GEMS FROM JEREMIAH (27) The (first) sermon you never want to have to preach, part IV

“The king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, “You will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back”—thinking, “David cannot come in here.”  Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, which is now the city of David. David had said on that day, “Whoever would strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates.” …David occupied the stronghold, and named it the city of David. David built the city all around from the Millo inward. And David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him.” (2 Samuel 5.6-10)

     Jeremiah’s Temple sermon (7.1 – 8.3) must have struck his audience as patently absurd.  After all, “the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, prophets, and people” (cf. 8.1; 7.2) had biblical evidence that legitimized their royal-Temple ideology!  The tabernacle at Shiloh had been a temporary shelter for Yahweh, located in a backwater of what would become the doomed Northern Kingdom (aka “Ephraim”; cf. Jer. 7.15).  Its destruction wasn’t exactly a disaster, merely a side-effect of inevitable conflict with Israel’s neighbours.  But Solomon’s Temple!  Now that’s a different matter altogether, said the Jerusalem elite.  The “city of David” had been chosen by Yahweh as the place “where he would place his name” (cf. 1 Kings 8.29; Jer. 7.12-14).  Yahweh had promised an eternal “house” (i.e., dynasty) to David and had mandated David’s son to build a “house” (i.e., Temple) for him (2 Sm. 7).  Solomon had constructed the Temple next to his palace and had thus consolidated the seemingly indissoluble link between the Davidic monarchy and the cult of Israel’s God.  Zion – the hill from which Yahweh would rule the nations through his anointed king (cf. Ps. 2) – was a bastion of Judah’s legitimacy and a guarantee of its invulnerability to any and all threats…or so the official propaganda would have it.  Jeremiah launches a frontal assault on this nationalistic, religiously-legitimized, self-serving mentality in a speech replete with withering rhetoric and graphic images of horror.  The “Temple sermon” is no well-reasoned homily; rather, it is an impassioned plea to the powers that be to radically alter their ways if there is any hope of staving off imminent and total destruction.

     Jeremiah’s preaching pierces the thin veneer of this aristocratic ideological wish-fulfillment and exposes the pervasive hypocrisy and corruption of both the Temple liturgy and the Jerusalem regime (cf. Jer. 1.16-19).  Jeremiah draws his audience’s attention to a valley southwest of the Temple mount – the valley of the son of Hinnom[1] (Jer. 7.29-34).    This was the location of the cult of the god Molech, which involved the sacrifice of live children to the flames of the altar situated before the idol or perhaps to the very hands of the idol which may have served as a “griddle” upon which the sacrificial victims were incinerated[2] (cf. Lev. 20.1-5; Dt. 12.31, 18.10; 2 Kings 23.10).  There is much scholarly malaise[3] at the phrase “burn their sons and their daughters in the fire”[4] (Jer. 7.31, passim); many proposals have been made in order to avoid taking these words in a straightforward, literal manner.  For example: some have suggested that this phrase refers to an initiation ritual which served to consecrate certain children to a life of sacred prostitution (a common practice in the Ancient Near East).[5]  Personally, I have no difficulty in believing the ancient Judahites (and Canaanites, Carthaginians[6], et al.) capable of burning infants alive.  There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, there is the widespread evidence for human sacrifice[7] as well as the exposure of unwanted babies[8] in the ancient world, and on the other hand, there are the modern phenomena of callous cruelty towards children and, indeed, what I call legalized infanticide.[9]  If modern people are capable of such things, in an enlightened age where death is delayed as long as possible for those who both desire and can afford to prolong their lives, surely it was not unthinkable in a pre-modern world where life was much cheaper than it is today.

     In the very centre of religious respectability and social conventionality, Jeremiah dares to unveil the horrors perpetrated by those who deem to take shelter in “the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord” (Jer. 7.4).

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[1] This valley is called “Gehenna” in the Gospels: e.g., Mt. 5.22, 29-30.  Some versions of the New Testament misleadingly translate this Greek word as “hell”; cf. Hart, David Bentley, The New Testament: A Translation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023 [2017], pp. 8-9, who translates “Gehenna” as the “Vale of Hinnom” in Mt. 5.  The concept of “fire” is connected to “Gehenna” in Mt. 5 and elsewhere in the NT due to the fact that in the first century AD, this valley was used as Jerusalem’s garbage dump, and there were fires constantly burning there.

[2] Cf. Brown, Michael L. “Jeremiah” in Longman & Garland, eds. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary 7: Jeremiah-Ezekiel, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010, pp. 171, 278.

[3] E.g. Brueggemann, Walter, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, p. 83, where he treats Jer. 7.29-34 in two paragraphs, and fails to even mention the issue of child sacrifice except for the euphemistic phrase “pagan religious action”; cf. idem., Deuteronomy, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001, p. 146 where, in reference to Dt. 12.31, Brueggemann does reference child sacrifice.

[4] Cf. Starr, Chester G. A History of the Ancient World, Oxford: OUP, 1991 [1965, 1974, 1983], p. 156, who claims that it was first-born children who were offered to Moloch, and predominantly in times of stress (cp. The 10^th plague of Egypt: Ex. 12-13); cf. the Roman practice of burying foreign slaves alive as sacrifices following defeats during the Punic Wars (decried by Livy as being an “un-Roman practice”): Beard, Mary, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015, p. 180.

[5] Cf. Tenney, Merrill C., ed. The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, Volume 4, Grand Rapids: Regency, 1976, p. 269; cp. Brown, Michael L. “Jeremiah” in Longman & Garland, eds. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary 7: Jeremiah-Ezekiel, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010, p. 278.

[6] Cf. G.K. Chesterton’s rejoicing over the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. as a victory over pagan barbarism in The Everlasting Man (1925).

[7] Cf. Campbell, Joseph, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. II: The Way of the Seeded Earth, Part 1: The Sacrifice, New York: Harper & Row, 1988.  This phenomenon was common in the Ancient Near East, the Mayan and Aztec civilizations, and also in Norse societies: Crossley-Holland, Kevin, The Norse Myths, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 187.

[8] Alexander, Ralph H. “Ezekiel” in Longman & Garland, eds. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary 7: Jeremiah-Ezekiel, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010, p. 721.

[9] E.g., China’s one-child policy (1979 – 2015; 2 children per couple are now permitted), child sex-slavery, the legalization of abortion-on-demand in many nations (available in Canada since 1988), the killing of infants along with their parents by Nazi death squads during WWII and the purported atrocities perpetrated against infants by Hamas during their attack on the state of Israel on October 7, 2023, not to mention all indiscriminate bombing by Western powers of residential areas (more often than not) in the Middle East to name but a few examples of the modern disparaging of helpless, innocent human life (cf. Golda Meir’s chilling remarks at a 1969 press conference in London: “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons”: https://www.msudenver.edu/golda-meir-center/golda-meir/quotes/, accessed October 15, 2023).