Cornelius a Lapide
Table of Contents
Synopsis of the Chapter
After Gedaliah's murder, Johanan and the other leaders, fearing that the Chaldeans will avenge his death, consult God through Jeremiah as to whether they should flee to Egypt or remain in Judea. Jeremiah responds that they should remain in Judea and obey the Chaldeans: so they will be safe; but if they flee to Egypt, they will perish there by the sword, famine, and pestilence of the Chaldeans.
Vulgate Text: Jeremiah 42:1-9
1. Then all the captains of the warriors and Johanan the son of Kareah and Jezaniah the son of Hoshaiah and all the people from the least to the greatest came near 2. and said to Jeremiah the prophet: Let our prayer fall before you, and pray for us to the Lord your God for all this remnant; for we are left but a few out of many, as your eyes see us. 3. And let the Lord your God declare to us the way we should go and the thing we should do. 4. Then Jeremiah the prophet said to them: I have heard you: behold, I will pray to the Lord your God according to your words, and whatever the Lord answers me, I will tell you; I will hide nothing from you. 5. And they said to Jeremiah: May the Lord be a true and faithful witness between us, if we do not act according to every word with which the Lord your God sends you to us. 6. Whether it be good or evil, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God, to whom we are sending you: that it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God. 7. And when ten days had passed, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. 8. And he called Johanan the son of Kareah and all the captains of the warriors who were with him, and all the people from the least to the greatest. 9. And he said to them: Thus says the Lord God of Israel, to whom you sent me to lay your prayers before Him.
Verse 10
10. If you will remain quietly in this land, I will build you up and not tear you down; I will plant you and not uproot you: for I am now appeased concerning the evil that I did to you. 11. Do not be afraid of the king of Babylon, whom you dread with fear: do not be afraid of him, says the Lord, for I am with you to save you and to deliver you from his hand. 12. And I will grant you mercies, and I will have compassion on you, and I will cause you to dwell in your own land. 13. But if you say: We will not dwell in this land, nor will we obey the voice of the Lord our God, 14. saying: No, but we will go to the land of Egypt, where we will not see war, nor hear the sound of the trumpet, nor suffer hunger: and there we will dwell — 15. then hear the word of the Lord, O remnant of Judah: Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: If you set your faces to enter Egypt and go in to dwell there: 16. the sword that you fear shall overtake you there in the land of Egypt, and the famine that you dread shall cling to you in Egypt, and there you shall die. 17. And all the men who have set their faces to enter Egypt to dwell there shall die by the sword and by famine and by pestilence: none of them shall remain or escape from the evil that I will bring upon them. 18. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: As My fury and My indignation were poured out upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so My indignation shall be poured out upon you when you enter Egypt, and you shall become an oath and a horror and a curse and a reproach: and you shall never again see this place. 19. The word of the Lord is upon you, O remnant of Judah: Do not enter Egypt. Know for certain that I have warned you this day, 20. that you have deceived your own souls: for you sent me to the Lord our God, saying: Pray for us to the Lord our God, and according to all that the Lord our God says, tell us, and we will do it. 21. And I have told you today, and you have not obeyed the voice of the Lord your God in all the things for which He sent me to you. 22. Now therefore know for certain that you shall die by the sword and by famine and by pestilence in the place where you desire to go to dwell.
Verse 2
2. Let our prayer fall. — That is, may it be pleasing and acceptable to you, so that our prayer may be heard by you — which is that you pray to God for us; hence in verse 4 Jeremiah responds:
4. I have heard — that is, I have been entreated, or I have obeyed, I have complied with your petition.
3. May the Lord be a witness of truth and faithfulness between us. — This is a formula of swearing, meaning: May the Lord be a true and faithful witness. So the Septuagint, the Chaldean, and Vatablus. That is: we call God to witness as a true and faithful witness; or rather, we swear and call God to witness — He who is the witness and avenger of truth and faithfulness — that we will truly and faithfully do whatever you command from the mouth of God, whether good or evil, that is, whether it be prosperous or disastrous; and if we do not do it, we pray that God may punish us.
The illustrious Aristides, volume II, later Sicilian Oration, says: "Those who pray should ask the gods for the greatest and most pleasant things; likewise those who undertake deliberation should choose the safest course of all, unless afterwards they wish to blame either themselves or the gods." But the safest things are those which God suggests. The same author, volume II, Rhodian Oration: "Most affairs are conducted not so much by abundance of resources as by counsel, confidence, and patience."
