Cornelius a Lapide
Table of Contents
Synopsis of the Chapter
God threatens the utmost devastation through the Chaldeans, and exaggerates it in wondrous ways; and therefore He warns Jeremiah not to take a wife in Judea, nor to beget children: for all fathers, mothers, and children will die, in such numbers that no one will have a grave or proper funeral rites. He asserts that the cause of so great an evil is sin. Then, in verse 16, He consoles the Jews, foretelling their liberation from captivity through Ezra, and especially through Christ and the Apostles, who will imbue not only the Jews, but also very many nations from the furthest ends of the earth with the knowledge and worship of God.
Vulgate Text: Jeremiah 16:1-21
1. And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: 2. You shall not take a wife, and you shall not have sons and daughters in this place. 3. For thus says the Lord concerning the sons and daughters who are born in this place, and concerning their mothers who bore them, and concerning their fathers, from whose stock they were born in this land: 4. They shall die of grievous deaths from diseases: they shall not be mourned, and they shall not be buried, they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by sword and famine, and their corpses shall be food for the birds of heaven and the beasts of the earth. 5. For thus says the Lord: Do not enter the house of feasting, nor go to mourn, nor console them: for I have taken My peace from this people, says the Lord, My mercy and compassion. 6. And great and small shall die in this land: they shall not be buried nor mourned, and they shall not cut themselves, nor shall baldness be made for them. 7. And they shall not break bread among them for the mourner to console him over the dead: nor shall they give them the cup to drink to console them over their father and mother. 8. And you shall not enter the house of feasting, to sit with them, and eat and drink: 9. for thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will take away from this place in your sight and in your days the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride. 10. And when you announce to this people all these words, and they say to you: Why has the Lord spoken all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? And what is our sin that we have sinned against the Lord our God? 11. You shall say to them: Because your fathers forsook Me, says the Lord, and went after foreign gods, and served them, and worshipped them, and forsook Me, and did not keep My law. 12. But you also have done worse than your fathers: for behold, each one walks after the depravity of his evil heart, so as not to hear Me. 13. And I will cast you out of this land, into a land which you do not know, neither you nor your fathers: and there you shall serve foreign gods day and night, who will give you no rest. 14. Therefore behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, and it shall no longer be said: As the Lord lives, who brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, 15. but: As the Lord lives, who brought the children of Israel out of the land of the North, and out of all the lands to which I drove them: and I will bring them back to their own land, which I gave to their fathers. 16. Behold, I will send many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall fish for them: and after this I will send them many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and from the caves of the rocks. 17. For My eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hidden from My face, and their iniquity is not concealed from My eyes. 18. And I will first repay double their iniquities and their sins: because they have defiled My land with the carcasses of their idols, and with their abominations they have filled My inheritance. 19. O Lord, my strength and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of tribulation: to You the nations shall come from the ends of the earth, and shall say: Surely our fathers possessed falsehood, vanity, which did not profit them. 20. Shall a man make gods for himself, and they are not gods? 21. Therefore behold, I will show them this time, I will show them My hand and My power: and they shall know that My name is the Lord.
Verse 2
2. YOU SHALL NOT TAKE A WIFE, etc., IN THIS PLACE, — in Anathoth, says Vatablus. Better Lyranus: in Judea, because it is about to be devastated: lest in addition to your own grief, you be tormented by the miseries of a wife and children, says St. Jerome. Hence it is clear that Jeremiah remained celibate and a virgin: for there is no doubt that he obeyed God, who commanded this here.
AND THEY SHALL NOT BE, — may they not be, that is, do not beget offspring. The future tense is used for the imperative.
Verse 4
4. THEY SHALL DIE OF GRIEVOUS DEATHS FROM DISEASES. — That is, of various diseases and ailments arising from famine, war, and the miseries of each, they shall die. So the Chaldean and Vatablus. Whence the Septuagint translates, they shall die a sickly death, or one proceeding from disease. THEY SHALL NOT BE MOURNED, — because there will be no one to mourn, so that from the continual funerals the survivors will learn not to care for or mourn the dead, as is usual in a great pestilence: for then men become numb to grief, and lose all sense of plague, death, funeral, and burial. Hence the dead, because of their great number, will remain unburied, and will lie and rot in the roads and streets as in a dunghill.
