116 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSthe oppressed from someone who has robbed him. If this is not done, says
Yahweh to another audience listening in, the divine wrath will burn like an
unquenchable fire. The reason: royal deeds are evil. On the face of it, this or-
acle with the possible exception of the concluding reference to "their evil do-
ings" is little more than the sort of admonition that one would likely hear from
the preacher in Deuteronomy. However, if injustices by the king and other roy-
alty are a daily occurrence, then what we have here is a demand that things get
turned around in a hurry, for failure to protect victims of oppression and other
such evils to which the poor and needy continually fall prey, is a gross violation
of covenant law.
In the second oracle, Yahweh indicts a proud Jerusalem, sitting securely as
she does on a rocky plateau in the Judaean mountains. He tells the city he is
against her. Then turning to address another audience, Yahweh makes his lis-
teners privy to the talk currently going on in the royal palace. There the king
and his princes are heard boasting that no one, surely no one, will be able to
swoop down and enter their habitations. Or has Jeremiah said "enter their
(hidden) lairs"?
In the third oracle, Yahweh says to Jerusalem's proud leaders that he will
reckon with them according to the fruit of their deeds. The language is now
judgment. Turning then to address his other audience, Yahweh says he will kin-
dle a fire in the forest of which Jerusalem's royalty is so proud, and it will con-
sume everything round about. This sounds as if the whole city will be ablaze.
Will the audience know that their deeds have been bad deeds, and the fruit
thus borne has been bad fruit?
When the three oracles are heard in sequence, v l 4a will answer the rhetori-
cal questions of v l 3b (Calvin). Members of the royal house say, "Who can
come down upon us, and who can enter into our habitations?" Yahweh an-
swers, "I can, and I will!" But v 13b will not likely be heard as a cheeky
response by the royal house to Yahweh's warning in v 12b, as Rudolph suggests,
although those listening will be conscious of the shifts between speaker and
audience. They may also perceive in the three oracles a progression from ad-
monition to indictment to judgment, which occurred in the three Temple Or-
acles of 7:3-14. The two clusters cover some of the same ground: care for the
needy and oppressed, robbery, and mistaken ideas about Jerusalem's inviolabil-
ity, which is rooted ultimately in a costly misunderstanding of the conditional
Sinai covenant. When all three oracles are heard in tandem, the "evil doings"
of Oracle I will anticipate the "fruit of [their] doings" in Oracle III, giving the
latter definition and pointing out the sad consequences in store for a nation
when its royal house fails to carry out the mandate it has to execute justice.
To a later audience, the oracles to the house of David will supplement the
prior oracles to Zedekiah (21:1-7) and the people (21:8-10) that were spoken
some 15-20 years later. At this point the waw is added to the superscription in
21:11: "And to the house of the king of Judah." The present oracles will also
help explain Jeremiah's uncompromising word to Zedekiah about Jerusalem's
fate, picking up on words in 21:5-6 and 10 that Yahweh will fight against the