Jeremiah 10
Jeremiah 10 draws one of the clearest lines in all of Scripture between the living God and the gods people make. In the middle of a long book of warning, the prophet pauses and turns the whole thing into a kind of courtroom display. He marches the idol out and shows you exactly how it is born: a man cutteth a tree out of the forest, a craftsman shapes it with the axe, it is decked with silver and gold, and then it is fastened with nails and hammers so that it will not fall over. The finished god is stiff and mute - upright as the palm tree, but speak not - and so helpless it has to be carried, because they cannot go. The prophet's verdict is devastating in its plainness: such a thing cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good (v. 5).3
Against that picture the chapter sets the only claim that matters: Forasmuch as there is none like unto thee, O LORD (v. 6). Then it states the thing the whole chapter turns on - But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king (v. 10) - and grounds it in creation: He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion (v. 12). One sentence, dropped into the Hebrew in the language of the nations themselves, settles the case against every rival: The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish (v. 11). To make a god is to bow to something less than yourself; to know the LORD is to know the One who made all things.
The chapter does not end in mockery. It darkens into the storm already gathering - the cities of Judah about to be made desolate, the tent spoiled, the children carried away - and then it turns the whole subject inward and personal. The prophet, speaking for his people, lays down the truest thing a human being can say: O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps (v. 23). We cannot map our own road. And so the man who has just exposed every false god ends not by congratulating himself but by asking the living One to take the reins: O LORD, correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger (v. 24).2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Jeremiah 10:1-5Learn Not the Way of the Heathen
1Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel: 2Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. 3For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. 4They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. 5They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.
The oracle opens with a summons and a warning: Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel… Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them (vv. 1-2). The danger Jeremiah names is not crude or obvious; it is the slow pull of the surrounding culture. The nations around Judah read the sky for omens, feared eclipses and comets and the wheeling of the stars, and built whole religions on that fear. Learn not the way of the heathen, the LORD says - do not pick up their habits of dread. The phrase the signs of heaven points to the sun, moon, and stars treated as powers to be appeased. But the people of the LORD have no business being dismayed by them: the heavens are not gods; they are things the LORD made. The warning is gentle in form and enormous in reach. It asks whether a believer's fears are being shaped by the One who made the stars, or by the same superstitions that drive everyone else.3
Then Jeremiah does something almost comic: he slows the camera down and films an idol being born, step by step, so you cannot miss how ordinary it is. One cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe (v. 3). First it is lumber. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not (v. 4). A craftsman dresses it up, and then - the detail that gives the whole game away - they nail it down so it will not topple over. Think about that. A god that has to be fastened to the wall to keep from falling on its face. The very same hands that swung the axe to fell the tree now drive the nails to prop the idol up. There is no point in the process where life enters the thing; it is wood and metal from start to finish, and the worshipper knows it, because he made it. Jeremiah is not arguing against a worthy rival. He is exposing the absurdity of bowing to something you yourself had to hold upright.
The finished idol is described with a deadpan precision that is hard to forget: They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go (v. 5). It stands stiff and straight like a smoothed palm trunk - and just as silent. It cannot speak; it cannot walk; if it is to be moved at all, someone has to pick it up and carry it. The relationship is exactly backwards from real worship: the worshipper carries his god rather than his God carrying him. Then comes the verdict, and it is the sharpest line in the section: Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good. An idol is not merely weak; it is utterly inert. It cannot hurt you and it cannot help you. There is nothing in it to fear and nothing in it to hope for. To be dismayed at such a thing (v. 2), to bow before it, to ask it for rescue, is to spend your whole life's reverence on something that, by its own maker's admission, can do precisely nothing.
Jeremiah 10:6-16There Is None Like Unto Thee, O LORD
6Forasmuch as there is none like unto thee, O LORD; thou art great, and thy name is great in might. 7Who would not fear thee, O King of nations? for to thee doth it appertain: forasmuch as among all the wise men of the nations, and in all their kingdoms, there is none like unto thee. 8But they are altogether brutish and foolish: the stock is a doctrine of vanities. 9Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz, the work of the workman, and of the hands of the founder: blue and purple is their clothing: they are all the work of cunning men. 10But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation.
The mockery breaks off, and the prophet turns to praise: Forasmuch as there is none like unto thee, O LORD; thou art great, and thy name is great in might. Who would not fear thee, O King of nations? (vv. 6-7). The line there is none like unto thee is the hinge of the whole chapter, and it is sharper than it first sounds. Jeremiah is not saying the LORD is the best among the gods, the strongest competitor in a crowded field. He is saying the LORD is in a category entirely His own - that when you have looked at the idols and looked at Him, you find there is simply nothing to compare. And notice the title: O King of nations. Not merely the God of one people, but the rightful King of all of them, including the very nations whose gods Jeremiah has just exposed. To thee doth it appertain - reverence is His by right; it belongs to Him. The fear the nations waste on the signs of heaven (v. 2) and on their carved gods is owed, all of it, to the One who made both the heavens and the nations.
