Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
A Wonderful and Horrible Thing
Jeremiah 5:20-31
20 “Declare this in the house of Jacob, and publish it in Judah, saying, · WEB
The sea keeps a boundary it could easily cross, and the contrast with a people who will not is what makes the chapter's closing verdict so severe.
The argument here is built from the natural world, and it is built carefully. Sand is set as the boundary of the sea by a perpetual decree. The waves toss and roar and cannot pass it. Nothing is weaker than a shoreline and nothing is stronger than an ocean, and the weaker thing holds because a word was spoken over it. The audience is described in the same passage as having eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear. They stand on the beach of a demonstration they are unable to read.
The second piece of evidence is the rainfall. God gives the former and the latter rain in its season and keeps the appointed weeks of the harvest — a claim about ordinary agricultural reliability rather than about miracles. What indicts the people is not that they deny this but that they do not say it in their heart. The failure is located in the absence of a thought, which is a serious way to define ingratitude: not the denial of a gift but the never quite noticing of one.
Then the consequence, stated as an economic fact: Your iniquities have turned away these things, and your sins have withheld good from you. The verse is not saying that God withholds rain to punish sin, though the book says that elsewhere. It is saying that the good was already given and something in the nation intercepted it, and the following verses identify who. Men lie in wait like fowlers and set traps that catch people. Their houses are as full of deceit as a cage is of birds. The image of the trap does real work, because a trap is not a robbery. It is an arrangement that lets the trapper stay respectable while the mechanism does the taking.
The profile of these men is then given in three strokes, and it is a portrait of successful people. They have become great and grown rich; they have grown fat and they shine. And the charge against them is not what they took but what they declined to do: they do not plead the cause of the fatherless or defend the rights of the needy. Under the law those two groups had no advocate but the court itself Deuteronomy 24:17, so a legal system that simply did not hear their cases destroyed them without a single illegal act.
The chapter ends with a description of the whole system in three clauses, and the third is the one that stings. The prophets prophesy falsely; the priests rule by their own authority; and my people love to have it so. Corrupt institutions are being described as a market with willing customers. That reframes everything the chapter has said. The false prophets were not imposed on Judah. They were the product Judah preferred. And the question left hanging at the end is not answered anywhere in the chapter: what will you do in the end of it?
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