Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
A Destroying Wind Against a Golden Cup
Jeremiah 51:1-26
1 Yahweh says: “Behold, I will raise up against Babylon, and against those who dwell in Lebkamai, a destroying wind. · WEB
Babylon is described as a beautiful cup that made the world drunk, and the hymn to the Creator that answers the idol-makers is repeated here word for word.
The image given to the empire is not a monster but a vessel: Babylon has been a golden cup in Yahweh's hand, who made all the earth drunk. The nations have drunk of her wine; therefore the nations have gone mad. Both halves matter. The cup is beautiful and it is held in someone else's hand — the world's most admired civilization, doing exactly what it was given to do, and leaving every nation that drank from it deranged.
What follows is an offer of treatment and a report of its failure, in the voice of the people who tried. Take balm for her pain. Perhaps she may be healed... We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed. Forsake her. That the possibility is even raised over this city is the striking thing, given what it had done. The verdict is not that she was ineligible but that the injury had gone past the point where anything applied from outside could reach it — the same conclusion the book reached about Judah Jeremiah 8:22, and reached the same way.
At the center of the oracle stands a passage the reader has met before. He made the earth by his power, established the world by his wisdom, stretched out the heavens by his understanding; the waters roar when he speaks; every goldsmith is disappointed by his image, for there is no breath in them; the portion of Jacob is not like these. Those verses appeared in full much earlier, in the warning against learning the way of the nations Jeremiah 10:12–16. They are repeated here without alteration, in the oracle against the empire whose gods they describe. The argument was always aimed at this address.
Two pictures close the section, and both concern what a nation is for. Babylon is called God's battle ax, the instrument with which he broke kingdoms — horse and rider, chariot and driver, old man and youth, shepherd and flock, farmer and yoke — and the tool is then held responsible for the evil it did in Zion. And the last figure is aimed at a civilization of builders: the destroying mountain is rolled down from the rocks and left a burned mountain, from which they won't take a cornerstone from you, nor a stone for foundations. An empire whose greatness was measured in brick and gate and wall ends as material nobody can build with.
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