Verses 8 and 9 turn back for one more look at the idols, and the language is blunt: But they are altogether brutish and foolish: the stock is a doctrine of vanities (v. 8). The word stock means the wooden trunk - the log at the heart of the idol - and Jeremiah calls it a doctrine of vanities: a piece of timber that teaches nothing but emptiness. Then he lingers, almost wonderingly, over the trouble people go to: Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz, the work of the workman, and of the hands of the founder: blue and purple is their clothing: they are all the work of cunning men (v. 9). Look at the effort. Precious metal hauled from the far ends of the trade routes, beaten into thin plates, fitted by skilled metalworkers, draped in the blue and purple of royalty. No expense is spared, no craft is too fine. And the punchline is buried in the last phrase - the work of cunning men. For all the imported gold and expert artistry, the thing remains exactly what human hands made it. You can spend a fortune and summon the finest skill in the world, and at the end you have a very expensive piece of wood.
Now comes the verse the whole chapter turns on, and after the long parade of dead idols it lands with the force of a thunderclap: But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation (v. 10). Three titles fall in a row, and each one is a direct answer to the idols. The idols are false; the LORD is the true God. The idols are dead wood; he is the living God. The idols rot and must be propped up; He is an everlasting king. And then the contrast is driven home by sheer power: where the idol cannot do evil, neither… good (v. 5), the LORD's wrath makes the very earth tremble, and no nation on earth can stand against His indignation. This is the difference between a thing that can do nothing and the One before whom everything that exists must give way. The idol is carried into the room on a man's shoulders; the living God shakes the ground the room stands on.
11The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens. 12He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion. 13When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, and he causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of his treasures. 14Every man is brutish in his knowledge: every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. 15They are vanity, and the work of errors: in the time of their visitation they shall perish. 16The portion of Jacob is not like them: for he is the former of all things; and Israel is the rod of his inheritance: The LORD of hosts is his name.
Verse 11 is one of the strangest verses in the book, and the strangeness is part of its point: it is the only sentence in all of Jeremiah written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, the common language of the wider ancient world. It reads like a sentence handed down in the language of the nations themselves, so the nations can hear the verdict in their own tongue: The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens (v. 11). Here is the single test that decides everything. Did your god make the heavens and the earth? If not - and no idol ever did, since the idols were themselves made - then your god has no future. The very heavens and earth the idols did not create will outlast them: they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens. The thing that was made will not endure; only the Maker endures. It is a quiet, devastating line of reasoning. Whatever did not make the world cannot finally save you in it, and will not even survive it.
Against the gods that made nothing, the prophet sets the God who made everything, and the language opens out into a hymn of creation: He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion (v. 12). Three verbs, each paired with something of God's own: He made the earth by His power; He established the world by His wisdom; He stretched out the heavens by His discretion - His understanding. The verse does not pause to explain the manner of the making; it simply stands in awe that the world is the work of the LORD's power and wisdom, founded and firm. And the proof goes on living all around us: When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens… he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of his treasures (v. 13). The storehouses of the wind, the gathering of the rain clouds, the lightning - these are not random forces; they answer His voice. So the indictment of the idol-makers returns once more, this time with the reason laid bare: Every man is brutish in his knowledge… for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them (v. 14). No breath. That is the whole case in two words. The maker of an idol is a maker of something with no life in it, while the LORD's voice fills the heavens with rain.3
The section closes by naming what the people of God actually have, over against what the idolater has: They are vanity, and the work of errors: in the time of their visitation they shall perish. The portion of Jacob is not like them: for he is the former of all things; and Israel is the rod of his inheritance: The LORD of hosts is his name (vv. 15-16). The idols are vanity - hevel again, a breath - and the work of errors, and a day of reckoning is coming in which they shall perish. But the believer's God is no such thing: The portion of Jacob is not like them. The word portion is tender and enormous. It is the language of inheritance - the share that is yours, your allotment, your treasure. The idolater's portion is a perishing piece of wood; the believer's portion is the former of all things, the Maker of everything, whose name is The LORD of hosts. And the relationship runs both ways: Israel is the rod of his inheritance - His people are His treasured possession just as He is theirs. To belong to the living God is to have, as your very inheritance, the One who made the heavens the idols could not make.
