Jeremiah 3:22

3:22 Come back to me, you wayward people.

I want to cure your waywardness. 1 

Say, 2  ‘Here we are. We come to you

because you are the Lord our God.

Jeremiah 35:8

35:8 We and our wives and our sons and daughters have obeyed everything our ancestor Jonadab commanded us. We have never drunk wine. 3 

Jeremiah 51:51

51:51 ‘We 4  are ashamed because we have been insulted. 5 

Our faces show our disgrace. 6 

For foreigners have invaded

the holy rooms 7  in the Lord’s temple.’

1 tn Or “I will forgive your apostasies.” Heb “I will [or want to] heal your apostasies.” For the use of the verb “heal” (רָפָא, rafa’) to refer to spiritual healing and forgiveness see Hos 14:4.

2 tn Or “They say.” There is an obvious ellipsis of a verb of saying here since the preceding words are those of the Lord and the following are those of the people. However, there is debate about whether these are the response of the people to the Lord’s invitation, a response which is said to be inadequate according to the continuation in 4:1-4, or whether these are the Lord’s model for Israel’s confession of repentance to which he adds further instructions about the proper heart attitude that should accompany it in 4:1-4. The former implies a dialogue with an unmarked twofold shift in speaker between 3:22b-25 and 4:1-4:4 while the latter assumes the same main speaker throughout with an unmarked instruction only in 3:22b-25. This disrupts the flow of the passage less and appears more likely.

3 tn Heb “We have not drunk wine all our days.” Actually vv. 8b-9a are a series of infinitive constructs plus the negative לְבִלְתִּי (lÿvilti) explaining the particulars of how they have obeyed, i.e., by not drinking wine…and by not building….” The more direct declarative statement is used here to shorten the sentence and is more in keeping with contemporary style.

4 sn The exiles lament the way they have been humiliated.

5 tn Heb “we have heard an insult.”

6 tn Heb “disgrace covers our face.”

7 tn Or “holy places, sanctuaries.”