Jeremiah 18:1–19:15

THIS IS THE word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: 2“Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” 3So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. 4But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.

5Then the word of the LORD came to me: 6“O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. 7If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, 8and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. 9And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, 10and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.

11“Now therefore say to the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, ‘This is what the LORD says: Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’ 12But they will reply, ‘It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart.’”

13Therefore this is what the Lord says:

“Inquire among the nations:

Who has ever heard anything like this?

A most horrible thing has been done

by Virgin Israel.

14Does the snow of Lebanon

ever vanish from its rocky slopes?

Do its cool waters from distant sources

ever cease to flow?

15Yet my people have forgotten me;

they burn incense to worthless idols,

which made them stumble in their ways

and in the ancient paths.

They made them walk in bypaths

and on roads not built up.

16Their land will be laid waste,

an object of lasting scorn;

all who pass by will be appalled

and will shake their heads.

17Like a wind from the east,

I will scatter them before their enemies;

I will show them my back and not my face

in the day of their disaster.”

18They said, “Come, let’s make plans against Jeremiah; for the teaching of the law by the priest will not be lost, nor will counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophets. So come, let’s attack him with our tongues and pay no attention to anything he says.”

19Listen to me, O LORD;

hear what my accusers are saying!

20Should good be repaid with evil?

Yet they have dug a pit for me.

Remember that I stood before you

and spoke in their behalf

to turn your wrath away from them.

21So give their children over to famine;

hand them over to the power of the sword.

Let their wives be made childless and widows;

let their men be put to death,

their young men slain by the sword in battle.

22Let a cry be heard from their houses

when you suddenly bring invaders against them,

for they have dug a pit to capture me

and have hidden snares for my feet.

23But you know, O LORD,

all their plots to kill me.

Do not forgive their crimes

or blot out their sins from your sight.

Let them be overthrown before you;

deal with them in the time of your anger.

19:1This is what the LORD says: “Go and buy a clay jar from a potter. Take along some of the elders of the people and of the priests 2and go out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, near the entrance of the Potsherd Gate. There proclaim the words I tell you, 3and say, ‘Hear the word of the LORD, O kings of Judah and people of Jerusalem. This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Listen! I am going to bring a disaster on this place that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. 4For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned sacrifices in it to gods that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. 5They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. 6So beware, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.

7“‘In this place I will ruin the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who seek their lives, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth. 8I will devastate this city and make it an object of scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds. 9I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives.’

10“Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching, 11and say to them, ‘This is what the LORD Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired. They will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room. 12This is what I will do to this place and to those who live here, declares the LORD. I will make this city like Topheth. 13The houses in Jerusalem and those of the kings of Judah will be defiled like this place, Topheth—all the houses where they burned incense on the roofs to all the starry hosts and poured out drink offerings to other gods.’”

14Jeremiah then returned from Topheth, where the LORD had sent him to prophesy, and stood in the court of the LORD’s temple and said to all the people, 15“This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: ‘Listen! I am going to bring on this city and the villages around it every disaster I pronounced against them, because they were stiff-necked and would not listen to my words.’”

Original Meaning

THESE TWO CHAPTERS do not preserve dates in Jeremiah’s career, and it is possible, but not necessary, to interpret them as recording two successive acts of the prophet. But it is also possible that the events of visiting a potter and visiting the Valley of Ben Hinnom to break a pot are separated by months or even years. Probably the two accounts are placed together as part of a catchword principle or the habit of topical collection (both deal with prophetic signs using pottery). In any case, there is much to be said for taking the two chapters together. Both function in this book as a means of illustrating the slide of Judah into irreversible failure. They are linked, furthermore, with chapter 20, where Jeremiah is publicly humiliated (cf. 20:1).

The basic literary units of the two chapters may be set out as follows:

A. 18:1–17: The prose description of a visit to the potter’s house (vv. 1–12) is followed by a poetic oracle of God’s response (vv. 13–17).

B. 18:18: Jeremiah’s opponents plan an attack on him.

C. 18:19–22: Jeremiah laments his circumstances and prays for vindication.

D. 19:1–13: Jeremiah takes a pot to the Valley of Ben Hinnom and breaks it as a symbol of God’s judgment to come.

E. 19:14–15: Jeremiah goes to the temple to announce God’s judgment on the land.

18:1–17. Readers receive an account of Jeremiah’s visit to a potter’s workshop and commentary on its significance. Verse 1 is clearly the work of Jeremiah’s editor(s). What is reported, however, has an autobiographical element still preserved (the “I” of 18:3; the “me” of 18:5). For his contemporaries, Jeremiah’s visit to the workshop and his announcement of God’s word have the profile of a symbolic act, what might be termed a parable in action.1 Jeremiah’s readers and hearers can use their imagination to envisage the workshop and the efforts of a potter to shape wet clay into a vessel ready to be fired and then used as a container.