In which (that is, for the purpose of declaring which) the Lord has sent you.
Verse 7
7. Ten days. — Note: Jeremiah persisted for ten days in prayer to learn God's will regarding the flight of the Jews to Egypt; and this went on for so long so that the people might understand that they were unworthy to be heard by God, and so that Jeremiah's love might become more evident.
Verse 10
10. I will build you up. — He compares the Jews metaphorically to a house, that is, a family established in Judea as in its own place, whose foundation is Abraham and Jacob; the walls are the various families joined together from various stones, that is sons, and rising on high.
Secondly, He compares them to a garden in which beautiful trees, that is children, are planted. The Apostle follows both metaphors in 1 Corinthians III, verse 9: 'You are God's field, you are God's building.' Both signify the firmness of the Synagogue and the Church solidly founded and rooted, as well as their growth and propagation, so that like a basilica they are built up on high, and like a tree they flourish in foliage and fruit, becoming like a vast forest.
I am appeased concerning the evil I did to you — meaning: I have already taken enough punishment from you, and therefore I am now appeased and reconciled to you. In Hebrew it is: I repent of the evil that I inflicted on you, that is, I will remove the scourges with which I struck you. This alludes to what He promised in chapter XVIII, 8: 'If a nation repents, etc., I also will repent.'
Verse 14
14. By no means — namely, will we hear the voice of the Lord, so as to remain in Judea; rather, we will flee to Egypt.
15. If you set your faces — that is, if you firmly resolve to flee to Egypt; for where the heart is, there the intent face also looks: where the eyes are, there is love; where the hands are, there is pain.
16. Famine, etc., shall cling to you — either because God will implant and enclose a perpetual hunger in your bowels, even though you have an abundance of bread. For just as God sends fever and other diseases, so also He sends ravenous and dog-like hunger upon men, so that whatever they eat, they are always still hungry, as Psalm LVIII, 7 says: 'They shall suffer hunger like dogs.' Or rather, because He will bring barrenness upon Egypt, and consequently famine, especially when Nebuchadnezzar invades it and devastates the whole land.
18. Was poured out. — In Hebrew נתך nittach, that is, was poured out. It is a metaphor from metals, which when they are smelted and liquefied, burst forth and pour out with great force like a torrent of fire, meaning: Just as by My sudden fury, like molten iron or lead, the citizens of Jerusalem were overwhelmed and burned: so you will be overwhelmed by the same in Egypt. The Septuagint translates: As My fury dripped down, like a dark and thick cloud which, dissolved by the sun, rains down and pours forth floods of water.
Note: The reason why God thus forbade the Jews from going to Egypt, even though He permitted them to be led to Babylon, was that the Egyptians, being utterly devoted to worshipping their many idols, would easily turn the Jews — already inclined — to worshipping the same idols and adopting their customs, as indeed they immediately did, as is evident from chapter XLIV, verses 19 and 23. For it was better for the Jews to be bound with iron chains in Babylon than to be given over to idols in Egypt.
Morally, learn here how carefully one must avoid the company of the wicked, lest they rub their impiety off on us. King Saul prophesied among the Prophets; but among the wicked, he acted wickedly, 1 Samuel XIX. St. Peter was steadfast with Christ; but standing in the courtyard among the guards, he denied Christ.
Hear what God said to Jehoshaphat, who allied himself with Ahaziah, the impious king of Israel: 'Because you had a treaty with Ahaziah, the Lord has struck your works, and your ships were wrecked and could not go to Tarshish,' 2 Chronicles XX, 37. And again, chapter XIX, 2: 'You give aid to the impious (Ahab) and join in friendship with those who hate the Lord, and therefore you indeed deserved the wrath of the Lord; but good works have been found in you.'
St. Ambrose, in his sermon On the Kalends of January, prohibiting association with Jews, says thus: 'We must avoid not only the company of Gentiles, but also of Jews, whose very conversation is a great pollution. For they artfully insinuate themselves among people, they enter homes, they enter courts, they trouble the ears of judges and public officials, and they prevail all the more because they are all the more brazen.'
