Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Sour Grapes and the Sowing
Jeremiah 31:23-30
23 Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says: “Yet again they will use this speech in the land of Judah and in its cities, when I reverse their captivity: ‘Yahweh bless you, habitation of righteousness, mountain of holiness.’ · WEB
A proverb that let a generation blame its fathers is retired, and the six verbs of the call come back with the destructive four spent.
Between two oracles the prophet says something about himself that appears nowhere else: On this I awakened, and saw; and my sleep was sweet to me. A man whose recorded nights are full of tears and whose recorded prayers include a curse on his own birth reports one good sleep, and reports it because of what he had been shown. It is the only line of its kind in the book and it belongs to the consolation rather than to the judgment.
The promise it wakes from is agricultural and it reverses the vocabulary of the call. God will sow the two houses with the seed of man and of animal; and as he watched over them to pluck up, break down, overthrow, destroy and afflict, so he will watch over them to build and to plant Jeremiah 1:10. The watching is the almond's word from the first chapter, the alertness of a God who does not forget what he has said Jeremiah 1:12. The same vigilance that made the destruction certain is now attached to the rebuilding, and that is the whole guarantee.
Then the proverb. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge — a neat piece of folk wisdom that let a generation explain its situation as inherited and therefore unearned. It is retired outright: everyone will die for his own iniquity, and the man who eats the sour grapes is the one whose teeth are set on edge.
That has to be read against the earlier verse which traced the sentence on Judah back to a king two generations dead Jeremiah 15:4, and the two are not in conflict once the difference is seen. A course set by earlier kings really did shape what later generations inherited; what the proverb was doing was converting that into an excuse, as though the descendants were merely paying a bill. The book's answer is that they were told for forty years to leave the road and did not, and were judged for that. Consequences are inherited. Guilt is not.
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