Jeremiah 15
Jeremiah 15 falls in one of the hardest stretches of the book. The drought of chapter 14 has come and gone, the people have not turned, and now the LORD speaks a word that slams a door: Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people (v. 1). Moses and Samuel were the two great intercessors of Israel's memory - the men who stood in the breach and turned away wrath more than once. The LORD names them only to say that even they could not avert what is now fixed. The first nine verses unfold the judgment in pitiless detail: sword, famine, captivity, a city emptied of its children, a people scattered into all kingdoms of the earth. It is the language of a patience finally exhausted - I am weary with repenting (v. 6).3
And then the chapter turns inward, to the man who has to carry this message. Jeremiah breaks into open lament: Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth… every one of them doth curse me (v. 10). He has done nothing to earn the hatred - I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury - yet the whole nation treats him as its enemy. The cost of faithfulness has become unbearable, and he says so, plainly, to God. What follows is one of the most honest prayers in all of Scripture, and one of the most important things to notice about it is that God receives it. The lament is not treated as faithlessness to be silenced; it is heard, and answered.
At the very heart of the chapter, in the middle of the grief, Jeremiah names what has held him up: Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts (v. 16). The word of God is not a burden laid on him from outside; it is food he has taken in, the source of his joy when every other joy has gone. Yet that same word has set him apart and made him lonely - I sat alone because of thy hand (v. 17) - and the strain finally tears loose in a startling complaint: Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable? (v. 18). The LORD's answer closes the chapter not with rebuke but with a summons and a shield: if thou return… thou shalt be as my mouth, and I will make thee unto this people a fenced brasen wall… for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee (vv. 19-20).2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Jeremiah 15:1-9Though Moses and Samuel Stood Before Me
1Then said the LORD unto me, Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people: cast them out of my sight, and let them go forth. 2And it shall come to pass, if they say unto thee, Whither shall we go forth? then thou shalt tell them, Thus saith the LORD; Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword; and such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for the captivity, to the captivity. 3And I will appoint over them four kinds, saith the LORD: the sword to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy. 4And I will cause them to be removed into all kingdoms of the earth, because of Manasseh the son of Hezekiah king of Judah, for that which he did in Jerusalem. 5For who shall have pity upon thee, O Jerusalem? or who shall bemoan thee? or who shall go aside to ask how thou doest? 6Thou hast forsaken me, saith the LORD, thou art gone backward: therefore will I stretch out my hand against thee, and destroy thee; I am weary with repenting. 7And I will fan them with a fan in the gates of the land; I will bereave them of children, I will destroy my people, since they return not from their ways. 8Their widows are increased to me above the sand of the seas: I have brought upon them against the mother of the young men a spoiler at noonday: I have caused him to fall upon it suddenly, and terrors upon the city. 9She that hath borne seven languisheth: she hath given up the ghost; her sun is gone down while it was yet day: she hath been ashamed and confounded: and the residue of them will I deliver to the sword before their enemies, saith the LORD.
The chapter opens by naming two men and then taking them away. Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people (v. 1). Moses and Samuel were the great intercessors of Israel's memory - the men who had stood in the gap and turned aside wrath more than once. When the people made the golden calf, Moses pleaded until the LORD relented; when Israel demanded a king and then trembled at a thunderstorm, Samuel prayed and the people were spared. The LORD invokes precisely these two, the very names a desperate nation would reach for, only to say that even they could no longer move Him on this people's behalf. This is not a claim that intercession is powerless - the whole of Scripture testifies otherwise. It is a statement about how far this generation has gone. There comes a point at which a people have so settled into turning away that judgment is no longer a threat to be averted but a reality to be carried out. Cast them out of my sight, and let them go forth. The door that intercession had held open for so long is, at last, allowed to close.1
What follows is unsparing. When the people ask Whither shall we go forth?, the answer is a grim sorting: Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword; and such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for the captivity, to the captivity (v. 2). Four destinies, and not one of them an escape. The LORD appoints four kinds over them - sword, dogs, birds, beasts - to devour and destroy (v. 3), and threatens to scatter them into all kingdoms of the earth (v. 4). The reason reaches back two generations, to Manasseh the son of Hezekiah king of Judah, whose long reign had filled Jerusalem with idolatry and innocent blood. Sin is never a private transaction sealed off in one lifetime; its consequences travel forward, gathering weight, until they break over a people who have refused every chance to turn. And the questions of verse 5 land like blows: who shall have pity upon thee, O Jerusalem? or who shall bemoan thee? A city that has spurned the God who loved her will find, in the day of her fall, that there is no one left to mourn her.