God (the potter) has the sovereign right to make and remake the clay as he sees fit. Wet clay is malleable, which means it is capable of being formed in a variety of shapes. But it is also capable of collapsing its shape or of being ill-mixed and thus unsuitable for firing. Not just any wet clay will do, and not just any individual can shape a vessel properly. It takes a correct mixture of clay and the skills of a trained artisan to form2 a pot for successful firing.

The meaning of this illustration is clear. Just as the potter may form and reform the same clay until he is either satisfied or decides to dump the clay completely, so God can form and reform the house of Israel. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel” (v. 6). This affirmation of God’s sovereign right over the people he has formed is followed by the “two-way” formulation of God’s dealings with any nation. If God announces judgment on a nation and that nation repents, then that judgment can be reversed or simply canceled. Correspondingly, if God has announced goodness for a kingdom and it acts faithlessly, then that good can also be reversed. The Hebrew verbs used for “uproot,” “tear down,” and “destroy” in verse 7 and those for “build” and “plant” in verse 9 are the same ones used in the call of Jeremiah to be a prophet to the nations (1:10).

The two-way formulation implies that a wholehearted repentance on the part of Judah can avert the judgment that looms over them. If so, it seems likely that this passage comes from an earlier period in the prophet’s public ministry, when he held out the hope that Judah and Jerusalem could make the necessary changes in public life.3 Verse 12, however, puts a quote in the mouth of the people to the effect that they will follow their own stubborn heart. This quote, of course, is Jeremiah’s portrait of them, based on their actions and (non-)reception of his prophecies. Judah will not repent, and irrevocable judgment will come.

God does not take “no” for an answer easily. The poetic reply in verses 13–17 begins with an indignant question: “Who has ever heard anything like this?” (cf. also the incredulous charge in 2:10). An appalling thing has happened; God’s people have forgotten him and worshiped other deities, worthless idols unable to help them. Verse 17 has a surprising metaphorical “turn” to it: In the coming day of judgment, God will show his “back” (ʾorep)4 to the people and not his face.

18:18–23. Jeremiah’s opponents are again the issue. In verse 18 they intend to attack him verbally and pay no attention to anything he says. Their persecution of the prophet shows that they have also rejected God’s word to them (and to Judah) that Jeremiah represents.5 They prefer the words of other mediators of God’s will to the judgmental pronouncements of Jeremiah. Note the three forms of mediating God’s will: the priest with tora (NIV “law”), counsel from the wise, and the word from the prophet. The point seems to be that although they reject Jeremiah, they will not lack for other sources of guidance.

In verses 19–23, in another personal lament, Jeremiah prays for God’s judgment on his enemies. His harsh words come in the context of a prayer for vindication from God and for a temporal judicial sentence by God on those who malign him. The metaphor he uses is that of a pit dug by his opponents (18:20, 22), a pit designed to catch him. It is a hunting image, a trap laid to catch prey, but also a proverbial symbol.6 Jeremiah prays, in essence, that his enemies may fall into the pit they have dug. He asks God to oversee the consequences of their acts rather than for a personal opportunity to judge them. Since they have committed an evil in attacking an innocent person, may the evil they intend fall back on them.

19:1–13. God now instructs Jeremiah to perform another symbolic act (a parable in action), also with a pottery jar. Presumably the actions described were carried out, though only the instructions and a brief report in 19:14–15 remain. God commands Jeremiah to buy an earthenware jar and to take a group of elders and priests to the Valley of Ben Hinnom where the Topheth, a place for human sacrificial rites, is located.7 This valley is situated immediately south of the temple mount area and continues to the western side of the old city of Jerusalem. Before he breaks the jar in the valley of slaughter and burial, Jeremiah must prophesy judgment on the kings of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. The failures of these addressees are listed as the worship of other gods, the spilling of innocent blood, and especially the worship of Baal through the burning of children in a sacrificial fire.

With the breaking of the jar, Jeremiah indicates the irrevocable judgment to come. Just as the smashed earthenware cannot be repaired, Judah cannot be reformed. For original hearers and readers there is likely added significance to the earthenware pot. The Topheth was not only the place of ceremonial slaughter; it likely also contained a section where earthenware jars with the charred remains of sacrificial victims were collected. Similar places are known in Phoenicia (Tyre and Achzib) and among Phoenician colonies in the western Mediterranean (e.g., Carthage).