Verse 5
5. DO NOT ENTER THE HOUSE OF FEASTING, — namely of mourning at a funeral: for in Hebrew it is marseach, which word signifies a funeral banquet, customarily prepared at the obsequies of the dead to console the relatives of the deceased, which the Greeks call perideipna, the Latins parentalia, as if through them proper rites are celebrated for parents, says St. Jerome. Christians imitate this, who give a feast not only to relatives but also to the poor, which the Spaniards call a charity, just as the ancients formerly called it an agape. The same was done by the pagan Romans and Greeks, as Alexander ab Alexandro teaches, Book 3 Genial. ch. 7.
Therefore Jeremiah is commanded, say St. Jerome and Lyranus, not to console anyone of the people, not to mingle in the banquets of God's enemies, not to celebrate funeral rites over the dead, who were justly slain by God for their crimes. For it is not fitting that men of God, especially Prophets, should honor the funerals of those whose actions and customs God abhors and condemns, and thereby praise and approve their lives.
Others think that Jeremiah is commanded here to proclaim that the slaughter will be such, and the general disturbance so great, that at the funeral of their own, relatives will neglect the things usually observed, such as the public and lawful lamentation, shorn hair, torn cheeks, funeral feasts, and all funeral pomp. So Sanchez. Therefore the imperatives here, as elsewhere in the Psalms and Prophets, are to be explained by the future tense: 'Do not enter,' that is, you will not enter, 'the house of feasting' at a funeral, since there will be none; for neither will relatives give one, nor take care of it: 'nor go,' that is, you will not go, nor will anyone else 'to mourn;' for there will be no customary lamentation at funerals: 'nor console,' that is, you will not console 'them,' as is customary at the death of friends. For all these things will cease, as I have said. But the former sense is plainer and truer: for clearly these words sound a command given by God to Jeremiah, and it is repeated in verse 8; yet the purpose of the command is that which the second exposition assigned; but the command is one thing, the purpose of the command another: for God here gives the command, but explains the purpose of the command in verses 6 and 9.
Verse 6
6. THEY SHALL NOT CUT THEMSELVES, — they shall honor the dead with no funeral rite, whether customary among Jews or Gentiles, meaning: The Jews will be so overwhelmed by such great and sudden miseries and disasters, that these will take from the few who remain all feeling for the dead, and they will consider the dead more fortunate than the living. So Lyranus. St. Jerome notes that it was the custom among the ancients, and up to the present day, he says, it is the custom among some Jews, that in mourning they cut their arms with knives and make themselves bald, as Job did, ch. 1:20; which, although it was forbidden to the Jews as savouring of paganism and diminishing the hope of resurrection through excessive grief, Deuteronomy 14:1; yet many Jews, imitating the nations, did this. The Prophet therefore says that now it will happen that what they were unwilling to do voluntarily according to the law of God, they will do out of necessity: for the multitude of the dying will be so great that there will be no one to cut himself or make himself bald for the dead.
Verse 7
7. AND THEY SHALL NOT BREAK BREAD AMONG THEM FOR THE MOURNER, — meaning: So great will be the slaughter of the Jews, that they will not even care to console one another in the death of their dearest ones; indeed there will scarcely be survivors to offer food and wine according to custom to children mourning the death of their parents, to mitigate their grief. That not only the Jews, but also Christians from ancient times practiced this, St. Clement teaches, Book 8 Constitutions ch. 24, and St. Chrysostom, Homily 37 on Matthew.
Verse 8
8. AND YOU SHALL NOT ENTER THE HOUSE OF FEASTING. — Understand the feast here as not a funeral one, as before, but a festive and convivial one, such as is customarily given at weddings, feasts, victories, etc. This is clear from what follows: for God wants Jeremiah to abstain from the banquets of his fellow citizens, so that by this very act he may signify that it is a time of mourning, not of joy, and so that he may in reality portend that all feasts and joys will soon cease with the approaching Chaldean enemy.
Verse 9
9. THE VOICE OF THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE VOICE OF THE BRIDE, — wedding songs and joyful ones, such as among the pagans were the hymeneals.
Verse 13
13. AND (that is, therefore) I WILL CAST YOU OUT OF THIS LAND, INTO A LAND WHICH YOU DO NOT KNOW, — into Chaldea. For the common people of the Jews had not seen it, and were ignorant of its location, conditions, and customs. AND YOU SHALL SERVE FOREIGN GODS THERE. — It is a concession, meaning: You will be able there to serve idols to your fill, for which you so pant, indeed are mad; or, the Chaldeans will compel you to serve their gods, but they WILL NOT GIVE YOU REST. — meaning: The gods of the Chaldeans will not free you from captivity and other evils, nor will their worshippers; but they will treat you slavishly and cruelly, and drive you from one labor and prison, as well as from one sin and idol to another. Thus the devil does to the sinner, just as Pharaoh did to the Hebrews. Whence in Hebrew it is: I will not give you clemency or mercy, namely to find it from foreign gods and your Chaldean enemies. 'Whatever we sin, says St. Jerome, whatever evil works we do day and night, is the dominion of demons, who never give us rest, but always drive us to increase sins upon sins, and to heap up our transgressions.'
