Yeremia 2:26

2:26 Just as a thief has to suffer dishonor when he is caught,

so the people of Israel ¹  will suffer dishonor for what they have done. ² 

So will their kings and officials,

their priests and their prophets.

Yeremia 3:2

3:2 “Look up at the hilltops and consider this. ³ 

You have had sex with other gods on every one of them. ⁴ 

You waited for those gods like a thief lying in wait in the desert. ⁵ 

You defiled the land by your wicked prostitution to other gods. ⁶ 

Yeremia 3:6-9

3:6 When Josiah was king of Judah, the Lord said to me, “Jeremiah, you have no doubt seen what wayward Israel has done. ⁷  You have seen how she went up to every high hill and under every green tree to give herself like a prostitute to other gods. ⁸  3:7 Yet even after she had done all that, I thought that she might come back to me. ⁹  But she did not. Her sister, unfaithful Judah, saw what she did. ¹⁰  3:8 She also saw ¹¹  that I gave wayward Israel her divorce papers and sent her away because of her adulterous worship of other gods. ¹²  Even after her unfaithful sister Judah had seen this, ¹³  she still was not afraid, and she too went and gave herself like a prostitute to other gods. ¹⁴  3:9 Because she took her prostitution so lightly, she defiled the land ¹⁵  through her adulterous worship of gods made of wood and stone. ¹⁶ 

Yeremia 3:11-12

3:11 Then the Lord said to me, “Under the circumstances, wayward Israel could even be considered less guilty than unfaithful Judah. ¹⁷ 

The Lord Calls on Israel and Judah to Repent

3:12 “Go and shout this message to my people in the countries in the north. ¹⁸  Tell them,

‘Come back to me, wayward Israel,’ says the Lord.

‘I will not continue to look on you with displeasure. ¹⁹ 

For I am merciful,’ says the Lord.

‘I will not be angry with you forever.

Yeremia 3:14

3:14 “Come back to me, my wayward sons,” says the Lord, “for I am your true master. ²⁰  If you do, ²¹  I will take one of you from each town and two of you from each family group, and I will bring you back to Zion.

Yeremia 3:22

3:22 Come back to me, you wayward people.

I want to cure your waywardness. ²² 

Say, ²³  ‘Here we are. We come to you

because you are the Lord our God.

[2:26]  ¹ tn Heb “house of Israel.”

[2:26]  ² tn The words “for what they have done” are implicit in the comparison and are supplied in the translation for clarification.

[3:2]  ³ tn Heb “and see.”

[3:2]  ⁴ tn Heb “Where have you not been ravished?” The rhetorical question expects the answer “nowhere,” which suggests she has engaged in the worship of pagan gods on every one of the hilltops.

[3:2]  ⁵ tn Heb “You sat for them [the lovers, i.e., the foreign gods] beside the road like an Arab in the desert.”

[3:2]  ⁶ tn Heb “by your prostitution and your wickedness.” This is probably an example of hendiadys where, when two nouns are joined by “and,” one expresses the main idea and the other qualifies it.

[3:6]  ⁷ tn “Have you seen…” The question is rhetorical and expects a positive answer.

[3:6]  ⁸ tn Heb “she played the prostitute there.” This is a metaphor for Israel’s worship; she gave herself to the worship of other gods like a prostitute gives herself to her lovers. There seems no clear way to completely spell out the metaphor in the translation.

[3:7]  ⁹ tn Or “I said to her, ‘Come back to me!’” The verb אָמַר (’amar) usually means “to say,” but here it means “to think,” of an assumption that turns out to be wrong (so HALOT 66.4 s.v. אמר); cf. Gen 44:28; Jer 3:19; Pss 82:6; 139:11; Job 29:18; Ruth 4:4; Lam 3:18.

[3:7]  sn Open theists suggest that passages such as this indicate God has limited foreknowledge; however, more traditional theologians view this passage as an extended metaphor in which God presents himself as a deserted husband, hoping against hope that his adulterous wife might return to him. The point of the metaphor is not to make an assertion about God’s foreknowledge, but to develop the theme of God’s heartbreak due to Israel’s unrepentance.

[3:7]  ¹⁰ tn The words “what she did” are not in the text but are implicit from the context and are supplied in the translation for clarification.

[3:8]  ¹¹ tc Heb “she [‘her sister, unfaithful Judah’ from the preceding verse] saw” with one Hebrew ms, some Greek mss, and the Syriac version. The MT reads “I saw” which may be a case of attraction to the verb at the beginning of the previous verse.

[3:8]  ¹² tn Heb “because she committed adultery.” The translation is intended to spell out the significance of the metaphor.

[3:8]  ¹³ tn The words “Even after her unfaithful sister, Judah, had seen this” are not in the Hebrew text but are implicit in the connection and are supplied for clarification.

[3:8]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “she played the prostitute there.” This is a metaphor for Israel’s worship; she gave herself to the worship of other gods like a prostitute gives herself to her lovers. There seems no clear way to completely spell out the metaphor in the translation.

[3:9]  ¹⁵ tc The translation reads the form as a causative (Hiphil, תַּהֲנֵף, tahanef) with some of the versions in place of the simple stative (Qal, תֶּחֱנַף, tekhenaf) in the MT.

[3:9]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “because of the lightness of her prostitution, she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood.”

[3:11]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “Wayward Israel has proven herself to be more righteous than unfaithful Judah.”

[3:11]  sn A comparison is drawn here between the greater culpability of Judah, who has had the advantage of seeing how God disciplined her sister nation for having sinned and yet ignored the warning and committed the same sin, and the culpability of Israel who had no such advantage.

[3:12]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “Go and proclaim these words to the north.” The translation assumes that the message is directed toward the exiles of northern Israel who have been scattered in the provinces of Assyria to the north.

[3:12]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “I will not cause my face to fall on you.”

[3:14]  ²⁰ tn Or “I am your true husband.”

[3:14]  sn There is a wordplay between the term “true master” and the name of the pagan god Baal. The pronoun “I” is emphatic, creating a contrast between the Lord as Israel’s true master/husband versus Baal as Israel’s illegitimate lover/master. See 2:23-25.

[3:14]  ²¹ tn The words, “If you do” are not in the text but are implicit in the connection of the Hebrew verb with the preceding.

[3:22]  ²² tn Or “I will forgive your apostasies.” Heb “I will [or want to] heal your apostasies.” For the use of the verb “heal” (רָפָא, rafa’) to refer to spiritual healing and forgiveness see Hos 14:4.

[3:22]  ²³ tn Or “They say.” There is an obvious ellipsis of a verb of saying here since the preceding words are those of the Lord and the following are those of the people. However, there is debate about whether these are the response of the people to the Lord’s invitation, a response which is said to be inadequate according to the continuation in 4:1-4, or whether these are the Lord’s model for Israel’s confession of repentance to which he adds further instructions about the proper heart attitude that should accompany it in 4:1-4. The former implies a dialogue with an unmarked twofold shift in speaker between 3:22b-25 and 4:1-4:4 while the latter assumes the same main speaker throughout with an unmarked instruction only in 3:22b-25. This disrupts the flow of the passage less and appears more likely.