Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Waste and Void
Jeremiah 4:19-31
19 My anguish, my anguish! I am pained at my very heart! My heart trembles within me. I can’t hold my peace, because you have heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. · WEB
Jeremiah sees the coming judgment as creation running backward, and the one limit set on it is that it will not be a full end.
The prophet's own body reacts before his message resumes. My anguish, my anguish! I am pained at my very heart! — and the pain is caused by a sound, the trumpet he himself has just been ordered to have blown. This is worth noting early, because the book is often read as the record of a man denouncing his nation. He is announcing the destruction of everything he has, and the announcement is what hurts.
Then comes a vision in four movements, each opening with the same two words, and the sequence is unmistakable. He looks at the earth and it is waste and void. He looks at the heavens and there is no light. He looks at the mountains and they are shaking. He looks at the world of the living and there is no man and not a bird left. The pair of Hebrew words behind waste and void is the pair used of the earth in the second verse of Genesis, though the English translations render them differently in the two places. What follows is that same account undone in reverse order: light withdrawn, the fixed land unfixed, the birds of the fifth day gone, the man of the sixth day gone. Judgment is described as decreation. It says something the invasion reports cannot — that the loss of a covenant people is a loss on the scale of the world's beginning.
One clause holds the vision back from the edge. The whole land will be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end. It is repeated twice more within two chapters Jeremiah 5:10 Jeremiah 5:18, and it is the load-bearing qualification of the entire book. The catastrophe is total in the sense that nothing familiar survives it. It is not total in the sense that God has finished with the people. Everything later promised about a remnant, a return and a new covenant stands on this clause.
And it is stated in the same breath as the most fixed language of intent in the chapter: I have spoken it, I have planned it, I have not repented, neither will I turn back. That sits beside the potter's principle, where a sentence is withdrawn if the nation turns Jeremiah 18:8, and the two are not in conflict. Judgment is revocable while there is time to turn. It stops being revocable when the turning has been refused long enough. What has hardened here is not God's willingness but the situation.
The chapter ends with two women. The first is dressing for the wrong occasion — scarlet, gold, painted eyes — as an army closes in. The verdict on her effort is one of the saddest lines in the prophets: her lovers despise her and seek her life. Judah's diplomacy is described as a woman making herself attractive to men who intend to kill her. The second woman is in labor with a first child, gasping, with her hands spread out. The chapter that began with an invitation to return ends on a cry that no one answers, and the imagery it uses for the end is at least the imagery of a birth rather than a death.
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