Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Damascus, Kedar and Elam
Jeremiah 49:23-39
23 Of Damascus: “Hamath and Arpad are confounded, for they have heard evil news. They have melted away. There is sorrow on the sea. It can’t be quiet. · WEB
Three short oracles reach an old rival, a people with no walls at all, and a nation at the far edge of the map, and God calls one of the doomed cities his joy.
Damascus is described by its neighbors' reaction before anything happens to it. Hamath and Arpad hear bad news and melt. There is sorrow on the sea, and it cannot be quieted. Then comes a lament in a voice that is startling to find here: How is the city of praise not forsaken, the city of my joy? The city being sentenced is called God's own joy in the same breath. He is not indifferent to what he is taking down. The book has already said that about Moab, and it now says it about the capital of an old enemy of Israel.
The oracle against Kedar is the strangest of the three, because there is nothing there to conquer. These are tent-dwellers with camels and flocks. The description is exact: a nation that is at ease, that dwells without care... that has neither gates nor bars, that dwells alone. An empire's army is directed against people with no walls. The plunder listed is curtains, tent-cloth, household vessels and livestock. These verses say something the great-power oracles cannot. Distance and obscurity are not protection either, and the cry heard among the tents is the one heard in Jerusalem — terror on every side.
Elam lies at the far eastern edge of the known world, beyond Babylon. Its oracle is dated to the beginning of Zedekiah's reign. It concerns a country most of Jeremiah's hearers would never see. What is broken there is the bow of Elam, the chief of their might — the weapon its soldiers were known for. The scattering is total, to the four winds, until there will be no nation where the outcasts of Elam will not come.
And then a sentence that gives the section its shape: I will set my throne in Elam, and will destroy from there king and princes. God's throne is placed in a foreign country. Judgment issues from inside it rather than being sent out from Jerusalem, and that is the claim which makes an oracle against Elam possible at all. What follows is a reversal, as it was for Ammon and Moab before: it will happen in the latter days that I will reverse the captivity of Elam. Three of the nations sentenced in these two chapters are given a future. The section is not a settling of Israel's accounts. It is a survey of one government over everybody.
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