Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Moab at Ease From His Youth
Jeremiah 48:1-25
1 Of Moab. Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says: “Woe to Nebo! For it is laid waste. Kiriathaim is disappointed. It is taken. Misgab is put to shame and broken down. · WEB
Moab's problem is diagnosed as a history without disturbance, in an image drawn from wine left to stand too long on its own sediment.
The oracle opens as a gazetteer of ruin, naming town after town: Nebo, Kiriathaim, Heshbon, Horonaim, Dibon , Aroer. The effect of the list is the point. Moab was a small country of many towns, and the roll call leaves nowhere out: the destroyer will come on every city, and no city will escape. Among the fugitives goes the national god. The picture is deliberate: Chemosh will go out into captivity, his priests and his princes together. A deity is deported with his own clergy, as freight.
The charge underneath it is stated plainly: because you have trusted in your works and in your treasures. It is the charge laid against Judah, with the objects changed. Moab had no temple slogan. It had a good economy and solid workmanship, and it rested on them exactly as Jerusalem rested on its building.
Then the image that makes this oracle worth its length. Moab has been at ease from his youth; he has settled on his dregs and has not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither has he gone into captivity; therefore his taste remains in him, and his scent is not changed. Wine left standing on its sediment keeps its character. In a winemaking country everyone knew that racking — pouring the wine off its lees into a fresh jar — is what improves it. Moab had never been poured. No deportation, no upheaval, nothing to unsettle it in four hundred years. The result is a nation that tastes exactly as it always did. Undisturbed history is named as the reason for an unchanged character, which is a serious thing to say about prosperity.
And the sentence follows the image. God will send men who pour off, and they will empty the vessels and break the jars. The comparison drawn afterward is one Israel could not object to. Moab will be ashamed of Chemosh as the house of Israel was ashamed of Bethel, their confidence. Both nations trusted something that could not stand, and the oracle puts the shrine of the northern kingdom in the same sentence as a pagan god without softening it.
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