Jeremiah 3:9

This word came to Jeremiah “in the days of Josiah the king”, who reigned from 640 to 609 BC. Josiah’s reign was a time of earnest and wide religious reform in Judah (2 Kings 22–23), so the message arrives while the nation looks as if it is coming back to God. The one who speaks is the LORD, the covenant God of Israel, who made himself known to Moses as I AM (Exodus 3:14).

He begins by pointing Jeremiah to the past. The northern kingdom of Israel, often called Ephraim, had been conquered and carried into exile by Assyria in 722 BC. “Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done?” is a question asked to set plain facts before Jeremiah and, through him, before Judah. There is grief in it as well as accusation, the grief of a God whose people have kept turning from him.

“Backsliding” is the Hebrew mᵉshûwbâh, a turning away, an apostasy. It comes from the root that means to turn back, and in Jeremiah it describes a settled pattern, a people who turn from God again and again and refuse his calls to return. God uses it here almost as Israel’s name, in verses 6, 8 and 11.

Israel “is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree”. The word for high, gâbôahh, is the ordinary word for something tall or lofty, and here it describes the hills themselves. Elsewhere it can describe a proud person, which suits people who set their own will above God. Hills and leafy trees were the usual sites of Canaanite fertility worship. High ground was thought to be nearer the gods, so altars to Baal were built there, and green trees and groves were tied to Asherah, a Canaanite goddess of fertility, whose poles stood beside the altars. The law had told Israel to destroy every such place (Deuteronomy 12:2–4). The word “every” is said of the mountains and of the trees alike, and it shows idolatry carried on openly across the whole land.

Verse 7 looks back to the years before the Assyrian exile. “After she had done all these things”, God said to Israel, “Turn thou unto me.” He made the offer when the idolatry was already complete, which shows how patient he is and how much he prefers reconciliation to judgment. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and wants them to turn and live (Ezekiel 33:11), and through Hosea he shows how unwilling he was to give Israel up (Hosea 11:8).

The verb is shûwb, to turn back or return. It is the Old Testament’s great word for repentance, a turning from sin back to God, and the same verb stands behind both “Turn” and “returned” in this verse. God said “Turn”, and the answer is given in the short clause “But she returned not.” The name “backsliding” comes from this same root, so Israel is the nation that turned away and refused to turn back.

The call is the more striking after the verses just before it. Jeremiah 3:1–5 recalls the law under which a divorced wife who had gone to another man could never go back to her first husband (Deuteronomy 24:1–4). God, the wronged husband, calls his unfaithful people back all the same.

“And I saw”, God says in verse 8. He had watched everything Israel did, and his judgment answered it. He put her away “for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery”. The word for causes, ʼôwdôwth, comes from a root that suggests turnings, and it means the occasions or reasons for a thing. Israel’s exile came as the result of many acts of unfaithfulness added together, so the sentence was fully earned.

The “bill of divorce” (kᵉrîythûwth) was a legal document every Israelite knew. Under the law a husband who put away his wife gave her this written bill, and the marriage was ended (Deuteronomy 24:1–4). God uses the practice to describe what he did to the northern kingdom. After Solomon, around 931 BC, the nation had split in two, and the northern kingdom lived through generations of idolatry and unstable rule until Assyria conquered it in 722 BC. That conquest and exile was the putting away. Israel lost her place in the promised land and was scattered among the nations, and it showed that even God’s chosen people answer for breaking his covenant.

From the end of verse 7 the passage turns to Judah, the southern kingdom, which was still standing in Jeremiah’s day. She is Israel’s “sister”, ʼâchôwth, the ordinary Hebrew word for a sister. The two kingdoms were descended from Jacob and stood in the same covenant with the LORD.

Judah is given a name of her own, “treacherous”. The Hebrew bâgôwd comes from the verb bâgad, to deal treacherously or faithlessly, and it speaks of a breach of trust inside a close bond. The phrase “her treacherous sister Judah” stands in verses 7, 8 and 10, and verse 11 calls her “treacherous Judah”.

“And her treacherous sister Judah saw it.” The verb râʼâh is the common word for seeing, and it also covers perceiving and taking heed. Judah had Israel’s idolatry and Israel’s exile in front of her as a plain lesson, so she sinned with knowledge. Verse 8 gives her response: she “feared not, but went and played the harlot also.” The reverent fear of God that her sister’s fate should have produced was missing, and the verb for her harlotry is the same zânâh used of Israel in verse 6.

