Jeremiah 13:26

Jeremiah preached during the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, from about 627 to 586 BC, under the kings Josiah, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin and Zedekiah. Babylon was rising, Egypt and Assyria were fading, and Judah sat between them as a small tributary kingdom. A century earlier the northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to Assyria for the same sins. Judah went on all the same, worshipping Baal and Asherah, oppressing the weak, keeping up an outward religion, and looking to treaties with foreign powers for safety. Josiah’s reforms came and went, and the reign of Jehoiakim (609–598 BC) was marked by open rebellion against God’s commands and the oppression of his own people.

Chapter 13 has been building to these verses. The LORD had Jeremiah wear a linen girdle and then bury it by the Euphrates until it was ruined, a picture of a people once bound close to him and now spoiled by pride and idolatry (Jeremiah 13:1–11). He spoke of wine jars filled and then shattered, a picture of the whole nation broken from its leaders down to its common people (Jeremiah 13:12–14). Jeremiah called the people to humility with tears (Jeremiah 13:15–17), and a warning went to the king and the queen (Jeremiah 13:18–19). Our six verses close the chapter by giving the reason for all of it.

The LORD’s answer is short: “For the greatness of thine iniquity.” He knows the question before Judah asks it. The verb ʼâmar is the ordinary word for saying, and to say something “in thine heart” is to think it, so this is the silent, bewildered question of a people who look at their ruin and wonder where it came from. Jeremiah had already spoken of them as a foolish people who lack understanding (Jeremiah 5:21).

The word for iniquity, ʻâvôn, means perversity or moral evil, and it can name both the guilt of a wrong and the punishment that follows it. “Greatness” is rôb, the word for a multitude or abundance, so the LORD is pointing to how much iniquity there is. Judah had forsaken him, the fountain of living waters (Jeremiah 2:13), and the idolatry and covenant-breaking had become the nation’s way of life. The suffering to come is therefore the just result of what the nation has done. Paul states the same rule for everyone when he says that a man reaps what he sows (Galatians 6:7).

Skin and spots stay as they are, and the LORD says that doing good is just as far out of Judah’s own reach. The Ethiopian is a Cushite, a man from the land south of Egypt, in today’s Sudan and Ethiopia, whose people were known for their dark skin. Everyone who heard Jeremiah knew that a man’s colour and a leopard’s coat are fixed, and that is all the comparison needs. The verb hâphak means to turn about or overturn, a complete reversal. The word for spots, chăbarburâh, is formed by doubling part of its root, and it names the streaks or spots of the leopard’s coat.

The weight of the verse falls on “accustomed”. Limmûwd means instructed or taught, and it is a word for a disciple. Judah has been to school in evil. Generation after generation practised it until it became a skill and a second nature, the settled way of the whole nation. If the Ethiopian could change his skin and the leopard his spots, then people trained in evil could turn themselves to good. Jeremiah says the same of the heart itself, that it is deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9).

“Therefore” ties the sentence to the charge. Because the people are fixed in their evil, the LORD himself will scatter them, and the “I” is his. The verb pûwts means to dash in pieces or to spread abroad, a breaking up of the nation’s life together. Stubble, qash, is the dry, brittle stalk left in the field after the grain is harvested, light and of little worth. “Passeth away” is ʻâbar, the common verb for crossing over or passing by. The wind of the wilderness is the hot, dry wind off the Judean desert, such as the sirocco, and stubble simply goes where it blows. Jeremiah’s hearers farmed on the edge of that desert and had watched it happen every year.

The wind had a name. God called Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon his servant for this work and foretold seventy years of captivity (Jeremiah 25:8–11), and Habakkuk describes the Chaldeans as a dreadful and terrifying nation (Habakkuk 1:7). Wave after wave of invasion and deportation followed, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 586 BC. Moses had warned of exactly this, that the LORD would scatter a disobedient people among all nations (Deuteronomy 28:64), and Jeremiah had preached it in his temple sermon (Jeremiah 7:1–15). The picture is an old one in Scripture. The first psalm likens the wicked to chaff (Psalm 1:4), and Isaiah sees the nations chased like chaff before the wind (Isaiah 17:13).

God scattered his own people because he is holy and holds those he has chosen to account. He also meant the exile to purify a remnant, to bring them to repentance, and to keep a people through whom his saving purpose would go on.

“This is thy lot, the portion of thy measures from me, saith the LORD.” A gôwrâl was a pebble or other small marked object used to settle a question, and the word came to mean the share or portion that the lot assigned. Land and inheritance were divided this way in Israel. “The portion of thy measures” says the same thing a second time, as something measured out, and “from me” says who measured it. Judah’s future is assigned by the LORD, and it is the fitting share for what she has done. David could say that the LORD himself was his portion (Psalm 16:5). Judah’s portion is exile.

Two reasons are given. The first is “thou hast forgotten me”. Shâkach means to forget, to let something slip from mind for want of attention. Judah forgot the LORD in the way Moses had warned against, when a people settled in a good land stops keeping his commandments (Deuteronomy 8:11–14) and lets go of the covenant he made with them (Deuteronomy 4:23–24). They lived as though he had little to do with their daily affairs. Hosea speaks of the same loss: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6).

