236 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSYahweh's prophet and commissioned him for prophetic service. This vision,
we are told, came after a humiliating subjugation of Jerusalem by Nebucha-
drezzar, king of Babylon, resulting in Judah's loss of its young king, Jehoi-
achin, other royalty, prominent people in government, and other valued
citizens of the city-all to exile in a faraway land, from which probably none
would ever return. In this vision, two baskets of figs were seen against the
backdrop of the Temple. One was filled with good figs, the early-ripened vari-
ety; the other with bad figs, so bad that they could not be eaten. Yahweh asked
the prophet what he saw, and he told him. Yahweh then interpreted the vision
in two oracles following.
Yahweh will regard Judahites exiled to Babylon like these good figs, for his
larger plan calls for a return to the land, where they will be built up. At that
time, they will be given a new heart to know him, for he is Yahweh, and the
covenant will once again be the bond it was meant to be. The covenant
people, for their part, will return to Yahweh in this new situation with their
whole heart.
Yahweh regards Zedekiah, his princes, and all those remaining in the
land like the bad figs. This includes those left in Jerusalem, those living in
Judah's cities and villages, and those who managed what they thought to be
a timely escape to Egypt. All will be accursed. Sword, famine, and pestilence
will consume all residing on the soil that Yahweh provided for them and
their fathers.
The oracles in combination overturn popular notions about what has re-
cently happened to the nation. Men, women, and children taken to Babylon
are as good as lost, while those remaining-however few in number and how-
ever precarious their existence might be-are surely the favored ones. But Yah-
weh tells Jeremiah, and eventually Judahite audiences in both Judah and
Babylon, that things are just the reverse: the exiles are his favored ones and
those left behind the unfavored. A Jerusalem audience will scarcely believe
this. But all the main themes of Jeremiah's preaching before and after the fall
of Jerusalem are announced here: the return of exiles from Babylon, their re-
building in the land, the making of a new covenant, and judgment on those
who have fled to Egypt.
This is the first dated prose in the book, and while we are not told precisely
when the vision and its accompanying oracles were received, we are told that
they came following the exile of 597 B.C., when Zedekiah was already king. A
date soon after 597 has broad support. Volz puts it closer to 588 B.C. The vision
and the oracles, though coming directly to Jeremiah, were meant for the com-
munity at large, and we may assume that at some point people in Jerusalem
and Judah, and eventually exiles in Babylon and Egypt, would hear them. Dur-
ing the final siege of Jerusalem and after the city's fall, all these ideas had be-
come public knowledge.