Jeremiah 2:15

2:15 Like lions his enemies roar victoriously over him;

they raise their voices in triumph. 1 

They have laid his land waste;

his cities have been burned down and deserted. 2 

Jeremiah 12:7

12:7 “I will abandon my nation. 3 

I will forsake the people I call my own. 4 

I will turn my beloved people 5 

over to the power 6  of their enemies.

Jeremiah 15:14

15:14 I will make you serve your enemies 7  in a land that you know nothing about.

For my anger is like a fire that will burn against you.”

Jeremiah 34:20

34:20 I will hand them over to their enemies who want to kill them. Their dead bodies will become food for the birds and the wild animals. 8 

1 tn Heb “Lions shout over him, they give out [raise] their voices.”

sn The reference to lions is here a metaphor for the Assyrians (and later the Babylonians, see Jer 50:17). The statement about lions roaring over their prey implies that the prey has been vanquished.

2 tn Heb “without inhabitant.”

3 tn Heb “my house.” Or “I have abandoned my nation.” The word “house” has been used throughout Jeremiah for both the temple (e.g., 7:2, 10), the nation or people of Israel or of Judah (e.g. 3:18, 20), or the descendants of Jacob (i.e., the Israelites, e.g., 2:4). Here the parallelism argues that it refers to the nation of Judah. The translation throughout vv. 5-17 assumes that the verb forms are prophetic perfects, the form that conceives of the action as being as good as done. It is possible that the forms are true perfects and refer to a past destruction of Judah. If so, it may have been connected with the assaults against Judah in 598/7 b.c. by the Babylonians and the nations surrounding Judah recorded in 2 Kgs 24:14. No other major recent English version reflects these as prophetic perfects besides NIV and NCV, which does not use the future until v. 10. Hence the translation is somewhat tentative. C. Feinberg, “Jeremiah,” EBC 6:459 takes them as prophetic perfects and H. Freedman (Jeremiah [SoBB], 88) mentions that as a possibility for explaining the presence of this passage here. For another example of an extended use of the prophetic perfect without imperfects interspersed see Isa 8:23-9:6. The translation assumes they are prophetic and are part of the Lord’s answer to the complaint about the prosperity of the wicked; both the wicked Judeans and the wicked nations God will use to punish them will be punished.

4 tn Heb “my inheritance.”

5 tn Heb “the beloved of my soul.” Here “soul” stands for the person and is equivalent to “my.”

6 tn Heb “will give…into the hands of.”

7 tc This reading follows the Greek and Syriac versions and several Hebrew mss. Other Hebrew mss read “I will cause the enemy to pass through a land.” The difference in the reading is between one Hebrew letter, a dalet (ד) and a resh (ר).

8 sn See this same phrase in Jer 7:33; 16:4; 19:7.