At the center of the indictment is one of the most arresting things ever said of God: Thou hast forsaken me, saith the LORD, thou art gone backward: therefore will I stretch out my hand against thee, and destroy thee; I am weary with repenting (v. 6). The word translated repenting does not mean the LORD had done wrong; in this older sense it means relenting - changing course, holding back the blow, offering mercy yet again. The LORD says He is weary of it. He has relented and relented, called and called, and been spurned every time. This weariness is not coldness or the petty fatigue of a tyrant; it is the exhaustion of a love that has been refused past counting. The cause is named without flinching: thou hast forsaken me… thou art gone backward. The judgment falling on Judah is not the act of a God who never cared, but of a God who cared long and was abandoned. The verses that follow - widows beyond the sand of the sea (v. 8), the mother of seven whose sun is gone down while it was yet day (v. 9) - are the sound of that long patience finally spent. They are meant to make the reader tremble, and to ask how far a soul can presume upon mercy before it is exhausted.3
Jeremiah 15:10-14A Man of Strife and Contention
10Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me. 11The LORD said, Verily it shall be well with thy remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat thee well in the time of evil and in the time of affliction. 12Shall iron break the northern iron and the steel? 13Thy substance and thy treasures will I give to the spoil without price, and that for all thy sins, even in all thy borders. 14And I will make thee to pass with thine enemies into a land which thou knowest not: for a fire is kindled in mine anger, which shall burn upon you.
Here the prophet's voice breaks for the first time, and what comes out is anguish: Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth (v. 10). It is the cry of a man who wishes, almost, that he had never been born - the same note he will sound even more starkly later in the book. Notice the shape of the grief. He does not say he is a man of strife because he stirred up trouble; he protests his own innocence: I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury. In other words, he has wronged no one, cheated no one, given no person a fair reason to hate him. There are no enemies he made by his own greed or unfairness. Yet every one of them doth curse me. The whole nation has turned on him for one reason only - the message he was given to carry. This is the peculiar loneliness of faithfulness: to be hated not for any wrong you have done but for the truth you will not stop telling. Jeremiah brings that loneliness straight to God, unfiltered. He does not pretend to be fine. The chapter will show that this kind of honesty is not the enemy of faith; it is often the form faith takes when the cost grows unbearable.
The LORD's reply is brief, hard, and double-edged. To Jeremiah He gives a thread of assurance: Verily it shall be well with thy remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat thee well in the time of evil (v. 11) - a quiet pledge that the prophet will be preserved even when judgment falls, and indeed Jeremiah would later be treated kindly by the very Babylonians who destroyed the city. Then comes a proverb whose precise sense is debated but whose thrust is clear: Shall iron break the northern iron and the steel? (v. 12). The “northern iron” is the hardest forged metal, and the question expects the answer no: ordinary iron cannot shatter it. The image points to the unstoppable force coming from the north - Babylon - against which Judah's strength will prove as brittle as soft metal against tempered steel. Verses 13 and 14 then turn back to the nation: Thy substance and thy treasures will I give to the spoil… for a fire is kindled in mine anger. The reply mingles a personal mercy to Jeremiah with an unbending word of judgment on the people - God can hold both at once, sheltering His servant within the very storm He has decreed.3
Jeremiah 15:15-18Thy Words Were Found, and I Did Eat Them
15O LORD, thou knowest: remember me, and visit me, and revenge me of my persecutors; take me not away in thy longsuffering: know that for thy sake I have suffered rebuke. 16Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts. 17I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat alone because of thy hand: for thou hast filled me with indignation. 18Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail?
Jeremiah's prayer turns from complaint to petition, and it is striking in its directness: O LORD, thou knowest: remember me, and visit me, and revenge me of my persecutors (v. 15). He appeals to the one certainty he has left - that God knows. God knows his innocence, knows what he has borne, knows that the rejection is undeserved. He even asks God to take vengeance on his persecutors, and to do it before His longsuffering toward them runs its course - take me not away in thy longsuffering, that is, do not let me die while you are still patiently bearing with my enemies. These are not the tidy petitions of a man at peace; they are the cries of someone stretched to the edge. And the ground of the whole appeal is in the last line: know that for thy sake I have suffered rebuke. Everything Jeremiah has endured, he has endured for God's sake - the reproach is not for his own faults but for his loyalty to the One who sent him. He lays that fact before God like the one thing he is sure of, and asks to be remembered by it.
