Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
We Will Certainly Perform Our Vows
Jeremiah 44:15-30
15 Then all the men who knew that their wives burned incense to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, even all the people who lived in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying, · WEB
The people answer Jeremiah to his face with an argument from experience, and it is the only sustained reply the book gives his opponents.
The refusal is stated first and without qualification: As for the word that you have spoken to us in Yahweh's name, we will not listen to you. Then comes their reasoning, and it deserves to be taken seriously because the book reports it in full. When they burned incense to the queen of the sky they had plenty of food, were well, and saw no evil. Since they stopped, they have lacked everything and been consumed by sword and famine. That is an argument from experience, and the chronology behind it is real. The reform under Josiah was followed by his death in battle, the loss of independence, three deportations and the destruction of the city.
What makes it hard to answer is that it is not stupid. It reads the same events Jeremiah reads and draws the opposite causal line. The difference between the two readings is not the data but the length of the view. And the women add a sentence that shows how the household worked: did we make her cakes and pour out drink offerings without our husbands? They refuse to be treated as the guilty party in a practice the whole family took part in, and the point is conceded by being recorded.
Jeremiah's reply does not dispute their history; it lengthens it. The incense burned in the cities of Judah by them, their fathers, their kings and their princes — didn't Yahweh remember them, and didn't it come into his mind? They date their prosperity from the years of idolatry and their disaster from the reform. He points out that the reform came after generations of the incense, and was too late to reverse what those generations had built. Their sample begins where the evidence is convenient.
Then the strangest sentence in the chapter, and it is not sarcasm: Establish then your vows, and perform your vows. They are handed over to what they insist on. The principle was stated earlier in the book, where a people who wanted other gods were told they would serve them day and night in a land not their own Jeremiah 16:13. The judgment is the granting of the request. What follows is the withdrawal of the name itself. God swears that his name will no longer be spoken by any man of Judah in Egypt. The community that kept using the divine name over the wrong worship loses the use of it.
And the whole dispute is put to a test that could be checked. A few will escape and return to Judah, and all the remnant... will know whose word will stand, mine or theirs. That is the question of the book reduced to one sentence. The sign given is the fall of the reigning Pharaoh into the hands of those seeking his life, exactly as Zedekiah fell. The people had gone to Egypt because Pharaoh looked like the safer bet, and the verifiable prediction offered them is about him.
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