by your Word give light to our lives. Amen.
We have been reading judgments against the nations, and God is using Babylon to carry out those judgments. In chapter 50 Jeremiah gives God’s word against Babylon. In 50:2 Bel is the chief god in Babylon, and Marduk is Bel’s personal name. Even though God is using Babylon for his own purposes, Babylon is not a God-fearing or God-honoring nation. Babylon will be punished for its actions as well.
The promise at that time (50:4-5) is that the two nations of Israel and Judah will again be one, and again they will live under the covenant.
Jeremiah 52 is the story of the fall of Judah. It functions like a flashback or a summary. If you are thinking, “didn’t we just read about this?” the answer is yes.
We generally attribute the book of Lamentations to Jeremiah. This is the lament of someone who has experienced the judgments described in the book of Jeremiah. It is actually 5 distinct poems (one each chapter), and they are masterfully written. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are acrostic poems where each verse begins with the successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. That would be like a poem in English where the first line began with a, the second with b, the third with c, and so on through z. In this case it is Hebrew – aleph, beth, gimel, dalet, he, all the way through tav. The middle poem has three lines each beginning with the same letter. This is no hastily written little book! Tomorrow we will dig into these poems.
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