Verse 14
14. IT SHALL NO LONGER BE SAID. — When the Jews swore oaths, out of honor and gratitude, they used to add to God's name the epithet of Liberator from Egypt: but here Jeremiah foretells that after the Babylonian captivity, they will swear by God the Liberator not from Egypt, but from Babylon; to signify that the Babylonian captivity would be more grievous than the Egyptian; so that the Jews, because of the bitterness of the present captivity, would forget the former, and consequently that God would bestow a greater benefit on them by liberating them from Babylon, than He formerly bestowed by liberating them from Egypt.
Verse 15
15. I WILL BRING THEM BACK TO THEIR OWN LAND, — namely from Babylon to Judea. So Theodoret and St. Thomas. Second and rather, from Babylon, that is from the confusion of sin, to the spiritual land of grace and the Church, which was promised and given to Abraham and the fathers in an inchoative and typological manner; but was truly and fully handed down through Christ. So St. Jerome, Rabanus, Hugh, Sanchez, and others.
Verse 16
16. BEHOLD, I WILL SEND FISHERMEN, etc., AND HUNTERS. — Theodoret, Hugh, Lyranus, Vatablus, Capella and a Castro take the fishermen and hunters as the Chaldeans, who surrounded and captured the Jews like fish in a net (as Habakkuk says, ch. 1:14) of siege: then they hunted and pursued Zedekiah fleeing with his men to the mountains, like wild beasts, and dragged them from their hiding places and captured them. Or, as St. Thomas and the Hebrews say, the 'fishermen' are the Chaldeans, the 'hunters' are Titus and the Romans. Thus tropologically, the 'fishermen and hunters' of souls are demons. Others take both as Cyrus and Darius, who sent the Jews from Babylon back to their homeland.
But our orthodox authors, says St. Jerome, more correctly take these things of the future, namely of the Church of Christ: for the Prophet flies ahead to Christ, according to Canon 4; yet so that, as St. Jerome, Rabanus, and Hugh attest, he touches upon the present matter, namely the liberation from Babylon through Zerubbabel, Joshua, and Ezra, who gathered and brought back the fugitive and dispersed Jews, as fishermen and hunters. The 'fishermen' therefore, says St. Jerome, are properly the Apostles, Matthew 4:19, who fished for Christ both the nations and the Jews. Whence verse 19 says: 'To You the nations shall come from the ends of the earth.' After these will follow the 'hunters,' that is, Ecclesiastical and Religious men, who hunt men to make them holy, from the mountains of lofty doctrines, and from the hills of good works, and from the caves of the rocks, that is, from the instruction of the Apostles and apostolic men, to imitate them. Or rather, and more literally, those who hunt all men, even savage ones, such as the Indians, the peoples of Uruguay, the Brazilians, etc., living in mountains and caves like wild beasts, to tame them for Christ, as St. Francis Xavier and his followers did. So Origen, St. Jerome, Rabanus, Tertullian, Book 4 Against Marcion ch. 9, Ambrose, Sermon 6 on Psalm 115, Augustine, Tract. 10 On the Usefulness of Fasting, ch. 9.
Such heavenly hunters I have seen in various colleges, namely in the Liege college, those who tracked down the charcoal-burners and Ardennese working in the mines and furnaces of copper and iron like Cyclopes and Brontes; and in the Innsbruck college, those who tracked down the mountain people in the Alps living like hermits, indeed like wild beasts scattered in their lairs, through frost and heat, through hunger and thirst, with immense labor and sweat, as well as zeal, capturing and instructing them, teaching them the way to heaven, and making the Alpine dwellers into heaven-dwellers, indeed God-worshippers.
Anagogically, the 'fishermen and hunters' are angels, who at the end of the world will gather from everywhere, from tombs and caves, the ashes and bones of the Saints, so that they may be given life by God and rise again.
Tropologically, 'mountains and hills' are pride and faintheartedness, and other vices; 'caves' are evil habits, etc.; from these, pastors and others who devote themselves to the profit of souls must draw out these wild beasts, that is, impious and impure men.
