Jeremiah 16
The word of the LORD comes to Jeremiah with a command that lands like a blow: Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place (v. 2). The most ordinary human hope - a household, children, a name carried into the next generation - is closed to the prophet. And the reason is not that these things are unworthy but that the future of this place belongs to death: the children born here will die of grievous deaths, unburied, unmourned. Jeremiah's very life, solitary and barren, is made into a sign written in flesh that the normal rhythms of Judah are about to be torn away.3
The sign deepens. He is forbidden the house of mourning - he may not even go to lament the dead - and forbidden the house of feasting, where weddings are celebrated. Both the deepest grief and the highest joy of a people are about to fall silent: I will cause to cease… the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride (v. 9). When the people ask why such evil is pronounced against them, the answer is plain - their fathers forsook the LORD and walked after other gods, and they have done worse than their fathers (vv. 10-12). So the sentence falls: they will be cast out into a land they do not know.
But judgment is not where the chapter rests. It rises into one of the great promises of the book. The day is coming, the LORD says, when the oath by which Israel had named Him for a thousand years - the LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt - will be replaced by a greater one: The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north… and I will bring them again into their land (vv. 14-15). He will send fishers and hunters to gather them from every hiding place. And the horizon widens past Israel to the nations themselves: the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, renouncing the lies they inherited (v. 19), until the chapter closes on the LORD's declared purpose - they shall know that my name is The LORD (v. 21).2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Jeremiah 16:1-9No Wife, No Mourning, No Feasting
1The word of the LORD came also unto me, saying, 2Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. 3For thus saith the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land; 4They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine; and their carcases shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth. 5For thus saith the LORD, Enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament nor bemoan them: for I have taken away my peace from this people, saith the LORD, even lovingkindness and mercies. 6Both the great and the small shall die in this land: they shall not be buried, neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them: 7Neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead; neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother. 8Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting, to sit with them to eat and to drink. 9For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes, and in your days, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride.
The chapter opens with a command that would have stunned anyone who heard it: Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place (v. 2). In Judah marriage and children were not optional extras to a life; they were the very shape of blessing, the way a name and a memory were carried forward, the visible token of a future. To forbid the prophet a wife and family was to forbid him the most ordinary human hope there is. And the reason is fixed to a phrase repeated like a tolling bell - in this place… in this place… in this land. The point is not that family is unworthy but that the future of this place has been handed over to death. To bring children into Jerusalem now would be to bring them into a city marked for the sword. Jeremiah is not being punished; he is being made into a sign. His solitary life is a sermon his neighbours cannot help but read - an empty house in a doomed city, asking by its very silence what is coming.3
The LORD spells out what waits for the children who would be born here, and the language is unsparing: They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth (v. 4). Every clause strips away another layer of dignity. They will die - and not gently, but by sword and famine. They will not be lamented, so no one will grieve them. They will not be buried, so their bodies will lie exposed like refuse, meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth. In a culture where a proper burial and the mourning of one's family were the final honour owed to a person, this is the picture of total catastrophe - death so widespread that the living have neither the strength nor the numbers to bury and mourn the dead. The horror here is not exaggeration for its own sake. It is the measure of how far a people have fallen from the LORD, and how real the consequences of that forsaking will be when they finally arrive.1
The sign now reaches into both poles of communal life. First Jeremiah is forbidden the house of mourning: Enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament nor bemoan them: for I have taken away my peace from this people (v. 5). He may not perform even the most basic act of human kindness - sitting with the bereaved, sharing the cup of consolation (v. 7). The reason given is staggering in its weight: the LORD has withdrawn His peace… even lovingkindness and mercies. The very steadfast love that had held this people together is being lifted, and the prophet's refusal to mourn enacts that withdrawal before their eyes. Then, just as sharply, he is forbidden the opposite: Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting, to sit with them to eat and to drink (v. 8). No funerals, and no weddings. Jeremiah is to stand outside the whole emotional life of his people, neither weeping with those who weep nor rejoicing with those who rejoice. By that strange double absence he announces that a day is near when there will be nothing left to weep or rejoice over at all.
Jeremiah 16:10-13Wherefore Hath the LORD Pronounced All This Great Evil?
10And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin that we have committed against the LORD our God? 11Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law; 12And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken unto me: 13Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; where I will not shew you favour.
The LORD anticipates the very question the people will throw back at Jeremiah: Wherefore hath the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin? (v. 10). It is worth pausing on the tone of that question. It is not the cry of a broken heart asking how to make things right; it is the protest of a people who genuinely cannot see what they have done wrong - or who will not. They stand under a sentence of exile and ask, with apparent sincerity, what the charge could possibly be. That blindness is itself part of the indictment. When sin has gone on long enough, it stops looking like sin to the one committing it; the conscience grows quiet, and rebellion comes to feel like normal life. So the question what is our iniquity? is not really innocence. It is the symptom of a people so far gone that they can no longer recognize their own condition. And the LORD does not leave the question hanging - He answers it plainly, naming exactly what they have refused to see.
