Jeremiah 3:7

Yet even after she had done all that, I thought that she might come back to me. ¹  But she did not. Her sister, unfaithful Judah, saw what she did. ² 

2Ki 17:13,14; 2Ch 30:6-12; Jer 3:8-11; Eze 16:46; Eze 23:2-4; Ho 6:1-4; Ho 14:1

¹ tn Or “I said to her, ‘Come back to me!’” The verb אָמַר (’amar) usually means “to say,” but here it means “to think,” of an assumption that turns out to be wrong (so HALOT 66.4 s.v. אמר); cf. Gen 44:28; Jer 3:19; Pss 82:6; 139:11; Job 29:18; Ruth 4:4; Lam 3:18.

sn Open theists suggest that passages such as this indicate God has limited foreknowledge; however, more traditional theologians view this passage as an extended metaphor in which God presents himself as a deserted husband, hoping against hope that his adulterous wife might return to him. The point of the metaphor is not to make an assertion about God’s foreknowledge, but to develop the theme of God’s heartbreak due to Israel’s unrepentance.

² tn The words “what she did” are not in the text but are implicit from the context and are supplied in the translation for clarification.