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 

I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me but she did not, and her unfaithful sister Judah saw it.

"I thought, ‘After she has done all these things she will return to Me’; but she did not return, and her treacherous sister Judah saw it.

I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me. But she did not come back. And though her faithless sister Judah saw this,

I assumed that after she had gotten it out of her system, she'd come back, but she didn't. Her flighty sister, Judah, saw what she did.

And I said, After she has done all these things she will come back to me; but she did not. And her false sister Judah saw it.

And I thought, "After she has done all this she will return to me"; but she did not return, and her false sister Judah saw it.

"And I said, after she had done all these things , ‘Return to Me.’ But she did not return. And her treacherous sister Judah saw it.

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 

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.