Yeremia 5:22

5:22 “You should fear me!” says the Lord.

“You should tremble in awe before me! ¹ 

I made the sand to be a boundary for the sea,

a permanent barrier that it can never cross.

Its waves may roll, but they can never prevail.

They may roar, but they can never cross beyond that boundary.” ² 

Yeremia 36:6

36:6 So you go there the next time all the people of Judah come in from their towns to fast ³  in the Lord’s temple. Read out loud where all of them can hear you what I told you the Lord said, which you wrote in the scroll. ⁴ 

Yeremia 38:25

38:25 The officials may hear that I have talked with you. They may come to you and say, ‘Tell us what you said to the king and what the king said to you. ⁵  Do not hide anything from us. If you do, we will kill you.’ ⁶ 

[5:22]  ¹ tn Heb “Should you not fear me? Should you not tremble in awe before me?” The rhetorical questions expect the answer explicit in the translation.

[5:22]  ² tn Heb “it.” The referent is made explicit to avoid any possible confusion.

[36:6]  ³ sn Regular fast days were not a part of Israel’s religious calendar. Rather fast days were called on special occasions, i.e., in times of drought or a locust plague (Joel 1:14; 2:15), or during a military crisis (2 Chr 20:3), or after defeat in battle (1 Sam 31:13; 2 Sam 1:12). A fast day was likely chosen for the reading of the scroll because the people would be more mindful of the crisis they were in and be in more of a repentant mood. The events referred to in the study note on v. 1 would have provided the basis for Jeremiah’s anticipation of a fast day when the scroll could be read.

[36:6]  ⁴ tn Heb “So you go and read from the scroll which you have written from my mouth the words of the Lord in the ears of the people in the house of the Lord on a fast day, and in that way [for the explanation of this rendering see below] you will be reading them in the ears of all Judah [= the people of Judah] who come from their towns [i.e., to the temple to fast].” Again the syntax of the original is awkward, separating several of the qualifying phrases from the word or phrase they are intended to modify. In most of the “literal” English versions the emphasis on “what the Lord said” tends to get lost and it looks like two separate groups are to be addressed rather than one. The intent of the phrase is to define who the people are who will hear; the וַ that introduces the clause is explicative (BDB 252 s.v. וַ 1.b) and the גַּם (gam) is used to emphasize the explicative “all Judah who come in from their towns” (cf. BDB 169 s.v. גַּם 2). If some force were to be given to the “literal” rendering of that particle here it would be “actually.” This is the group that is to be addressed according to v. 3. The complex Hebrew sentence has been restructured to include all the relevant information in more comprehensible and shorter English sentences.

[38:25]  ⁵ tn The phrase “and what the king said to you” is actually at the end of the verse, but most commentators see it as also under the governance of “tell us” and many commentaries and English versions move the clause forward for the sake of English style as has been done here.

[38:25]  ⁶ tn Or “lest we kill you”; Heb “and we will not kill you,” which as stated in the translator’s note on 37:20 introduces a negative purpose (or result) clause. See 37:20, 38:24 for parallel usage.