Is There No Balm in Gilead
18 Oh that I could comfort myself against sorrow! My heart is faint within me. 19 Behold, the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people from a land that is very far off: “Isn’t Yahweh in Zion? Isn’t her King in her?” “Why have they provoked me to anger with their engraved images, and with foreign idols?” 20 “The harvest is past. The summer has ended, and we are not saved.” 21 For the hurt of the daughter of my people, I am hurt. I mourn. Dismay has taken hold of me. 22 Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then isn’t the health of the daughter of my people recovered? Jeremiah 9 1 Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a spring of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! 2 Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might leave my people and go from them! For they are all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men. 3 “They bend their tongue, as their bow, for falsehood. They have grown strong in the land, but not for truth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they don’t know me,” says Yahweh.
The prophet's grief becomes the text, and his three questions about a famous medicine are rhetorical in a direction that makes them worse.
The voice here is Jeremiah's own, and the passage does not separate it cleanly from God's. That is part of its force. The mourning of the messenger and the mourning of the sender run together in the same lines: For the hurt of the daughter of my people, I am hurt. I mourn. Dismay has taken hold of me. A man who has spent eight chapters announcing the disaster is destroyed by it, and the book records that without treating it as a failure of nerve.
Between the two laments a conversation is staged in fragments. The people cry from a far-off land, asking whether Yahweh is not in Zion and whether her King is not in her — which is the temple slogan again, in the form of a question, asked now by people already deported. The answer given is not a yes or a no but a counter-question about engraved images, and the technique matters. Their question assumed the presence of God was a fact about a location. The reply treats it as a fact about a relationship they had ended.
Then the line that has outlived its context: The harvest is past. The summer has ended, and we are not saved. It reads like a proverb and probably was one. In an agricultural year there is a window. When the grain and the summer fruit are both in and the granary is still empty, no amount of effort afterward will change the outcome. The year is simply lost. Applied to a nation, it says that opportunity has a season and that the season closes, which is the most sobering thing the chapter contains.
The closing questions are the most quoted in the book, and their direction is usually missed. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Gilead's balm was a real product, exported and known Genesis 37:25, and the expected answer to both questions is yes, there is. The failure is therefore not one of supply. Medicine exists, the physician is available, and the wound of the people is not healed. That leaves only the patient to account for it. And the wish that follows — that the prophet's head were water and his eyes a spring of tears — is set immediately beside a second wish, that he could leave them altogether and live in a desert inn. Both are honest, and the book keeps them side by side without choosing.
settled What this mark means