Jeremiah

Jeremiah: Broken promises of the Lord

 For behold, I am sending among you serpents,
adders which cannot be charmed,
and they shall bite you," says the LORD. (8:17)

Now what is he griping about, wondered Seymour Light? Like a bleak winter wind, the anger, curses and threats of Yahweh are ever sounding through the Book of Jeremiah:

 I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins,
a lair of jackals;
and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation,
without inhabitant."

 "Thus says the LORD:
`The dead bodies of men shall fall
like dung upon the open field,
like sheaves after the reaper,
and none shall gather them.'" (9:11,22)

But haven’t we heard this enough already, do we really need more?

Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will punish all those who are circumcised but yet uncircumcised -- Egypt, Judah, Edom, the sons of Ammon, Moab, and all who dwell in the desert that cut the corners of their hair; for all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart." (9:25,26)

So, those with stylish haircuts are going to get it in the neck.  Even getting circumcised is not enough to avert the nonstop hail of curses from Yahweh. He appears as ever-tormented, we’re not quite sure by what:

 My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain!
Oh, the walls of my heart!
My heart is beating wildly;
I cannot keep silent;
for I hear the sound of the trumpet,
the alarm of war.
Disaster follows hard on disaster,
the whole land is laid waste.

This is Yahweh speaking not Jeremiah – because it is immediately followed by

For my people are foolish,
they know me not;
they are stupid children,
they have no understanding.
They are skilled in doing evil,
but how to do good they know not." (4:19-22)

One might have thought a god would appear serene just occasionally - but, not this one. The Israelites have done something terribly shameful, but what is it?

But from our youth the shameful thing has devoured all for which our fathers laboured, their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters. (3:24)

What could that be? Yahweh’s fiery wrath goes forth as usual:

 Circumcise yourselves to the LORD,
remove the foreskin of your hearts,
O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem;
lest my wrath go forth like fire,
and burn with none to quench it,
because of the evil of your doings." (43-4)

And this will bring evil and destruction: “for I bring evil from the north,
and great destruction”.(4:6) Jeremiah has finally had enough, and he answers back:” then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD, surely thou hast utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, `It shall be well with you'; whereas the sword has reached their very life.” (4:10)

Pages more about doom follow - the fire, the sword etc – and again Jeremiah reminds the Lord:,

Then I said: "Ah, Lord GOD, behold, the prophets say to them, `You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you assured peace in this place.'" (14:12)

Not so, replies, Yahweh, those good-news tidings were not from Me – they were from false prophets!

And the LORD said to me: "The prophets are prophesying lies in my name; I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds. Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the prophets who prophesy in my name although I did not send them, and who say, `Sword and famine shall not come on this land': By sword and famine those prophets shall be consumed. (14:13-15)

Jeremiah is categorically told – its just bad news, and you have to bring it!

We finally hear what everyone has done wrong:

Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; (7:18)

The people may well have believed that Ishtar or Ashtoreth the Queen of Heaven was more help in making their crops grow, than this irate god of mountains and storms. Very occasionally Yahweh gives some agricultural advice:

"Break up your fallow ground,
and sow not among thorns (4:3)

But it’s never very convincing. He’s much more likely to blast the entire farm with a curse:

 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, upon man and beast, upon the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched. (7:18)

He is the bringer of evil:

 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such evil upon this place that the ears of every one who hears of it will tingle. Because the people have forsaken me, and have profaned this place by burning incense in it to other gods whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known; and because they have filled this place with the blood of innocents (19:3-4).

Yahweh complaining about the shedding of the blood of innocents! Seymour Light was shocked. Was that not precisely what he has been doing and training his people to do, in page after page, book after book of the Torah? 

All this doom is too much for Jeremiah, who ends up regretting the day he was born and, cursing his own parents:

Cursed be the day
on which I was born!
The day when my mother bore me,
let it not be blessed!
[15] Cursed be the man
who brought the news to my father,
"A son is born to you,"
making him very glad. (20:14)

Yahweh realises that he has not yet cursed the prophets:

 Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts concerning the prophets:
"Behold, I will feed them with wormwood,
and give them poisoned water to drink;
for from the prophets of Jerusalem
ungodliness has gone forth into all the land."

And what did they do wrong? They have been ‘filling you with vain hopes’ explained the Lord. (23:16)

Earth gets re-Cursed

As if all the dire curses unleashed by Yahweh upon Planet Earth in the Book of Isaiah were not enough, it receives a new lot in the Book of Jeremiah. To start with Yahweh claims that:

"Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words, behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, says the LORD, and for Nebuchadrez'zar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all these nations round about; I will utterly destroy them, and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting reproach.
[10] Moreover, I will banish from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones and the light of the lamp. 

This is retrospective prophecy, written after the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem (586 BCE), made to appear as if Jeremiah were foretelling it! Babylon will get its due reward for helping Yahweh:

This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity, says the LORD, making the land an everlasting waste. I will bring upon that land all the words which I have uttered against it, everything written in this book, which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations. (25:12-14)

This alludes to Cyrus defeating the Babylonians in 539 BCE, written after it and masquerading as prophecy. An evil scheme is devised by Yahweh for ruining the nations:

Thus the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: "Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. They shall drink and stagger and be crazed because of the sword which I am sending among them. So I took the cup from the LORD's hand, and made all the nations to whom the Lord sent me drink it: Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, its kings and princes, to make them a desolation and a waste, a hissing and a curse, as at this day; Pharaoh king of Egypt, his servants, his princes, all his people, etc., etc.

Then you shall say to them, `Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Drink, be drunk and vomit, fall and rise no more, because of the sword which I am sending among you. And if they refuse to accept the cup from your hand to drink, then you shall say to them, Thus says the LORD of hosts: You must drink! For behold, I begin to work evil at the city which is called by my name, and shall you go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth, says the LORD of hosts.(25:8-13)

How, Seymour Light wondered, can any civilised society hope to survive or prosper, taking these books packed with curses, rage, race supremacism, endless mass murder etc. as sacred texts? 
 
'Upon all the bare heights in the desert, destroyers have come; for the sword of the Lord devours from one end of the land to the other; no flesh has peace. .. because of the fierce anger of the Lord.' (Jeremiah 12:12-13)  To be sure, it is wonder that the Western World has survived this long, with so depreaved a deity-system, reflected Seymour Light.