn you with loving kindness. The love is stated as the cause of the drawing rather than as its result, which settles the order of everything that follows — nothing in these chapters is offered as a reward.
What is remarkable is who it is offered to. Tambourines and dances for the virgin of Israel, vineyards planted again on the mountains of Samaria , and watchmen on the hills of Ephraim calling Arise! Let's go up to Zion. Samaria and Ephraim are the northern kingdom, deported a century before Jeremiah was born and long written off. The restoration begins with the case everyone had closed, and it heals the schism as it goes — northern watchmen calling people south to a temple their kingdom had rejected from the day it was founded.
The travelers are then listed, and the list is the argument. God brings them from the north country along with the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her who travails with child together. Those are precisely the people who cannot make a long march, and they are named rather than quietly left behind. A straight way, rivers of water, no stumbling — the road is described in terms of what these particular travelers need. And the reason given is a relationship: I am a father to Israel. Ephraim is my firstborn.
Then the sound of weeping in Ramah, which is not a poetic location. Ramah is where the captives were assembled in chains before the march to Babylon Jeremiah 40:1, a holding yard on the road out, and Rachel — the mother of the northern tribes, buried in that country — is heard refusing to be comforted because her children are gone. The answer she is given does not tell her the grief is misplaced. It tells her the grief is an investment: your work will be rewarded... They will come again from the land of the enemy. There is hope for your latter end.
The repentance that follows is quoted from Ephraim's own mouth, and its central request is one of the most important sentences in the book: Turn me, and I will be turned, for you are Yahweh my God. A people whose habit of evil had been compared to skin color and to a leopard's spots Jeremiah 13:23 asks to be turned rather than promising to turn, and the reply is not a rebuke but a father's — my heart yearns for him. I will surely have mercy on him. Practical instructions come immediately after: set up road signs and guideposts, mark the highway, because the way home is the way they went out. The chapter's last line is famously obscure, a new thing created on the earth in which a woman encompasses a man, and the English translations divide widely over what it means. It stands where the return is being promised, and the text says no more than that.
held with reason What this mark means