19
📚Thus says the LORD: “Go and get a potter’s earthenware jar, and take some of the elders of the people, and some of the elders of the priests,2 📚and go out to the valley of the son of Hinnom, which is at the entrance of the Gate of the Potsherd 📖, and there proclaim the words that I will tell you, 3 📚and say, ‘Hear the word of the LORD, O kings of Judah, and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: See, I will bring disaster on this place; the ears of whoever hears of it will tingle, 4 📚because they have forsaken me, and have made this a foreign place, and have burned incense in it to other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers have known, nor the kings of Judah, and have filled this place with the blood of innocents. 5 📚They have also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire as burnt offerings to Baal. I did not command this, or speak of it, nor did it enter my mind. 6 📚Therefore, see, the days are coming, says the LORD, that this place will no longer be called Tophet, or The Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but The Valley of Slaughter.
7 📚“And I will make void the plans of Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies, and by the hands of those who seek their lives, and I will give their corpses as food for the birds of the sky, and for the beasts of the earth. 8 📚And I will make this city desolate, and an object of hissing. Everyone who passes by it will be astonished and hiss because of all its plagues. 9 📚And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and every one of them will eat the flesh of his friend in the siege and distress, with which their enemies and those who seek their lives, will distress them.’
19:2-9 Notes on Jer 7:30-34.⚜
19:9 Lev 26:29; Deut 28:49-57; Lam 2:20; 4:10 – cannibalism actually occurred during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.⚜
10 📚“Then you shall break the jar in the sight of the men who go with you, 11 📚and say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts: Like this I will break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s jar that cannot be made whole again; and they will bury them in Tophet, until there is no room to bury.
19:10-11 God has no more difficulty in smashing a nation than Jeremiah in smashing a clay pot.⚜
12 📚I will do so to this place, says the LORD, and to its inhabitants, and even make this city like Tophet. 13 📚And the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses of the kings of Judah, will be defiled like the place of Tophet, because of all the houses on whose roofs they have burned incense to all the starry host 📖 of heaven, and poured out drink offerings to other gods.’ ”
19:12-13 Tophet was defiled by death, and by the action of King Josiah (2 Kings 23:10). Josiah probably leveled the shrines there to the ground. So would God do to Jerusalem.⚜
14 📚Then Jeremiah came from Tophet, where the LORD had sent him to prophesy, and he stood in the court of the LORD’s house, and said to all the people, 15 📚“Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘See, I will bring on this city and on all her towns all the disaster that I have proclaimed against it, because they have hardened 📖 their necks, that they might not hear my words.’ ”
19:14-15 Jeremiah was determined, at whatever danger to himself (Jer 18:23), to declare God’s message to all the people. Compare Acts 20:24; 21:13.⚜