Jeremiah 25:15

Judah and the Nations Will Experience God’s Wrath

25:15 So 1  the Lord, the God of Israel, spoke to me in a vision. 2  “Take this cup from my hand. It is filled with the wine of my wrath. 3  Take it and make the nations to whom I send you drink it.

Jeremiah 25:22

25:22 all the kings of Tyre, 4  all the kings of Sidon; 5  all the kings of the coastlands along the sea; 6 

1 tn This is an attempt to render the Hebrew particle כִּי (ki) which is probably being used in the sense that BDB 473-74 s.v. כִּי 3.c notes, i.e., the causal connection is somewhat loose, related here to the prophecies against the nations. “So” seems to be the most appropriate way to represent this.

2 tn Heb “Thus said the Lord, the God of Israel, to me.” It is generally understood that the communication is visionary. God does not have a “hand” and the action of going to the nations and making them drink of the cup are scarcely literal. The words are supplied in the translation to show the figurative nature of this passage.

3 sn “Drinking from the cup of wrath” is a common figure to represent being punished by God. Isaiah had used it earlier to refer to the punishment which Judah was to suffer and from which God would deliver her (Isa 51:17, 22) and Jeremiah’s contemporary Habakkuk uses it of Babylon “pouring out its wrath” on the nations and in turn being forced to drink the bitter cup herself (Hab 2:15-16). In Jer 51:7 the Lord will identify Babylon as the cup which makes the nations stagger. In v. 16 drinking from the cup will be identified with the sword (i.e., wars) that the Lord will send against the nations. Babylon is also to be identified as the sword (cf. Jer 51:20-23). What is being alluded to here in highly figurative language is the judgment that the Lord will wreak on the nations listed here through the Babylonians. The prophecy given here in symbolical form is thus an expansion of the one in vv. 9-11.

4 map For location see Map1-A2; Map2-G2; Map4-A1; JP3-F3; JP4-F3.

5 sn Tyre and Sidon are mentioned within the judgment on the Philistines in Jer 47:4. They were Phoenician cities to the north and west of Judah on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in what is now Lebanon.

map For location see Map1-A1; JP3-F3; JP4-F3.

6 sn The connection with Tyre and Sidon suggests that these were Phoenician colonies. See also Isa 23:2.