Jeremiah understands the Topheth as a place of defilement and its earthenware jars as symbolic of slaughter. Indeed, he gives the valley a devastating nickname—“the Valley of Slaughter” (cf. 7:32, where the same name change is given). Judgment will come on Jerusalem in such a way that there will be no other place to bury the dead except in the Topheth, the place of ritual slaughter and cultic defilement. One of the characteristics of Topheth is the crowded nature of the burial section, where pots full of bones and charred remains are stacked together.

19:14–15. Jeremiah leaves the Topheth and goes to the courtyard of the temple to proclaim that God will “bring on this city and the villages around it every disaster I pronounced against them, because they were stiff-necked and would not listen to my words.” His presence in the temple courtyard is tantamount to bringing the defilement of the Topheth into the temple, as any reader familiar with the purity laws of the Old Testament would recognize (a cemetery or a corpse rendered a person ceremonially unclean). Furthermore, the reference to “stiff-necked” people catches up the failure of the people to recognize the possibility of repentance that was announced as possible in 18:7–11.

Bridging Contexts

THE EDITORIAL ARRANGEMENT of chapters 18–19 is a key to how the original acts and words of Jeremiah are to instruct later readers. From the potter’s workshop, through the prophetic lament of persecution, to the shattering scene at the Topheth, the progression of the accounts confirms Judah’s guilt and the irrevocable judgment on the historical horizon. Later readers are told in no uncertain terms why Judah fell to the Babylonians. It was God’s just judgment. With the enumeration of Judah’s sins, later readers are also asked to search their own lives to see if they too are guilty of these failings.

On interpreting prophecies. In addition to the instruction about the past, later readers are confronted with a teaching about the prophetic word that opens their present and future to God (18:7–11). How should they interpret unconditional prophecies of judgment or peace? Concerning judgment, Jeremiah announces that God will “relent” when people repent of their evil deeds. Correspondingly, God will “reconsider” the good when a people fall into sinful behavior. Some prophecies explicitly contain conditional elements within their formal structure. The issue for later readers, however, is whether unconditional prophecies should be understood as determinism (as unalterable) or as an expression of God’s resolve to act in light of particular circumstances, a resolve that may change as historical circumstances themselves change and as God moves toward the fulfillment of his temporal purposes to a yet grander design.

With respect to the word “relent” (Heb. nḥm) in Jer. 18:8, some translations render it as “repent.” The theological issue at stake is not God’s repentance from evil or whether God is fickle; rather, the issue is how to account for the personal activity of God who responds as Judge and Deliverer in the historical process. Jonah, for example, did not understand God as fickle when God “relented” over Nineveh’s changed circumstances. The prophet believed all along that God was slow to anger and abundant in mercy—and for that reason, he knew that God might use Jonah’s own unconditional prophecy of judgment as a means by which to effect change in Nineveh (Jonah 3:1–4:11).

The question of interpreting prophecies about the future is a fundamental one for interpreters who wish to bring God’s announcements about the future from the Old Testament into the present: How is God the final interpreter of his own Word? Some interpreters will see in prophecy a blueprint for things as yet unrealized; others will see primarily a teaching about God’s moral resolve that preserves his freedom to act in surprising ways.

In Jer. 18:12 the indictment of the people because of their stubborn and evil heart catches up the theme of the heart’s corruption in the larger context. The saying also sets the stage for the portrayal of the people as “stiff-necked” in 19:15. God will hold true to his announced judgment where an ingrained evil is in evidence; but even so, the possibility of change is open to the descendants of the evil generation as God uses even the harsh words of a previous judgment to call his people to repentance.

Potter and clay. The potter’s workshop takes up the theme of God’s sovereignty over the things he has made. It is the right of the potter (who knows what potential the clay has) to remake and to reform a vessel until it is suitable. At an interpretive level, this analogy of potter and clay fits the question of God and unconditional prophecy. Theological reflection begins by asking the purpose for which God sent a prophetic word in the past. God may reshape his future dealings with his people in light of what that Word accomplishes among them or among those who read it (even much later). It is not so much a single fulfillment of prophecy that Christians should look for as a constant encounter with prophecy and with the God who makes sovereign use of prophecy in different contexts.

