Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
No One Repents of His Wickedness
Jeremiah 8:4-17
4 “Moreover you shall tell them, ‘Yahweh says: “‘Do men fall, and not rise up again? Does one turn away, and not return? · WEB
Falling and getting up is the normal course of things, and the chapter's charge is that Judah has managed the abnormal feat of falling and staying down.
The argument opens with two questions whose answers are obvious. Do men fall and not rise up again? Does one turn away and not return? Both describe reflexes rather than decisions. A man who trips gets up. A traveler who takes a wrong road turns around. The point is that repentance is classified as the natural thing rather than the heroic thing. What Jerusalem has achieved is a perpetual backsliding, a permanent version of what should have been momentary, and the verse says how it is maintained: they cling to deceit.
God is then described as listening. He listened and heard, and what was missing was one sentence: No one repents of his wickedness, saying, "What have I done?" Four words would have been enough, and none of them were said. The image for the alternative is a warhorse rushing headlong into battle: animal momentum, all direction and no reflection. Then comes an argument from birds. The stork knows her appointed times. The turtledove, the swallow and the crane keep the seasons of their coming. Migration is used as evidence. Creatures with no law and no revelation keep the timetable written into them, and a people given the law outright does not know it.
The next charge is aimed at people who would have said they did know it. They claim to be wise and to have the law of Yahweh with them, and the reply names an instrument: the false pen of the scribes has made that a lie. This is a rare accusation about the handling of the written word rather than about ignoring it. It does not specify how the pen worked — whether by copying, by interpretation, or by teaching. What it fixes is responsibility. The people possessing the law and the professionals administering it are the same group here. The charge is that possession was turned into a claim of security by the men holding the pens.
Two verses then repeat, almost word for word, the verdict already delivered on the leadership two chapters earlier: everyone given to covetousness, the wound healed superficially, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, and the men who could not blush Jeremiah 6:13–15. The repetition is itself part of the meaning. The same diagnosis is delivered twice because nothing changed between the two deliveries. And the section ends with the people quoting their own disappointment back: we looked for peace, and no good came. They had been promised peace by their prophets and had believed it. That is what makes the arrival of the horses from Dan the collapse of a religion as well as of a border.
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