Verse 10 brings the heaviest charge. “And yet for all this”, after the divorce of Israel and all that Judah had watched, “her treacherous sister Judah hath not turned unto me with her whole heart, but feignedly.” The verb is again shûwb. Judah did make a show of returning, and God says what that show was worth.

The heart, lêb, is the inner person in Hebrew thought: the seat of thinking, feeling and willing, and of moral character. A “whole heart” is complete and undivided devotion. “Feignedly” translates sheqer, a falsehood, a lie, a sham. Judah’s turning was a lie. In Josiah’s days there was reform in public, and yet the nation kept the temple services going while it held on to its idols, some of them inside the temple courts. The words “saith the LORD” close the verse. They are nᵉʼum Yᵉhôvâh, the utterance or declaration of the LORD, so this is God’s own finding about Judah, given by the one who sees the heart.

Scripture says the same in many places. God complains through Isaiah of a people who honour him with their lips while their heart is far from him (Isaiah 29:13), and Jesus applies those words to his own generation (Matthew 15:8). Joel calls the people to rend their hearts and not their garments (Joel 2:13). Moses promised that God would circumcise the heart of his people (Deuteronomy 30:6), and David confesses that God desires truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6). Jesus pronounced woes on religious leaders who looked righteous outwardly and were corrupt within (Matthew 23:27–28).

Israel comes out as the less guilty of two guilty sisters, and that is all the comparison means. “Justified” is tsâdaq, to be right or righteous in a moral or legal sense, and it is used here with irony. Israel had sinned so badly that God sent her away, and she was far from innocent. Beside Judah, though, her guilt was the smaller.

The reason is what each sister had seen. Israel sinned before the judgment fell. Judah sinned after it, with her sister’s exile in full view, and then added a pretended repentance. The two names carry the difference: “backsliding” describes a people who turn away and keep relapsing, while “treacherous” describes a betrayal carried out with open eyes.

So God’s judgment takes account of knowledge and opportunity. Jesus teaches that much is required of the one to whom much is given (Luke 12:48). Paul writes of the righteous judgment of God that falls on those who know better (Romans 2:1–3), and Hebrews warns against wilful sin (Hebrews 10:26–29). Israel’s history was written down as a warning to us (1 Corinthians 10:11), as Israel’s fall was a warning to Judah. Every sin offends God’s holiness, and light that has been refused makes the guilt heavier.

Both sisters failed, and their failure shows that the trouble lies in the human heart, which reform and law could never mend. The passage therefore points forward to what God himself would do. He promised a new covenant in which his law would be written on the heart and sins forgiven (Jeremiah 31:31–34), and he promised a new heart and a new spirit (Ezekiel 36:26–27). Hebrews declares that this better covenant has come in Christ (Hebrews 8:6–13), and Paul says the Spirit now writes on the tables of the heart where the old law was written on stone (2 Corinthians 3:3).

Jesus is the faithful one where Israel and Judah were faithless. He came to fulfil the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17), and he came to save the world and not to condemn it (John 3:17). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and on the cross he was made a curse for us (Galatians 3:13), bearing the judgment that unfaithfulness deserves. God showed his love in this, that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8).

Because of him the sinner who could never justify himself is justified freely by grace (Romans 3:23–24). God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19–21), and Christ is the way by which we come back to the Father (John 14:6). His blood cleanses us from the defilement of sin (1 John 1:7), so that we worship the living God in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). Christ loved the church as a husband and gave himself for her, to present her to himself as a pure and spotless bride (Ephesians 5:25–27). The whole-hearted return that Judah failed to make is what he gives his people by his Spirit.

This passage shows us a God who says “Turn thou unto me” after every wrong has already been done. His patience toward Israel was real, and the verses that follow renew the call and promise restoration to all who return (Jeremiah 3:12–18). Anyone who has wandered far can take courage from the order of verse 7, where the invitation comes after “all these things”.

It also shows that God looks past what can be seen. Judah’s public reform was impressive, and he called it a lie because her heart stayed where it was. Idols today are seldom made of stone or wood, yet a career, money, comfort or the approval of others can hold the place in the heart that belongs to God. He is as undeceived by our appearances as he was by Judah’s, and he is as ready to receive an honest return.

Judah’s story leaves us with the weight of what we know. We have Israel’s history and Judah’s, and the whole of Scripture besides, so we have seen even more than she did. The warnings we have been given are a mercy, and the God who gave them is the same God who promises a new heart to those who come to him in Christ.