Now comes the verse that holds the whole chapter together: Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts (v. 16). After all the grief, the prophet names what has kept him standing. He does not say he merely heard God's words, or studied them, or obeyed them; he says he ate them. The word is taken inside, swallowed, made part of his own substance the way food becomes the body it feeds. And the effect of that eating is joy - the joy and rejoicing of mine heart. Here is the great paradox of the chapter laid bare. The same man who has just cried woe is me can also say that God's word is his deepest gladness. The sorrow is real, but it is not the bottom; underneath it runs a joy that the rejection cannot reach, because it is fed by something that comes from outside the wreckage. And he grounds his hope in his belonging: I am called by thy name. He bears God's name; he is God's own. The title he uses - O LORD God of hosts - names the commander of all heaven's armies, and it is no accident that a man this beleaguered reaches for it. The One whose word is his food is also the One with every power at His command.2
The joy of the word has a cost, and the next verse names it without softening: I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat alone because of thy hand: for thou hast filled me with indignation (v. 17). Because Jeremiah belonged to God and carried God's word, he could not sit where the careless and the scornful sat. He did not join the easy laughter of those who took nothing seriously; he held himself apart. And the result was loneliness - I sat alone. Notice he traces that solitude to God's own hand: it was because of thy hand, and because God had filled him with indignation at the wickedness around him. The very seriousness that the word produced in him made the company of the frivolous impossible, and so he sat by himself. This is one of the quieter costs of taking God seriously: it can set a person at a distance from a world that does not. The one who has eaten the word and grieves over what grieves God will often find the room emptying around them. Jeremiah names it honestly. The joy of verse 16 and the isolation of verse 17 are not two different men; they are the single experience of one who truly knows God in a world that does not want to.
And then the strain tears all the way loose, in a line that startles every reader: Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail? (v. 18). The grief has become a wound that will not close. And the prophet asks God a question that borders on accusation: will you be to me like a brook that promises water and then runs dry in the heat - as waters that fail? A desert traveler stakes his life on a streambed and arrives to find it bone-dry; Jeremiah dares to wonder aloud whether God has been such a streambed to him. This is astonishing language to aim at God, and it is left standing in Scripture without apology. That is the thing to sit with. The Bible does not edit out the prophet's near-despair or tuck it behind a pious correction. It preserves the raw question. And what follows in the next verses is not God striking Jeremiah down for his boldness, but God answering him. The chapter quietly teaches that honest lament - even lament this close to the edge - is something God receives, not something He recoils from.3
Jeremiah 15:19-21I Will Make Thee a Fenced Brasen Wall
19Therefore thus saith the LORD, If thou return, then will I bring thee again, and thou shalt stand before me: and if thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth: let them return unto thee; but return not thou unto them. 20And I will make thee unto this people a fenced brasen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the LORD. 21And I will deliver thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible.
God answers the prophet's near-despair, and the answer is bracing rather than soft: Therefore thus saith the LORD, If thou return, then will I bring thee again, and thou shalt stand before me (v. 19). This is not a call to repent of some gross sin; Jeremiah is the faithful one in this chapter. It is a call to return from the brink of his own bitterness - from the edge where verse 18 had taken him, doubting whether God was a brook that would fail. If thou return, the LORD says, then your place before me is restored, and you shall again stand before me as my servant and spokesman. Then comes the charge that gives the prophet his work back: if thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth. He is to separate what is precious - the true word - from what is worthless, and refuse to blend them. Do that, and he will be as my mouth, the very organ through which God speaks. And the LORD draws a firm line about the direction of influence: let them return unto thee; but return not thou unto them. Jeremiah must not soften his message to win the crowd; the crowd must come to the truth, not the truth bend to the crowd. The prophet's recovery is not coddling; it is re-commissioning. God meets the broken man by handing him his calling again.1
The chapter ends with a promise that answers Jeremiah's loneliness with a vow of God's own presence: And I will make thee unto this people a fenced brasen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the LORD (v. 20). The image is exactly the one the LORD gave at Jeremiah's call - the prophet himself made into a fortified bronze wall, immovable against a whole city bent on tearing him down. Notice the honesty of the promise: God does not say they will stop fighting. They shall fight against thee - the opposition is guaranteed to continue. What God promises is not the absence of battle but the certainty of the outcome: they shall not prevail. And the reason is not Jeremiah's own toughness but God's nearness: for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee. The wall is strong because of who stands behind it. The final verse seals it with two of the great words of redemption: I will deliver thee… and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible (v. 21). The lonely, hated man who began the chapter cursing the day he was born ends it with a divine pledge that he will be made unbreakable - not by removing the assault, but by the LORD standing with him in the midst of it.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Jeremiah 15 with Rashi, Radak, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the verb akhal (v. 16, “I did eat them”), for the pairing of yaqar and zolel (v. 19, “the precious” from “the vile”), and for the divine title YHWH Elohe Tseva'ot (v. 16, “LORD God of hosts”).