The answer comes in two layers. First, the fathers: Because your fathers have forsaken me… and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law (v. 11). The verb forsaken sounds twice in one breath, framing the whole charge - this was not a stumble but an abandonment, a turning of the back on the God of the covenant. Then the harder word, aimed at the living generation: And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken unto me (v. 12). This is the sting of it. They have not merely inherited their fathers' sin; they have outdone it, and they have done so with the fathers' ruin in plain view as a warning. To sin in ignorance is one thing; to sin with the wreckage of the previous generation right before your eyes, refusing to hear, is another. The phrase the imagination of his evil heart traces the rebellion to its root - not bad luck or hard circumstance, but a heart bent on its own way and a will set against listening. And the sentence fits the crime: those who insisted on serving other gods at home will be cast into a foreign land to do exactly that, day and night (v. 13), until they taste how empty the thing they chose really is.
Jeremiah 16:14-18A New Exodus · Fishers and Hunters
14Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be said, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; 15But, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers. 16Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks. 17For mine eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hid from my face, neither is their iniquity hid from mine eyes. 18And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double; because they have defiled my land, they have filled mine inheritance with the carcases of their detestable and abominable things.
Out of the sentence of exile the chapter suddenly lifts into one of the most remarkable promises in all the prophets. For as long as Israel had a memory, the LORD was named by the one act that made them a people: the LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. The exodus was the bedrock oath, the deed that defined who God was. Now the LORD says a day is coming when even that will be eclipsed: it shall no more be said, The LORD liveth, that brought up… out of… Egypt; But, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them (vv. 14-15). This is staggering. The deliverance still to come will be so much greater than the exodus that it will become the new reference point for who God is - the rescue people swear by, the act that names Him. And notice where the promise lands: I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers. The same God who is about to drive them out is the one who pledges to bring them home. The exile is real; it is not the end of the story. Beyond it stands a homecoming so great it will reset the very language of faith.3
To gather a people scattered across the world, the LORD pictures a thorough, two-fold search: Behold, I will send for many fishers… and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks (v. 16). The image is vivid and total. The fishers cast wide nets and draw in great numbers at once; the hunters then go after whatever the nets missed, tracking the scattered ones out of every crevice and hiding place. Together they leave no one unreached - not those caught in the open, not those buried in the most remote corner. In its first setting the picture cuts both ways: the same imagery of being hunted out is used elsewhere for judgment, the inescapable reach of God upon those who flee Him. But here, set inside the promise of verses 14-15, it serves the homecoming - the relentless determination of a God who will recover His people from wherever they have been driven. For mine eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hid from my face (v. 17). The very omniscience that exposes their sin is also what guarantees their rescue: the God from whom nothing is hidden knows exactly where every scattered child has been carried, and will send for them all.
The promise of return does not erase the reckoning that comes first: And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double; because they have defiled my land, they have filled mine inheritance with the carcases of their detestable and abominable things (v. 18). The little word first matters. Before the homecoming, there is a settling of accounts. The phrase recompense… double need not mean twice what justice requires - in legal usage it carries the sense of full measure, the complete and fitting repayment for what was done. And the charge is specific: they have defiled the land and filled the LORD's own inheritance with the dead, lifeless forms of their idols, the carcases of their detestable and abominable things. The word for the idols is deliberately revolting - these so-called gods are corpses, dead weight cluttering a land meant to be holy. So the chapter holds two truths together without flinching. The exile is deserved; the sin is real and will be answered in full. And yet beyond that full reckoning stands the unbreakable promise of restoration. Grace here does not pretend the wound away; it goes through the cost and brings the people home on the far side of it.
Jeremiah 16:19-21They Shall Know That My Name Is The LORD
19O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit. 20Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods? 21Therefore, behold, I will this once cause them to know, I will cause them to know mine hand and my might; and they shall know that my name is The LORD.
In the middle of all this judgment, the prophet's own voice breaks through in prayer, and it opens onto the widest horizon in the chapter. O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction (v. 19) - Jeremiah, carrying a message that has cost him a family and a place among his people, turns to God as the only solid ground he has. And from that place of affliction he sees something glorious coming: the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth. Not Israel only - the nations. People from the farthest reaches of the world will turn to the LORD. And hear what they will say when they come: Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit. This is the language of people waking from a long sleep. They look back on everything their fathers handed down to them - their gods, their certainties, the religion they were born into - and they call it what it is: lies, vanity, empty things that never delivered what they promised. There is a piercing honesty in the confession. To inherit something is to receive it without questioning it; these nations finally question, and discover that what they were given was hollow. The deepest tragedy is not merely worshipping a false god - it is doing so because it was simply handed to you, and never once asking whether it was true.