Jeremiah 10:17-22The Storm Out of the North
17Gather up thy wares out of the land, O inhabitant of the fortress. 18For thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will sling out the inhabitants of the land at this once, and will distress them, that they may find it so. 19Woe is me for my hurt! my wound is grievous: but I said, Truly this is a grief, and I must bear it. 20My tabernacle is spoiled, and all my cords are broken: my children are gone forth of me, and they are not: there is none to stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains.
The tone changes without warning. The mockery of idols is over, and now the prophet hears the order to pack and flee: Gather up thy wares out of the land, O inhabitant of the fortress (v. 17). The siege is coming; gather your bundle, the way refugees do when there is no more time. And the LORD names what is about to happen in a single violent image: Behold, I will sling out the inhabitants of the land at this once, and will distress them, that they may find it so (v. 18). To be slung out is to be hurled from a sling like a stone - the people flung from the land in one sudden motion. The phrase that they may find it so is heavy with sorrow: they would not believe the warnings, so now they will learn the truth the hard way, by living through it. This is the other side of everything the chapter has said about idols. A people who gave their reverence to gods that cannot do evil, neither… good (v. 5) discover, too late, that the living God they ignored was real all along - and that His warnings were not empty.
Now a voice cries out in grief, and it is hard to tell where the prophet ends and the wounded nation begins - which is the point, for Jeremiah feels his people's ruin as his own: Woe is me for my hurt! my wound is grievous: but I said, Truly this is a grief, and I must bear it (v. 19). There is no false comfort here, no pretending the blow is light. The wound is grievous; the only honest response is, I must bear it. Then the loss is spelled out in the imagery of a collapsing tent - the oldest picture of home a wandering people knew: My tabernacle is spoiled, and all my cords are broken: my children are gone forth of me, and they are not: there is none to stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains (v. 20). Every line is a fresh bereavement. The tent is torn down; the ropes that held it are cut; the children - the very ones who would have raised the tent again - are gone, carried off into exile, and they are not. There is no one left to rebuild. This is what it costs when a people will not hear: not an abstract judgment, but a home pulled down and a family scattered. The grief is real, and the chapter does not rush past it.
21For the pastors are become brutish, and have not sought the LORD: therefore they shall not prosper, and all their flocks shall be scattered. 22Behold, the noise of the bruit is come, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah desolate, and a den of dragons.
The prophet names the reason the tent has fallen, and it lands on those who were supposed to lead: For the pastors are become brutish, and have not sought the LORD: therefore they shall not prosper, and all their flocks shall be scattered (v. 21). The pastors are the shepherds - the kings, princes, and leaders charged with guiding the people. The word brutish circles back from earlier in the chapter, where it described the makers of idols (vv. 8, 14); the same dullness has now infected the leadership. And the heart of their failure is given in one phrase: they have not sought the LORD. They did not consult Him, did not turn to Him, did not look to the living God for direction - and so, predictably, the flock is scattered. A shepherd who will not seek the LORD cannot keep the sheep. Then the chapter lifts its eyes to the horizon and the dread the warnings have been pointing to all along: Behold, the noise of the bruit is come, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah desolate (v. 22). A bruit is a rumour, a report; the sound of an advancing army is already audible, rolling down from the north. The judgment is no longer a warning on a page. It is a noise on the wind.
Jeremiah 10:23-25The Way of Man Is Not in Himself
23O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. 24O LORD, correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger, lest thou bring me to nothing. 25Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not, and upon the families that call not on thy name: for they have eaten up Jacob, and devoured him, and consumed him, and have made his habitation desolate.
The chapter ends not with a fresh attack on idols but with a confession, and it is among the most honest sentences in the Bible: O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps (v. 23). After all the mockery of false gods, the prophet turns the searchlight on the human heart itself - and finds there a deep insufficiency. The phrasing is careful. It is not that a person cannot take steps; it is that he cannot, of himself, direct them - cannot guarantee where his road actually leads, cannot see far enough or true enough to chart his own life rightly. We make our plans with real confidence and discover again and again that the outcome was never fully in our hands. There is a quiet link back to the whole chapter here. The deepest idolatry is not always a carved image; it is the assumption that I am sufficient to run my own life - that the way of man is in himself. The verse gently dismantles that. To say the way of man is not in himself is to admit you need Someone outside yourself to guide you - which is exactly why a living God you can turn to, rather than a dead idol you have made, is the only hope worth having.3
Out of that confession comes a prayer, and it is a model of how to ask God for what we both need and fear: O LORD, correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger, lest thou bring me to nothing (v. 24). Notice what the prayer does not ask. It does not ask to be left alone. It does not plead, do not correct me at all. A person who has just admitted he cannot direct his own steps knows he needs correcting. So the prayer asks for the correction to come with judgment - with measure, with justice, fitted to what can be borne - and not in thine anger, not in the full fury that would bring me to nothing. It is the cry of someone who would rather be disciplined by God than abandoned by Him, but who also knows that undiluted judgment would destroy him. And then the prayer turns outward in verse 25, asking that the LORD's fury fall instead on the heathen that know thee not, and upon the families that call not on thy name - the nations who have eaten up Jacob… and have made his habitation desolate. The one who calls on God's name pleads to be corrected in mercy; the danger is named for those who never call on His name at all. The difference between the two is the difference the whole chapter has been pressing: whether a person turns to the living God, or away from Him.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Jeremiah 10 with Rashi, Radak, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for hevel (vv. 3, 8, 15, the “vanity” of the idols, literally breath or vapour), for elohim emet and elohim chayyim (v. 10, “the true God… the living God”), and for the lone Aramaic verse (v. 11) that interrupts the Hebrew to pronounce sentence on the no-gods.