Paul took up this analogy of potter and clay in his reflection on the state of Israel according to the flesh and God’s larger design in calling the Gentiles to new life in Christ (Rom. 9–11). It is God’s sovereign right as the “potter” to make a common vessel (and to judge it) as it is to select one for special service (9:19–21). The apostle saw in God’s sending of Christ the outworking of a plan to bind all over “to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (11:32). God’s sovereign mercy is the foundation of the apostle’s wrestling with the difficult subject of Israel’s disobedience and her future. He was convinced that Israel’s rejection of Christ as the Messiah was a hardening of the heart that God could use. It would not mean the final rejection of Israel but the opportunity for the Gentiles. God is a merciful and righteous “potter,” not a puppet master pulling chains.

Persecution and vindication. In his lament over his circumstances Jeremiah once again finds himself in the setting reserved for prophets and disciples. He is persecuted and rejected by contemporaries because of his words and deeds. As a result he prays for God’s judgment on the persecutors. Readers do well to remember that what Jeremiah seeks is judicial sentencing, not personal vengeance. At the same time, we see the amazing grace of the Christ who prays for his enemies when we recognize the legitimacy of Jeremiah’s lament and his desire for vindication. Grace is indeed unmerited favor when someone is faced with the legitimacy of judgment.

Contemporary Significance

WORDS OF JUDGMENT. As with the previous words of judgment in Jeremiah, one avenue of appropriation moves along the way of demonstrating God’s righteousness in the face of ingrained evil. Since the book is filled with passages proclaiming judgment, modern readers are given many opportunities to reflect on God’s ways with the world. If, for example, we see the hand of God judging the failures of communism in the fall of the Berlin Wall, are we able to see any correcting hand in the Vietnam War and its tragic aftermath or in the continuing struggles over civil rights? Some, perhaps many, North American Christians may want to equivocate in assessing these last two matters, but Christians from other cultures may want to encourage North Americans to take a second, prayerful look for a judging and correcting hand. The emphasis on judgment and on Judah’s failure to repent can be instructive to modern readers, if only to remind them that it is an awesome thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

The symbolic acts of the prophet (potter’s workshop, broken jar) remind us that ministry calls for the embracing of society and even the embodiment of God’s message through acts of service. Jesus’ own ministry, whether in judgment or deliverance, was replete with symbolic acts and signs that conveyed the essence of his message. Jeremiah’s confession that he had stood before God and prayed for the people (Jer. 18:20) is testimony to the cost of discipleship. A community that has not prayed for the lost and has not interceded for the wicked will not be able to have a prophetic ministry.

God’s word of judgment is not unalterable for those with ears to hear and eyes to see. The wonder of Jeremiah’s announcement that God can “relent” and “reconsider” is not that God can change approaches to bring about his purposes. It is the wonder that God opens up ways of transformation and change in the midst of sinful and painful circumstances. What is resistant to change is not God’s messages about the future but people stuck in self-destructive activities.

God’s sovereignty. Jeremiah’s description of the potter opens up avenues to explore the classical doctrine of God’s sovereignty. It is usually fruitless to discuss God’s power and purpose in the abstract. Power for what and about whom? A philosophical description can constrict and thereby control, since it is anthropologically generated. God’s power, what is often called God’s omnipotence, is known in relationship. Similarly with respect to God’s goodness and predestination, his power and goodness are discovered in relationship and only acknowledged adequately by those who have committed themselves to know God. The proclamation that God judged Judah is not news of interest to later readers unless it somehow instructs them about the ways of God, to whom they too are related by confession.

Confidence in the potter comes finally in knowing the potter, not in observing him spin the wheel and shape the clay from the vantage point of a supposed neutrality. The Pauline reflection on the potter (Rom. 9:18–24) develops this point profoundly and in a manner consistent with the book of Jeremiah. The clay does not have the right to question the potter; but much more significant is the claim that the potter has intentions of preparing vessels for his glory and fit for his mercy. In the process of fulfilling these purposes, vessels can be shaped and reshaped and used in ways not understood by the vessels themselves. Their “essence” is not thereby violated but taken up and used by the God of grace.

In authentic discussions about God’s purpose and goodness, there is an inherent reference to a future entrusted to God; it is a future not completely understood from a finite human perspective. One is called to trust in the work of the potter, to walk by faith and not by sight, and to accept God’s judgment in the present in the hope that the Potter will reshape the future.

Certainly one of the stupendous events of the twentieth century happened with the collapse of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The impact of this collapse is still being worked out. Each state has its own version of the impact as do the churches in the region. Can anyone say for sure where the collapse will lead? No Christian should doubt the role of God in this process; the contribution of the churches to the collapse is widely recognized. Here is a paradigm of the surprising providence of God being worked out. Was the collapse predicted in the Old Testament? Not precisely, but the God who reshapes history and speaks authoritatively is revealed in the Old Testament, and he is still at work.