Jeremiah 12:7-13

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Jeremiah 12:7 tn Heb “my house.” Or, “I have abandoned my nation.” The word “house” has been used throughout Jeremiah for the temple (e.g., 7:2, 10), the nation or people of Israel or Judah (e.g. 3:18, 20), and the descendants of Jacob (i.e., the Israelites, e.g., 2:4). Here the parallelism argues that it refers to the nation of Judah. The translation throughout vv. 5-17 assumes that the verb forms are prophetic perfects, the form that conceives of the action as being as good as done. It is possible that the forms are true perfects and refer to a past destruction of Judah. If so, it may have been connected with the assaults against Judah in 598/7 b.c. by the Babylonians and the nations surrounding Judah that are recorded in 2 Kgs 24:14. No other major recent English version reflects these as prophetic perfects besides NIV and NCV, which does not use the future until v. 10. Hence the translation is somewhat tentative. C. Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” EBC 6:459 takes them as prophetic perfects, and H. Freedman (Jeremiah [SoBB], 88) mentions that as a possibility for explaining the presence of this passage here. For another example of an extended use of the prophetic perfect without imperfects interspersed, see Isa 8:23-9:6 HT (9:1-7 ET). The translation assumes they are prophetic and are part of the Lord’s answer to the complaint about the prosperity of the wicked; both the wicked Judeans and the wicked nations God will use to punish them will be punished.
2. Jeremiah 12:7 tn Heb “my inheritance.”
3. Jeremiah 12:7 tn Heb “the beloved of my soul.” Here “soul” stands for the person and is equivalent to “my.”
4. Jeremiah 12:7 tn Heb “will give…into the hands of.”
5. Jeremiah 12:8 tn See the note on the previous verse.
6. Jeremiah 12:8 tn Heb “have become to me like a lion.”
7. Jeremiah 12:8 tn Heb “have given against me with her voice.”
8. Jeremiah 12:8 tn Or “so I will reject her.” The word “hate” is sometimes used in a figurative way to refer to being neglected, i.e., treated as though unloved. In these contexts it does not have the same emotive connotations that a typical modern reader would associate with hate. See Gen 29:31, 33 and E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech, 556.
9. Jeremiah 12:9 tn Or “like speckled birds of prey.” The meanings of these words are uncertain. In the Hebrew text the sentence is a question, either, “Is not my inheritance to me a bird of prey, [or] a hyena?” or, “Is not my inheritance to me a speckled bird of prey?” The question, expecting a positive answer, appears here as an affirmative statement. The meaning of the second Hebrew word in the verse, occurring only here, is debated. BDB 840 s.v. צָבוּעַ relates it to a word translated “dyed stuff” that also occurs only once (Judg 5:30). HALOT 936 s.v. צָבוּעַ compares a word found in the cognates meaning “hyena.” This is more likely and is the interpretation followed by the Greek, which reads the first two words as “cave of a hyena.” This translation has led some scholars to posit a homonym for the word “bird of prey” meaning “cave” that is based on Arabic parallels. The metaphor would then be of Israel carried off by hyenas and surrounded by birds of prey. The evidence for the meaning “cave” is weak and would involve a wordplay of a rare homonym with another word that is better known. For a discussion of the issues see J. Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament, 128-29, 153.
10. Jeremiah 12:9 tn Heb “Are birds of prey around her?” The question is again rhetorical and expects a positive answer. The birds of prey are, of course, the hostile nations surrounding her. The metaphor involved in these two lines may be interpreted differently. God could consider Israel a proud bird of prey (hence the word for speckled) but one surrounded and under attack by other birds of prey. The fact that the sentences are divided into two rhetorical questions speaks somewhat against this.
11. Jeremiah 12:9 tn Heb “Go, gather all the beasts of the field [= wild beasts]. Bring them to devour.” The verbs are masculine plural imperatives addressed rhetorically to some unidentified group (the heavenly counsel?). See the notes on 5:1 for further discussion. Since translating literally would raise a question about who the commands are addressed to, they have been turned into passive third person commands to avoid confusion. The metaphor has likewise been turned into a simile to help the modern reader. By the way, the imperatives here implying future action argue that the passage is future and that it is correct to take the verb forms as prophetic perfects.
