Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace
1 “Flee for safety, you children of Benjamin, out of the middle of Jerusalem! Blow the trumpet in Tekoa and raise up a signal on Beth Haccherem, for evil looks out from the north with a great destruction. 2 I will cut off the beautiful and delicate one, the daughter of Zion. 3 Shepherds with their flocks will come to her. They will pitch their tents against her all around. They will feed everyone in his place.” 4 “Prepare war against her! Arise! Let’s go up at noon. Woe to us! For the day declines, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out. 5 Arise! Let’s go up by night, and let’s destroy her palaces.” 6 For Yahweh of Armies said, “Cut down trees, and cast up a mound against Jerusalem. This is the city to be visited. She is filled with oppression within herself. 7 As a well produces its waters, so she produces her wickedness. Violence and destruction is heard in her. Sickness and wounds are continually before me. 8 Be instructed, Jerusalem, lest my soul be alienated from you, lest I make you a desolation, an uninhabited land.” 9 Yahweh of Armies says, “They will thoroughly glean the remnant of Israel like a vine. Turn again your hand as a grape gatherer into the baskets.” 10 To whom should I speak and testify, that they may hear? Behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they can’t listen. Behold, Yahweh’s word has become a reproach to them. They have no delight in it. 11 Therefore I am full of Yahweh’s wrath. I am weary with holding it in. “Pour it out on the children in the street, and on the assembly of young men together; for even the husband with the wife will be taken, the aged with him who is full of days. 12 Their houses will be turned to others, their fields and their wives together; for I will stretch out my hand on the inhabitants of the land, says Yahweh.” 13 “For from their least even to their greatest, everyone is given to covetousness. From the prophet even to the priest, everyone deals falsely. 14 They have healed also the hurt of my people superficially, saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace. 15 Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush. Therefore they will fall among those who fall. When I visit them, they will be cast down,” says Yahweh.
A siege is staged in the chapter's own dialogue, and the men who should have warned the city are the ones telling it that the wound is not serious.
The chapter opens with an evacuation of the capital in the direction of Jeremiah's own tribe — flee, children of Benjamin, out of the middle of Jerusalem — with signal fires ordered on the hills south of the city. Warnings in this book are practical. They name roads, tribes and towns, because the disaster being announced is a military one with a timetable.
Then the text does something unusual: it lets the invaders speak. Prepare war against her! Arise! Let's go up at noon — and then the complaint that the day is going and the shadows are stretching, and the decision to attack by night instead. An enemy army is overheard discussing its schedule and is impatient. Nothing conveys inevitability quite like being allowed to listen to the other side making arrangements, and the passage spends four verses on it.
The reason the siege is permitted is given in an image that answers the chapter before it. Jerusalem produces her wickedness as a well produces its waters: steadily, from a source, without effort. Earlier, God was the spring of living waters and the people had dug leaking cisterns instead Jeremiah 2:13. Now the city has a spring of its own after all, and what rises from it is violence. Sin is described as productive rather than occasional, which is why the remedy will have to reach the source.
Jeremiah's own difficulty is stated in the middle of this, and it is the difficulty of a man who cannot get anyone to listen. To whom should he speak, when the ear is uncircumcised and the word of Yahweh has become a reproach they take no pleasure in? The same organ has now been indicted twice — the heart that needs cutting, the ear that has never been opened — and both figures say that the obstacle is not the message's clarity.
The verdict on the leadership is the most quoted sentence in the book, and it is a medical charge rather than a moral one. They have healed the hurt of the people superficially — treated a deep wound at the surface — saying, Peace, peace! when there is no peace. A dressing over an untreated wound is worse than no dressing, because it ends the search for a cure. And the closing question describes something further gone than dishonesty. Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? They were not ashamed, and could not blush. The capacity itself is described as lost, and a conscience that cannot register an offense is beyond the reach of any further warning.
settled What this mark means