The second reason is “trusted in falsehood”. Sheqer is a lie or a sham, an empty thing that disappoints whoever leans on it. For Judah it covered the idols, which had no power to save. It covered the alliances with Egypt and Assyria that were supposed to bring safety (Jeremiah 2:18, Jeremiah 2:36–37). It also covered the prophets who promised peace in the LORD’s name while speaking lies (Jeremiah 14:14–15). Forgetting and false trust go together, because a people who let go of God will lean on something else.

Verse 26 returns to the picture of verse 22, and now the LORD names himself as the one who does it. “Discover” here is châsaph, which means to strip off or make bare. The skirts are thrown up over the face, so that the one shamed is uncovered before everyone and knows it. The word for shame, qâlôwn, means disgrace or dishonour, and it can also name the private parts of the body, which is why the picture is as blunt as it is.

The punishment answers the sin. Judah’s unfaithfulness had been carried on as though unseen, and God, who sees all, brings it into the open. Public stripping was a known humiliation for captives and for women judged immoral, and the prophets use it of Nineveh (Nahum 3:5), of Oholibah (Ezekiel 23:29) and of Israel (Hosea 2:10). Jeremiah had already called Judah’s idolatry harlotry (Jeremiah 3:8). The language is meant to shock, so that the people feel the weight of breaking covenant with a holy God and turn before the judgment arrives.

“I have seen” is the LORD speaking as a witness to all of it. Scripture pictures the covenant between the LORD and his people as a marriage, most fully in Ezekiel 16, so worship given to other gods is adultery. That is the first word of the charge, niʼuph, “adulteries”. “Neighings”, matshâlâh, is the sound of a stallion after a mare, a picture of eager and unbridled appetite for idols. “The lewdness of thy whoredom” joins zimmâh, a plan or device and especially a wicked one, to zᵉnûwth, harlotry, so the unfaithfulness was thought out and purposed. “Abominations” is shiqqûwts, a word for a disgusting thing and for an idol.

“On the hills in the fields” (gibʻâh, hill, and sâdeh, field) says where it happened. These are the high places, the bamot, open-air shrines where the fertility worship of Canaan went on, with its sacred prostitution and even child sacrifice. Jeremiah had pointed to these same high places earlier (Jeremiah 3:2). Hosea speaks of Israel’s whoredom in the same terms (Hosea 4:12), Ezekiel calls Jerusalem an adulterous wife (Ezekiel 16:32), and James carries the word over to believers when he says that friendship with the world is enmity with God (James 4:4). It was done openly, across the countryside, by the people of the city that held the LORD’s own house.

Every need this passage uncovers is met in Jesus Christ. Judah was to be stripped for her own iniquity. Jesus, the sinless one, was stripped and mocked by the soldiers (Matthew 27:28) and bore the shame of the cross (Hebrews 12:2). God made him to be sin for us, “who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Those who trust him are clothed with the garments of salvation and the robe of righteousness (Isaiah 61:10), and under the new covenant God writes his laws on their hearts and forgives their iniquities (Hebrews 8:10–12).

The leopard’s spots are answered too. Jesus said that a man must be born again (John 3:3). Anyone in Christ is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the good that the old nature was unable to do, God himself works in his people (Philippians 2:13).

The scattering has its answer in the good shepherd, who gives his life for the sheep and gathers them into one flock (John 10:11–16). The Father has given us a share in the inheritance of the saints, a new lot in place of the old, and has moved us out of the power of darkness into the kingdom of his Son (Colossians 1:12–14). The Spirit given at Pentecost gathers people of every tribe and tongue into one body (Acts 2:1–4), reconciled through the cross (Ephesians 2:13–16). At the end Christ will gather his elect “from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” (Matthew 24:31).

Jesus is the truth (John 14:6), the opposite of the falsehood Judah trusted, and he is the faithful Son who always remembered his Father. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). His blood cleanses us (Hebrews 9:14), he made the new covenant in that blood (Luke 22:20), and he cleanses his church by the washing of water with the word (Ephesians 5:26). So the question “when shall it once be?” has its answer at the cross.

God sees. “I have seen” covers the hills of Judah and the hidden places of every heart, and with him the question “Wherefore come these things upon me?” always has a true answer. When trouble comes, this passage gives us an honest place to begin, which is our own hearts before our circumstances, since suffering often follows disobedience.

The falsehoods we lean on today are seldom carved idols. Money, human systems, our own good sense and our own goodness can each take the place where God should be trusted. God is usually forgotten by neglect, of his word, of prayer and of his people, long before anyone denies him.

The leopard’s spots tell us the truth about self-improvement, which is that the change we most need is one God must give. That is humbling, and it is also a relief, because he has promised to give it, and he is faithful to forgive those who confess their sins (1 John 1:9).

The last word of the chapter is a question from God, who is still asking for his people’s cleansing after everything he has seen. The God who judges is the God who grieves, “Woe unto thee”, and who asks when.