Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Valley of Slaughter
Jeremiah 7:30-8:3
30 “For the children of Judah have done that which is evil in my sight,” says Yahweh. “They have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to defile it. · WEB
A valley used for burning children is renamed for what will be buried in it, and the bones of those who worshiped the sky are laid out in front of it.
The practice is named without any softening: high places built at Topheth in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire. This is not foreign atrocity reported from a distance. It is happening in a ravine on the edge of Jerusalem, conducted by the people who fill the temple courts in the same chapter. The law had forbidden it in the plainest terms available Leviticus 18:21 Deuteronomy 12:31.
The divine disclaimer attached to it is unusual and worth weighing: which I didn't command, nor did it come into my mind. Three denials of increasing depth — not commanded, not spoken of, never conceived. The last one matters because the practice was evidently defended as devotion, an offering of what was most valuable. The reply is that the idea has no point of contact with God at all; it did not originate with him even as a thought he rejected.
The judgment then takes the form of a renaming. The valley will no longer be called Topheth or the valley of the son of Hinnom but the valley of Slaughter, and the reason is grimly practical — they will bury there until there is no room left. A place where children were killed becomes the mass grave of the generation that killed them. That is not an arbitrary punishment. It is the same ground doing the same work, with different bodies in it. And the burial itself runs out, so that the dead lie unburied for the birds, which in that culture was the final indignity.
The last stroke is the most exact. The bones of kings, princes, priests, prophets and citizens are brought out of their graves and spread before the sun, the moon and all the host of heaven — and the text lists five verbs to describe the relationship: which they have loved, served, walked after, sought, and worshiped. The astral gods are given their worshipers, laid out in front of them in daylight, and they do nothing. Idolatry is not answered here with an argument. It is answered by an arrangement. The objects of worship and the remains of the worshipers are placed in the same field of view, and the emptiness of the one is left to be observed against the other.
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