Jeremiah 3:22-25 New English Translation
22 Come back to me, you wayward people.
I want to cure your waywardness.[a]
Say,[b] ‘Here we are. We come to you
because you are the Lord our God.
23 We know our noisy worship of false gods
on the hills and mountains did not help us.[c]
We know that the Lord our God
is the only one who can deliver Israel.[d]
24 From earliest times our worship of that shameful god, Baal,
has taken away[e] all that our ancestors[f] worked for.
It has taken away our flocks and our herds
and even our sons and daughters.
25 Let us acknowledge[g] our shame.
Let us bear the disgrace that we deserve.[h]
For we have sinned against the Lord our God,
both we and our ancestors.
From earliest times to this very day
we have not obeyed the Lord our God.’
Footnotes
- Jeremiah 3:22 tn Or “I will forgive your apostasies.” Heb “I will [or want to] heal your apostasies.” For the use of the verb “heal” (רָפָא, rafaʾ) to refer to spiritual healing and forgiveness, see Hos 14:4.
- Jeremiah 3:22 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 the people’s words are a response to the Lord’s invitation, a response which is said to be inadequate according to the continuation in 4:1-4, or whether they are the Lord’s model for Israel’s confession of repentance, to which 4:1-4 adds further instructions about the proper heart attitude that should accompany it. The former implies a dialogue with an unmarked, twofold shift in speaker between 3:22b-25 and 4:1-4, while the latter assumes the same main speaker throughout, with an unmarked instruction only in 3:22b-25. The latter disrupts the flow of the passage less and appears more likely.
- Jeremiah 3:23 tn Heb “Truly in vain from the hills the noise/commotion [and from] the mountains.” The syntax of the Hebrew sentence is very elliptical here.
- Jeremiah 3:23 tn Heb “Truly in the Lord our God is deliverance for Israel.”
- Jeremiah 3:24 tn Heb “From our youth the shameful thing has eaten up….” The shameful thing is specifically identified as Baal in Jer 11:13. Compare also the shift in certain names such as Ishbaal (“man of Baal”) to Ishbosheth (“man of shame”).
- Jeremiah 3:24 tn Heb “fathers” (also in v. 25).
- Jeremiah 3:25 tn Heb “Let us lie down in….”
- Jeremiah 3:25 tn Heb “Let us be covered with disgrace.”
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