Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Babylon Taken, and a People Going Home Weeping
Jeremiah 50:1-20
1 The word that Yahweh spoke concerning Babylon, concerning the land of the Chaldeans, by Jeremiah the prophet. · WEB
The empire that was God's servant is sentenced, and the exiles come home weeping and looking for a covenant, with their guilt sought for and not found.
The announcement is to be made as loudly as possible — declare among the nations, publish, do not conceal — and its content is the fall of the gods before the fall of the city: Babylon has been taken, Bel is disappointed, Merodach is dismayed. The empire's chief deities are named and reported humiliated. That is how the ancient world read a defeat, and the oracle turns the convention against the power that had used it on Judah.
What happens to the exiles is described in an unexpected register. They do not march home in triumph. They go on their way weeping, and will seek Yahweh their God, asking the road to Zion with their faces turned toward it. What they say when they arrive is a proposal rather than a celebration: Come, and join yourselves to Yahweh in an everlasting covenant that will not be forgotten. The last clause is aimed at the whole history behind them. The first covenant was not forgotten by God. It was forgotten by them.
The hardest verse in the section is the one that quotes Babylon's defense. Their adversaries said, We are not guilty, because they have sinned against Yahweh. It is a real argument, and the book has spent forty-nine chapters supplying its premise. The answer is not that the premise is false. It is that being an instrument is not innocence — the same point made when Nebuchadnezzar was first called a servant and sentenced in the same paragraph Jeremiah 25:9–12. The precedent is then named. God will punish the king of Babylon as he punished the king of Assyria. An empire that watched its predecessor fall for the same behavior cannot claim it did not know.
The section ends on the strongest statement of forgiveness the book has made since the new covenant. In those days, and in that time... the iniquity of Israel will be sought for, and there will be none, also the sins of Judah, and they won't be found; for I will pardon them whom I leave as a remnant. The picture is of a search conducted and coming back empty. A book that has documented the sins of this people in exhaustive detail ends its account of them with a file that cannot be found.
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