12. Jeremiah 12:10 tn Heb “Many shepherds.” For the use of the term “shepherd” as a figure for rulers see the notes on 10:21.
13. Jeremiah 12:10 tn Heb “my vineyard.” To translate literally would presuppose an unlikely familiarity with this figure on the part of some readers. Some translate as “vineyards,” but that is misleading because it misses the figurative nuance altogether.sn The figures of Israel as God’s vine and the land as God’s vineyard are found several times in the Bible. The best known of these is the extended metaphor in Isa 5:1-7. This figure also appears in Jer 2:20.
14. Jeremiah 12:10 tn Heb “my portion.”
15. Jeremiah 12:11 tn For the use of this verb see the notes on 12:4. Some understand the homonym here as meaning “it [the desolated land] will mourn to me.” However, the only other use of the preposition עַל (ʿal) with this root means “to mourn over” not “to” (cf. Hos 10:5). For the use of the preposition here see BDB 753 s.v. עַל II.1.b and compare the use in Gen 48:7.
16. Jeremiah 12:11 tn Heb “But there is no man laying it to heart.” For the idiom here see BDB 525 s.v. לֵב II.3.d and compare the usage in Isa 42:25; 47:7.sn There is a very interesting play on words and sounds in this verse that paints a picture of desolation and the pathos it evokes. Part of this is reflected in the translation. The same Hebrew word referring to a desolation or a waste (שְׁמֵמָה, sh^ememah) is repeated three times at the end of three successive lines (the first is the last line of v. 10), and the related verb is found at the beginning of the fourth (נָשַׁמָּה, nashammah). A similar sounding word is found in the second of the three successive lines (שָׁמָהּ, shamah = “he [they] will make it”). This latter word is part of a further play because it is repeated in a different form (שָׁם, sham = “laying”) in the last two lines of the verse: they lay it waste, but no one lays it to heart. There is also an interesting contrast between the sorrow the Lord feels and the inattention of the people.
17. Jeremiah 12:12 tn Heb “destroyers.”
18. Jeremiah 12:12 tn Heb “It is the Lord’s consuming sword.”
19. Jeremiah 12:12 tn Heb “For a sword of the Lord will devour.” The sword is often symbolic for destructive forces of all kinds. Here and in Isa 34:6; Jer 47:6, it is symbolic of the enemy armies that the Lord uses to carry out destructive punishment against his enemies, hence the translation “his destructive weapon.” A similar figure is use in Isa 10:5, where the figure is more clearly identified; Assyria is the rod/club that the Lord will use to discipline unfaithful Israel.
20. Jeremiah 12:12 tn Heb “There is no peace to all flesh.”
21. Jeremiah 12:13 sn Invading armies lived off the land, using up all the produce and destroying everything they could not consume.
22. Jeremiah 12:13 tn The pronouns here are actually second plural: Heb “Be ashamed/disconcerted because of your harvests.” Because the verb form (וּבֹשׁוּ, uvoshu) can either be Qal perfect third plural or Qal imperative masculine plural, many emend the pronoun on the noun to third plural (see, e.g., BHS). However, this is the easier reading and is not supported by either the Latin or the Greek, which have second plural. This is probably another case of the shift from description to direct address that has been met with several times already in Jeremiah (the figure of speech called apostrophe; for other examples see, e.g., 9:4; 11:13). As in other cases, the translation has been leveled to third plural to avoid confusion for the contemporary English reader. For the meaning of the verb here see BDB 101 s.v. בּוֹשׁ Qal.2 and compare the usage in Jer 48:13.
23. Jeremiah 12:13 tn Heb “be disappointed in their harvests from the fierce anger of the Lord.” The translation makes explicit what is implicit in the elliptical poetry of the Hebrew original.