- Jeremiah 10 ↔ Psalm 115 · Isaiah 44 · 1 Thessalonians 1Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Jeremiah's idol-satire (vv. 1-5) to Psalm 115 and Isaiah 44 - idols with mouths that speak not, feet that walk not - and the call to turn from them read beside ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God (1 Thess. 1:9), with the creation lines of verse 12 set alongside the One by whom all things were made (John 1:3; Col. 1:16).
- Jeremiah 10 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Jeremiah 10 - the step-by-step making of the idol in verses 3-4, the difficult and much-discussed verse 5 (“upright as the palm tree”), the Aramaic interruption in verse 11, and the closing confession in verse 23 that a person cannot direct his own steps.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Learn Not the Way of the Heathen
- Psalm 115:4-8They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not... They that make them are like unto them.The same satire as verses 3-5 - idols with mouths that cannot speak, and the warning that makers grow like what they make.
- Isaiah 44:14-17He heweth him down cedars... and the residue thereof he maketh a god... and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god.The making of an idol from a felled tree, told as Jeremiah tells it in verses 3-4 - firewood and a god from the same log.
- 1 Thessalonians 1:9ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.The very turning the chapter urges - from the dead idol of verse 5 to the living and true God of verse 10.
- Habakkuk 2:18-19What profiteth the graven image... Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach!The folly of verses 4-5 - asking a thing of wood and stone, which cannot move, to wake and save.
- Deuteronomy 4:19lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars... shouldest be driven to worship them.The warning of verse 2 - not to be dismayed at the signs of heaven, nor to worship what the LORD made.
There Is None Like Unto Thee, O LORD
- Isaiah 40:18-22To whom then will ye liken God?... It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth... that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain.The twin themes of verses 6-12 - there is none like the LORD, who stretches out the heavens no idol could make.
- Psalm 96:5For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the LORD made the heavens.The exact test of verse 11 - the gods of the nations are nothing, but the LORD made the heavens.
- John 1:3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.The making of all things in verse 12 read alongside the One by whom all things were made.
- Colossians 1:16-17by him were all things created... and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.The world established by God’s wisdom (v. 12) - held beside the Son by whom and for whom all things were created.
- Jeremiah 16:20Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?The folly of verses 8-9 - a man making, of imported gold and fine craft, a thing that is no god at all.
The Storm Out of the North
- Jeremiah 23:1-2Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!... ye have scattered my flock.The failure of verse 21 named in full - shepherds who scatter the flock because they will not seek the LORD.
- Ezekiel 34:5-6they were scattered, because there is no shepherd... My sheep wandered through all the mountains.The scattered flock of verse 21 - sheep lost for want of a shepherd who sought God.
- Jeremiah 1:14Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.The commotion out of the north in verse 22 - the judgment Jeremiah was warned of from the start.
- Lamentations 1:16For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water... my children are desolate.The grief of verses 19-20 carried into Lamentations - the spoiled home and the children gone.
- John 10:11I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.The answer to the brutish shepherds of verse 21 - the Shepherd who seeks the LORD perfectly and lays down His life for the flock.
The Way of Man Is Not in Himself
- Proverbs 16:9A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.The direct answer to verse 23 - we cannot direct our own steps, but the LORD directs them.
- Proverbs 3:5-6Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding... and he shall direct thy paths.The way forward from verse 23 - not leaning on our own understanding, but letting the LORD direct the path.
- Psalm 37:23The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.The hope beneath verse 23 - the steps a person cannot direct are ordered by the LORD.
- John 8:12I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.The guide for the one who cannot direct his own steps (v. 23) - the Light who keeps His followers out of the dark.
- Psalm 6:1O LORD, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.The same prayer as verse 24 - asking to be corrected in measure, not consumed in wrath.