World English Bible · Babylon and the exile
Jeremiah 3
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"They say, 'If a man puts away his wife, and she goes from him, and becomes another man's, should he return to her again?' Wouldn't that land be greatly polluted? But you have with many lovers; yet return again to me," . "Lift up your eyes to the heights, and see! Where have you not been lain with? You have sat for them by the road, as an in . You have polluted the land with your prostitution and with your wickedness. Therefore the have been withheld and there has been no ; yet you have had a forehead and you refused to be . Will you not from this time cry to me, ', you are the guide of my youth!'? "'Will he retain his ? Will he keep it to the end?' Behold, you have spoken and have done evil things, and have had your way." Moreover, said to me in the days of the king, "Have you seen that which backsliding Israel has done? She has gone up on every high mountain and , and has there. I said after she had done all these things, 'She will return to me;' but she didn't return, and her treacherous sister Judah saw it. I saw when, for this very cause, that backsliding Israel had committed , I had put her away and given her a , yet treacherous Judah, her sister, had no fear, but she also went and . Because she took her prostitution lightly, the land was polluted, and she committed with stones and with wood. Yet for all this her treacherous sister, Judah, has not returned to me with her , but only in pretense," . said to me, "Backsliding Israel has shown herself more than treacherous Judah. Go, and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, 'Return, you backsliding Israel,' ; 'I will not look in on you, for I am merciful,' . 'I will not keep . Only your , that you have transgressed against your , and have scattered your ways to the strangers , and you have not ,'" . "Return, backsliding children," , "for I am a husband to you. I will take one of you from a city, and two from a family, and I will bring you to . I will give you according to , who will feed you with knowledge and understanding. It will come to pass, when you are multiplied and increased in the land in those days," , "they will no longer say, 'the !' It will not come to . They won't remember it. They won't miss it, nor will another be made. At that time they will call ' ;' and all the nations will be gathered to it, to name, to . They will no longer walk after the stubbornness of their evil . In those days the house of Judah will walk with the , and they will come together out of the land of the north to the land that I gave for an to your fathers. "But I said, 'How I to put you among the children, and give you a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the armies of the nations!' and I said, 'You shall call me "", and shall not turn away from following me.' "Surely as a wife treacherously departs from her husband, so you have dealt treacherously with me, ," . A voice is heard on the heights, the weeping and the petitions of the ; because they have perverted their way, they have forgotten their . Return, you backsliding children, and I will heal your backsliding. "Behold, we have come to you; for you are our . Truly help from the hills, the tumult on the mountains, is in . Truly the of Israel is in our . But the shameful thing has devoured the labor of our fathers from our youth, their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters. Let us lie down in our , and let our confusion cover us; for we have against our , we and our fathers, from our youth even to this day. We have not our voice."
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Babylon and the exile, 612 BC to 539 BC ›
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
- Babylon
- Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
- Egypt
- Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
- Judah
- Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
- Further afield
- An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.
All of Jeremiah