Jeremiah 3 Footnotes

3:1 Jeremiah referred to the provision in the law of Moses that forbids a man from taking back a wife he has divorced if she has married another man in the interim (Dt 24:1-3). His question implied that Israel (the “wife”) was asking to return to the Lord (her first husband) after being espoused to false gods. But the first husband, in such a case, would not be likely to take the wife back. This passage does not issue a teaching about divorce and remarriage, but is using the Mosaic instruction to make a point about Israel’s status with the Lord.

3:7 The Lord’s rhetorical question did not imply that he lacked foreknowledge of Israel’s refusal to return. God knows when people will refuse to repent (Ex 4:21). His question simply built on the question of v. 1. For God to speak to himself is a literary device found elsewhere in Scripture, from Genesis onward (“Let us make man in our image,” Gn 1:26).

3:18 The kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrians a century and a half earlier, yet Jeremiah’s prophecy referred to the “house of Israel” as a current entity although only the kingdom of Judah remained at the time. Israel is the name for the covenant community of the Lord, which includes Judah; its use for the northern kingdom, as a political entity, was a secondary application. The prophet was concerned with his people as a religious community, so he used the name Israel. An additional factor is that Josiah had restored to Judah much of the territory that had formerly been part of northern Israel, so the kingdom’s extent had come to approximate that of David and Solomon’s united Israel.

3:19-20 The Lord’s words suggest that his plans for Israel did not materialize as he expected because the people turned from him. A totally programmed response of obedience from his people would have brought him no honor or pleasure; God took the risk of allowing them a choice, as he did in creation with man and woman in the garden. Scripture looks at the question of humanity’s response to God realistically, from the human side of the equation. To ask whether God could have ordered events differently, compelling Israel to remain loyal, is to introduce a hypothetical concern foreign to the biblical perspective. On “I thought,” see note on v. 7.