An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 158: A Smiting Tour of the Middle East (Jeremiah 46-52)

Jeremiah 46-52
A Smiting Tour of the Middle East.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Jeremiah 46

 “The word that the LORD spake to Jeremiah the prophet, how Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon should come and smite the land of Egypt.”

Well, yes, that’s about the size of it. This chapter is a prophecy of how Babylon will invade and conquer Egypt, and it’s a familiar death-and-destruction type rhetoric. And, of course, Jeremiah and his fellow remnant are stuck in the middle of it, although once again they have God’s promise that they, or at least the Israelite people, will be saved and live on after the invasion. This is very similar to passages in Isaiah where each nation was singled out for specific smiting. I did like the reference to the troop dispositions, though; “Come up, ye horses; and rage, ye chariots; and let the mighty men come forth; the Ethiopians and the Libyans, that handle the shield; and the Lydians, that handle and bend the bow.”

Jeremiah 47

“The word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah the prophet against the Philistines, before that Pharaoh smote Gaza.”

So it looks like we are getting the same treatment as in Isaiah, with a little smiting tour of the Middle East; this chapter it’s the turn of the Philistines in relatively few verses. “Baldness is come upon Gaza” – I like this, although I assume it means “desolation of the land” rather than hair loss. And “O thou sword of the LORD, how long will it be ere thou be quiet?” In Gaza? Some time yet, it would appear.

Jeremiah 48

“Moab is destroyed; her little ones have caused a cry to be heard.”

This chapter it’s the turn of Moab and the Moabites, and they get considerably more verses than the Philistines but it is mostly repetition of how they will be destroyed, with almost a city by city account of them being smashed like a broken bottle. Are there not any nice prophecies? It’s always woe and burning and scattering, and it gets very wearisome after a while (although I dare say less so reading about it than it would have been living in such times!) And then there’s this – “For every head shall be bald, and every beard clipped: upon all the hands shall be cuttings, and upon the loins sackcloth.” So I guess the baldness of Gaza wasn’t a metaphor, but a reference to people shaving their heads in mourning. Or maybe it was meant with both a literal and a metaphoric meaning.

There’s also mention here of the Moabite god – Chemosh, which apparently translates as either “the destroyer” or “fish god”. The Moabites worship Cthulhu?

Jeremiah 49

“Howl, O Heshbon, for Ai is spoiled: cry, ye daughters of Rabbah, gird you with sackcloth; lament, and run to and fro by the hedges; for their king shall go into captivity, and his priests and his princes together.”

This chapter covers the fates of the Ammonites, the Edomites, Damascus and two other places that aren’t familiar to me – Hazor and Elam, and it’s all pretty much the same stuff, with the Babylonians doing conquest to them all. It occurred to me that this makes less sense in the context of Jeremiah, which is all about God punishing the Israelites for not worshipping Him properly, whereas usually the neighbouring kingdoms get a good smiting as punishment for harassing the Israelites. Here they are potentially blameless, unless you take them as being guilty for tempting the Israelites with their strange gods. But there’s not really a reference as to why any of these places are being punished.

Jeremiah 50

“The word that the LORD spake against Babylon and against the land of the Chaldeans by Jeremiah the prophet.”

Finally Babylon itself will fall, under the attack of “an assembly of great nations from the north country”. The Israelites will be freed, and they will have made a new covenant with God, and be sinless (“the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none”), except that then there are exhortations to turn and destroy Babylon utterly, with the usual rhetoric of killings and burnings and desolation. And at this point I’m thinking – just let it lie. Just try to get on with each other. I wonder if it would have made any difference if three of the world’s major religions hadn’t originated from a region of almost constant back and forth warfare. Of course, the irony is that these religions all arose as an attempt to try to contain that warfare, so I have no answer to that, only to say that I’ll be happy to read about something other than Babylonian conquests.

Also, I was under the impression from Esther and Nehemiah that actually the return of the exiled Israelites was achieved relatively peacefully, under a Babylonian king who was sympathetic to their plight. Like, you know, a diplomatic solution rather than killing and burning. Which seems to me a much more admirable action.

Jeremiah 51

“Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will raise up against Babylon, and against them that dwell in the midst of them that rise up against me, a destroying wind;”

And so it goes on. Nigh on sixty verses of vengeful destruction which, apparently, Jeremiah dictates into a book which is then thrown into the Euphrates, tied to a stone, as a demonstration of how Babylon will “sink” as well.

There’s only so much of this kind of thing “With thee also will I break in pieces man and woman; and with thee will I break in pieces old and young; and with thee will I break in pieces the young man and the maid” that I can stomach, and there’s a long list of things that will be broken into pieces. Mind you, this is using the “Lord of the Hosts” as a metaphorical battleaxe, so in fact this bit can be taken more to mean conversion than destruction, if so desired.

It doesn’t seem entirely fair that God should be so set on destroying Babylon when He was using it as a tool to punish His people with; these last couple of chapters are so vehement in their ire at the Babylonians that they feel more like the fantasy of someone that has reason to hate them than they do a follow-on to the rest of the book.

And then there’s this; “cause the horses to come up as the rough caterpillers”. I’ve no idea what that means but it’s a great line.

Jeremiah 52

“And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and pitched against it, and built forts against it round about.”

The book of Jeremiah ends with a summary of the timeline, and this reads like a chapter of Kings or Chronicles. Zedekiah “does wrong” in the eyes of God, so the Babylonians lay siege to the city and destroy it. Zedekiah tries to escape but he is captured and blinded, after his sons are killed in front of him. The Nebuzaradan, the Babylonian viceroy, plunders the temple (there is remorseless detail of what he takes, like it’s a receipt or something) and carries off slaves, and this happens a number of times of quite a few years, so evidently it’s an occasional tribute or similar. There is no mention of Jeremiah in this chapter. Finally, when Jehoiachin, ex-king of Judah, has been captive for thirty seven years, the Babylonian king Evil-Merodach (and what a foreboding name that is) frees him from prison and starts treating him with respect and kindness. See, I knew it was a peaceful resolution.

And that’s Jeremiah. It’s a depressing book, full of death and destruction, but I thought the personal view of what it’s like to be a prophet (which was also depressing, having to give bad news to people who don’t believe you but despise you all the same) was an interesting slant. It’d be nice to move onto something with a bit less woe, but as the next book is “Lamentations” I’m not holding out much hope!