Indictment ofludah and the Nations (25:1-38) 253messengers who called them to return to the covenant demands, the whole
world will pay a huge price. Yahweh will send for the tribes of the north and
for Nebuchadrezzar, the king of Babylon, who, wonder of wonders, is now
acting as his servant, and these combined forces of hostility will be brought
against Judah and the surrounding nations. Yahweh in anger will devote
them all to destruction. The language here, as the careful listener will be
quick to recognize, is holy war language. The peoples suffering judgment
will endure shameful reproach, and the lands they have inhabited will be-
come rubble for all time. Glad sounds will vanish-the happy voices of bride
and groom, the morning sound of grinding millstones; missing also will be
the soft lamplight of evening. Judah, it is repeated, will become a ruin, and
she along with other conquered nations can expect to be in the service of the
king of Babylon 70 years.
In a third oracle, which is dated sometime later, Yahweh says that after 70
years he will reckon with the iniquity of the king of Babylon, the nation of
Babylon, and the land of a proud Babylonian people. The land he will make
desolations forever. The oracle goes on to say, in what may be a later add-on,
that all the dire predictions contained in a book of oracles against this nation
will fall on Babylon. At this time many nations and great kings will make the
Babylonians serve-yes, even them! For Yahweh intends to repay Babylon for
its evil deeds and for its handmade idols.
Jeremiah's speech and the first two divine oracles are datable to the fourth
year of Jehoiakim, i.e., 605 B.C. Oracle III, because of v 13, must date to after
594/3 B.C., when Jeremiah is said to have written the Babylon collection of ora-
cles into a book.
As I write (August 200 I), an evening wedding celebration is taking place in
East Jerusalem. Lights are on outside the St. George Hotel, and the sounds of
honking cars and happy voices fill the street. But should violence and war
come again to this city named for peace, sounds such as these will no longer
be heard, and the soft lights now seen will no longer pierce the evening
darkness.
Excursus III: The Composition of Jeremiah 24-36
Chapters 24-36 are manifestly out of chronological order, which does not
make them unique in the book of Jeremiah, since prophetic utterances and
narrative all throughout the book are assembled according to criteria other
than chronology. It is just that a J?ck of c~rOn()l()gic;oiJs.equence is more notice-
able in these chapters because many of the narratives··;;·;--e·aaled. The Book of
Restoration in chaps. 30-33 has been inserted into the larger book we now
possess (30:2), possibly to juxtapose the hope it contains with the hope in Jere-
miah's letter to the exiles in chap. 29. This onetime independent book has
undergone its own expansion, from a poetic core in 30: 5-31:22 to a book