The confession of the nations sharpens into a single, exposing question: Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods? (v. 20). Said plainly, it lays bare the whole absurdity of idolatry. A god that a person manufactures - carved, cast, set up by human hands - is by definition no god at all. The maker is always greater than the thing he makes; a craftsman cannot fashion something larger than himself and then kneel to it. To do so is to bow before your own handiwork, to ask help from an object that owes its very existence to you. The prophets return to this point again and again, sometimes with biting irony - a man plants a tree, cuts it down, burns half to cook his dinner, and from the other half carves an image and prays to it. The question of verse 20 needs no answer; the asking is the answer. And it cuts wider than ancient idols of wood and stone. Anything a person constructs and then looks to for security, identity, or rescue - anything we make and then serve - falls under the same searching question. The nations, when they finally come to the LORD, see this clearly at last: the things they had made could never be God, because they had made them.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Jeremiah 16 with Rashi, Radak, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the oath formula chai YHWH (vv. 14-15, “the LORD liveth”), for dayyagim (v. 16, “fishers”) and tsayyadim (“hunters”), and for the verb azab (v. 11, “forsaken”) that runs through the indictment.
- Jeremiah 16 ↔ Matthew 4 · Luke 4 · Colossians 1Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Jeremiah 16 to the rest of Scripture - the new exodus that outshines Egypt (vv. 14-15) read alongside the deliverance of Col. 1:13, the “fishers” God sends (v. 16) read beside I will make you fishers of men (Matt. 4:19), and the Gentiles streaming in from the ends of the earth (v. 19) read with the gospel sent to all nations.
- Jeremiah 16 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Jeremiah 16 - the prophetic sign-act of forbidden marriage and mourning (vv. 1-9), the reshaped oath formula in verses 14-15, the much-discussed imagery of fishers and hunters in verse 16, and the confession of the nations in verse 19.
Where this echoes in Scripture
No Wife, No Mourning, No Feasting
- Ezekiel 24:16-18I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep... So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife died.Another prophet whose private life is made a public sign of coming judgment - the same calling Jeremiah bears in verses 2-9.
- Jeremiah 7:34Then will I cause to cease... the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride: for the land shall be desolate.The silenced wedding song of verse 9 sounded earlier in the same book - the signature of a land under judgment.
- John 3:29He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom... rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice.The bridegroom’s voice of verse 9, silenced in judgment, restored to joy when the true Bridegroom comes.
- Revelation 19:9Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.The mirth and gladness cut off in verse 9 returned forever - the wedding feast that judgment cannot silence.
- Matthew 9:15Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?The bridegroom of verse 9 present in person - and where He is, mourning gives way to celebration.
Wherefore Hath the LORD Pronounced All This Great Evil?
- Jeremiah 2:13they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.The forsaking of verse 11 named at its deepest - abandoning the living spring for broken pits that hold nothing.
- Deuteronomy 29:24-26Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land?... Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD... and went and served other gods.The very question of verse 10 and its answer, foreseen in the law generations before.
- Judges 2:10-12there arose another generation... which knew not the LORD... And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers... and followed other gods.The generational drift of verses 11-12 - each generation forsaking further than the last.
- Genesis 6:5God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.The same diagnosis as verse 12 - rebellion traced to the imagination of the heart.
- 2 Chronicles 7:19-22But if ye turn away... then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land... Because they forsook the LORD God of their fathers.The sentence of verse 13 promised long before - a people uprooted from the land for forsaking the LORD.
A New Exodus · Fishers and Hunters
- Jeremiah 23:7-8they shall no more say, The LORD liveth, which brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The LORD liveth, which brought up... the house of Israel out of the north country.The renewed oath of verses 14-15 repeated - a return from exile that outshines the exodus as the defining act of God.
- Matthew 4:19And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.The fishers God sends in verse 16 - the same image taken up by Christ to gather people into the kingdom.
- Isaiah 11:11-12the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people... and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.The gathering from every land of verses 15-16 - the LORD recovering His scattered people a second time.
- Colossians 1:13Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.The deliverance greater than the exodus (vv. 14-15) - a rescue from a deeper bondage, into a better kingdom.
- 2 Chronicles 16:9For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.The all-seeing eyes of verse 17 turned toward rescue - the same gaze that finds the scattered to bring them home.
They Shall Know That My Name Is The LORD
- Psalm 22:27All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.The ingathering of verse 19 - the ends of the earth turning to the LORD, the very promise the gospel carries.
- Acts 14:15we preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God.The nations renouncing their inherited “vanity” (v. 19) - the apostolic call to leave dead idols for the living God.
- Matthew 28:19Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.The Gentiles coming from the ends of the earth (v. 19) - gathered now by the gospel sent to all nations.
- Philippians 2:9-11God... hath given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow... and that every tongue should confess.The promise of verse 21 - that all will know His name - brought to its fullest answer.
- Isaiah 44:9-10They that make a graven image are all of them vanity... Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing?The exposing question of verse 20 - the folly of a man making gods that are no gods at all.