Let them hear the sharp exhortation of St. Basil on that text of Deuteronomy 15: 'Attend to yourself,' according to the Septuagint: 'The house of God, he says, which is the Church of the living God, has travelers, architects, builders, farmers, pastors, athletes, soldiers, hunters sent by God who warns thus: Behold, I will send many hunters, and they shall hunt many. Therefore attend with much diligence, lest perhaps the prey escape you, so that those made savage by wickedness, convicted by the word of truth, you may offer to the Savior. You are a traveler, like him who prayed: Direct my steps. Attend to yourself lest you wander off the path, and turn neither to the right nor to the left; proceed by the royal road. The architect should lay and place the foundation of faith in a solid and safe place, which is Jesus Christ. The builder, let him see how he builds, that he use not wood, not hay, nor straw; but gold, silver, precious stones. Are you a pastor? Turn back the wandering and straying flock; bind up what is broken and bruised; heal what is sick. Are you a farmer? If the fig tree is unfruitful, dig around it; and apply to it what you know will be conducive to bearing fruit. Are you a soldier? Labor together with the Gospel, fight the good fight against the spirits of wickedness, against the corrupt affections of the flesh put on the whole armor of God. Are you an athlete? Imitate Paul both striving in the race, and wrestling in the arena, and fighting in the boxing ring: fix your eye more steadfastly and unmoved upon the adversary; let your spirit be not relaxed, but alert and watchful.'
Verse 17
17. For My eyes are upon all their ways, — meaning: Their ways by which they will flee from the Chaldeans, their enemies, are not hidden from Me, just as their iniquities were not hidden from Me; and so I will be able to draw them out through My hunters from all their hiding places as well as from their iniquities.
Note: The Prophets are accustomed to speak of the conversion of the Gentiles and the impious as if it were vengeance, captivity, fishing, and hunting; because God in them avenges, fishes, hunts, and captures their crimes and impious customs, so that He may tame them and transform them into different customs and people. See Canon 46.
Verse 18
18. AND I WILL REPAY, — meaning: First, however, before I send the fishermen, I will punish for their merits their double, that is, manifold iniquities, so that being thus afflicted they may have recourse to Me and implore My help. Thus God punished the Jews through Antiochus Epiphanes and his successors, and through Pompey, Caesar, and other Romans. Likewise He punished the Gentiles, when He exhausted and destroyed each of their kingdoms and monarchies before Christ through wars: for thus He punished and devastated the Persians through the Greeks, the Greeks through the Romans, the Romans through one another and through civil wars.
Note 'double,' that is, of the fathers and of the children, says Isidore. Second, St. Jerome: 'Double,' he says, because the iniquities of the Jews who knew God's law were twice as grave as those of the ignorant nations. Third and best, 'double,' that is, manifold. See what was said at 1 Timothy 5:17.
WITH CARCASSES. — He calls carcasses the corpses of children and animals which they sacrificed to idols. So Theodoret.
Verse 19
19. TO YOU THE NATIONS SHALL COME. — By 'nations' the Chaldean and Vatablus understand the Jews returning from Chaldea to Jerusalem. Second, St. Thomas and Lyranus understand the nations converted to Judaism, and returning with the Jews from Babylon to Judea. That many such existed is clear from 1 Ezra 6:21 and Esther 8:17. Third and best, St. Jerome, Rabanus, Theodoret, a Castro, Eusebius, Demonstration 5 ch. 30, St. Thomas, Lyranus, and St. Augustine, Book 1 On the Consensus of the Evangelists ch. 26, understand the nations converted to Christ and the Church, to whom God will show His 'hand and power,' that is, Christ who is the power and might of God, and His signs and most powerful miracles, especially the fact that through poor and lowly fishermen He would convert the whole world; they will say: 'Truly falsehood,' that is, false gods and idols, 'our fathers possessed,' or, as in Hebrew, inherited, because they received and worshipped them, as if by hereditary right, from their fathers.
Verse 20
20. SHALL A MAN MAKE? — Is it fitting or proper to make? Not at all, meaning: What madness is it for a man to make gods for himself, when he sees they are not true; but false, mute, and mere stones? This is what the nations say when they are converted to God.
Verse 21
21. I WILL SHOW THEM MY HAND, — My power, in so wondrous and efficacious a conversion of them, in so many miracles, graces, virtues, and gifts of the Holy Spirit. So St. Jerome.