- Jeremiah 15 ↔ John 6 · Ezekiel 3 · Revelation 10 · Matthew 4Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Jeremiah 15 to the rest of Scripture - eating the word (v. 16) read alongside Ezekiel told to eat this roll (Ezek. 3:1-3) and John handed the little book to eat (Rev. 10:9-10), the word as the heart's joy beside man shall… live… by every word (Matt. 4:4), and the bread of life who is Himself the Word (John 6:35, 63).
- Jeremiah 15 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Jeremiah 15 - the force of “my mind could not be toward this people” (v. 1), the difficult military proverb about iron and steel (v. 12), the much-discussed line “wilt thou be… as waters that fail” (v. 18), and the call to “take forth the precious from the vile” (v. 19).
Where this echoes in Scripture
Though Moses and Samuel Stood Before Me
- Exodus 32:11-14And Moses besought the LORD his God... And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.Moses standing in the breach - the very intercession verse 1 says can no longer avail for this generation.
- 1 Samuel 7:8-9cry unto the LORD our God for us... and Samuel cried unto the LORD for Israel; and the LORD heard him.Samuel’s intercession turning away wrath - named, with Moses, in verse 1.
- 2 Kings 21:11-12Because Manasseh king of Judah hath done these abominations... I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah.The sin of Manasseh that verse 4 names as the cause of the scattering.
- Hebrews 7:25he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.The intercessor whose standing before God does what Moses’ and Samuel’s could not finally do (v. 1).
- Romans 2:4-5despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering... after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath?The danger of presuming on the patience that verse 6 calls a weariness with repenting.
A Man of Strife and Contention
- Jeremiah 20:14-18Cursed be the day wherein I was born... Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow?The same despairing note as verse 10, sounded even more starkly later in Jeremiah’s laments.
- Job 3:1-3After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day... Let the day perish wherein I was born.The cry of verse 10 - the suffering righteous wishing they had never been born, brought honestly before God.
- Psalm 142:1-2I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble.What Jeremiah does in verse 10 - the complaint carried straight to God rather than away from Him.
- Jeremiah 39:11-12Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon gave charge concerning Jeremiah... Take him, and look well to him, and do him no harm.The promise of verse 11 kept - the enemy entreating Jeremiah well in the time of evil.
- John 15:18-20If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you... The servant is not greater than his lord.The loneliness of verse 10 - being hated not for wrongdoing but for bearing the truth.
Thy Words Were Found, and I Did Eat Them
- Ezekiel 3:1-3eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel... then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.The same image as verse 16 - the prophet eating the word so that it becomes part of him.
- Revelation 10:9-10Take it, and eat it up... And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up.The word eaten (v. 16) - sweet in the mouth, taken wholly in before it is spoken out.
- John 6:35I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.The feeding of verse 16 fulfilled - the Word Himself given as the bread of life.
- Matthew 4:4Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.The truth Jeremiah lived in verse 16 - the word of God as the soul’s true food.
- Psalm 19:10More to be desired are they than gold... sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.The joy of verse 16 - God’s words tasted as sweeter than any earthly good.
I Will Make Thee a Fenced Brasen Wall
- Jeremiah 1:18-19I have made thee this day a defenced city... and brasen walls against the whole land... they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee.The same promise as verse 20 - the prophet made an unbreakable wall, first given at his call.
- Isaiah 53:3He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.The rejected servant of verses 19-20 read toward the One who bore rejection to its depths.
- John 1:11He came unto his own, and his own received him not.The pattern of the hated prophet (vv. 19-20) carried into the One His own would not receive.
- Matthew 28:20and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.The presence pledged to Jeremiah in verse 20 - “I am with thee” - left with all His sent ones.
- 2 Corinthians 4:8-9We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed... persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.The shape of verse 20 in the believer’s life - fought against, yet not prevailed against.