Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Call for the Mourning Women
Jeremiah 9:17-22
17 Yahweh of Armies says, “Consider, and call for the mourning women, that they may come. Send for the skillful women, that they may come. · WEB
Professional mourners are summoned and then told to train their daughters, because the grief is going to outlast the people who know how to express it.
The instruction is to send for a trade. Mourning women were hired specialists, called in to lead the wailing at a funeral so that a household's grief had a form to take. The summons here is issued at the national level. What is arranged is a funeral for the country, before the death, with the professionals brought in to start the lament on schedule.
The reason given is practical rather than ceremonial: that our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids gush out with waters. The tears are the object of the exercise. This is a people described throughout the book as unable to blush and unwilling to say what have I done. The summoning of experts to produce weeping is an admission that the natural response is not coming. Grief has to be imported, like the frankincense of the earlier chapter.
Then the summons turns into a curriculum, and this is the darkest touch in the passage. Teach your daughters wailing. Everyone teach her neighbor a lamentation. A skill is to be passed to the next generation. That assumes there will be a next generation, and that it will need this. Judah taught its children to gather wood for the queen of the sky Jeremiah 7:18. Now the teaching that is ordered is how to mourn. The transmission runs the same way and carries the opposite freight.
The cause of the mourning is put in a sentence that reads like something remembered rather than composed: death has come up into our windows. It has entered into our palaces. Death climbing in through a window is how a household is entered when the doors are barred. It is the one route the defenses do not cover. The two places it reaches are the street outside and the palace at the top. Rich and poor lose the same thing, and the last picture is of bodies lying like the handful a harvester drops behind him, with nobody following to gather it.
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