Discovery BoxJeremiah 2:25 
Context2:25 Do not chase after other gods until your shoes wear out
and your throats become dry. 1
But you say, ‘It is useless for you to try and stop me
because I love those foreign gods 2 and want to pursue them!’
Jeremiah 48:18
Context48:18 Come down from your place of honor;
sit on the dry ground, 3 you who live in Dibon. 4
For the one who will destroy Moab will attack you;
he will destroy your fortifications.
Jeremiah 50:12
Context50:12 But Babylonia will be put to great shame.
The land where you were born 5 will be disgraced.
Indeed, 6 Babylonia will become the least important of all nations.
It will become a dry and barren desert.
Jeremiah 51:43
Context51:43 The towns of Babylonia have become heaps of ruins.
She has become a dry and barren desert.
No one lives in those towns any more.
No one even passes through them. 7
1 tn Heb “Refrain your feet from being bare and your throat from being dry/thirsty.”
2 tn Heb “It is useless! No!” For this idiom, see Jer 18:12; NEB “No; I am desperate.”
3 tn Heb “sit in thirst.” The abstract “thirst” is put for the concrete, i.e., thirsty or parched ground (cf. Deut 8:19; Isa 35:7; Ps 107:33) for the concrete. There is no need to emend to “filth” (צֹאָה [tso’ah] for צָמָא [tsama’]) as is sometimes suggested.
4 tn Heb “inhabitant of Daughter Dibon.” “Daughter” is used here as often in Jeremiah for the personification of a city, a country, or its inhabitants. The word “inhabitant” is to be understood as a collective as also in v. 19.
sn Dibon was an important fortified city located on the “King’s Highway,” the main north-south road in Transjordan. It was the site at which the Moabite Stone was found in 1868 and was one of the cities mentioned on it. It was four miles north of the Arnon River and thirteen miles east of the Dead Sea. It was one of the main cities on the northern plateau and had been conquered from Sihon and allotted to the tribe of Reuben (Josh 13:17).
5 tn Heb “Your mother will be utterly shamed, the one who gave you birth…” The word “mother” and the parallel term “the one who gave you birth” are used metaphorically for the land of Babylonia. For the figure compare the usage in Isa 50:1 (Judah) and Hos 2:2, 5 (2:4, 7 HT) and see BDB 52 s.v. אֵם 2 and 408 s.v. יָלַד Qal.2.c.
6 tn Heb “Behold.” For the use of this particle see the translator’s note on 1:6.
7 tn Heb “Its towns have become a desolation, [it has become] a dry land and a desert, a land which no man passes through them [referring to “her towns”] and no son of man [= human being] passes through them.” Here the present translation has followed the suggestion of BHS and a number of the modern commentaries in deleting the second occurrence of the word “land,” in which case the words that follow are not a relative clause but independent statements. A number of modern English versions appear to ignore the third feminine plural suffixes which refer back to the cities and refer the statements that follow to the land.