St. Augustine teaches that he was made worse by bad company, Confessions book II, chapters III, VIII, IX, and X: 'Headlong I rushed with such blindness that among my peers I was ashamed of lesser disgrace than I heard them boasting of their shameful deeds, glorying all the more in proportion as they were more base; and I delighted in doing things not only from the desire of the deed, but also from the desire for praise. What is worthy of blame if not vice? I, lest I be blamed, became more vicious, and where no actual deed was at hand by which I might equal the most depraved, I pretended to have done what I had not done, lest I seem more contemptible the more innocent I was; and lest I be held cheaper the more chaste I was.' Then he adds: 'Behold, with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon, and I wallowed in its mire as though in cinnamon and precious ointments. And that I might cling more tenaciously to its navel, the invisible enemy trampled upon me and seduced me, because I was easily seduced, etc. O most hostile friendship, unfathomable seduction of the mind! From sport and jest came the eagerness to harm, the appetite for another's loss, with no desire for my own gain, no desire for revenge; yet when someone says: Let us go, let us do it — one is ashamed not to be shameless.'
The same Augustine in the same place confesses that he would not have been lured to the theft of pears except to please his companions: 'What fruit did I, wretch, ever have in those things which now I blush to recall, especially in that theft — in which I loved the theft itself, nothing else, when even the theft was nothing, and I was the more wretched for that very reason? And yet I would not have done it alone — so I recall my mind at that time — I would absolutely not have done it alone. Therefore I also loved there the companionship of those with whom I did it.'
Nebridius, Augustine's fellow student, although he did not change his morals while among courtiers, nonetheless left the court lest he be changed. Hear St. Jerome about him, letter 9 to Salvina: 'Forgetting his rank,' he says, 'he afterward had all his fellowship with monks and clergy. For who has entered the furnace of the king of Babylon without being burned? What young man's cloak has the Egyptian mistress not seized? What wife of a eunuch bears no children when pleasure has passed?'
King Amaziah had hired a hundred thousand soldiers for a hundred talents of silver; but the prophet warned him to dismiss them, for they were impious and would bring misfortune, 2 Chronicles chapter XXV.
Our Maffei writes, book XVI of the History of the Indies, that nothing so impeded the conversion of the Chinese to Christ as the vices and scandals of certain Christians. He writes the same about the Brazilians in book XV.
"There befell," he says, "an untamed and widespread evil, and nothing had more powerfully blocked the way and path of the Gospel: the license and impudence of the old Christians — unworthy of such a name and profession — combined with anxious greed and sordidness, so that their arrival in the villages of the barbarians and their manner of living both gravely offended everyone and brought enormous envy and infamy upon the Christian name."
Gordiana, the aunt of Gregory the Great, as he himself laments in book IV of his Dialogues, chapter XVI, although she enjoyed the most holy example of her sisters Tharsilla and Aemiliana, nevertheless — because she took excessive pleasure in the company of lay girls devoted to this world — after the death of her sisters she was wretchedly led astray.
You shall become an oath — you shall become an אלה ala, that is, an oath of execration, so that whoever wishes to curse someone may say: May God destroy you, as He destroyed the Jews who fled to Egypt against the Lord's will.
Verse 19
19. Do not enter Egypt (for otherwise if you enter it): know assuredly (that is, know and remember) that I have warned you today — meaning: When you perish in Egypt, remember that I foretold this to you and begged you not to do it. Secondly and better: know that I have 'protested,' that is, declared solemnly, and have called you yourselves, your good faith, and the oath you swore in verse 5 as witnesses, as in fact I do here call them; 'that you have deceived your own souls,' and that you rush willingly into your own destruction and will die by sword and famine in Egypt.
20. You have deceived your own souls — meaning: You have deceived me, pretending that you wished to submit to God's will; for now that you understand that His will is for you to remain in Judea, by your very sad and averted expression you show that you do not wish to submit. Therefore you have deceived not so much me as your own souls: because for your dwelling abroad, your disobedience, and your perjury, God will punish you and take your lives from you and kill you in Egypt. Hence the Septuagint and the Chaldean translate: You have done evil to your own souls. It would have been better not to ask God, nor to resign yourselves to His will with an oath, than to rebel against Him after asking and receiving His answer. For this is to mock God: either you pretended that you would obey God; or if at the time you had a sincere will to obey and changed it during these ten days that elapsed between your petition and oath and verse 7, you are lighter and more inconstant than a chameleon, liars and perjurers; and so you deal with God as if He were a child, a buffoon, or a fool. What could be more outrageous? With what punishments must this be expiated?
Vatablus explains it differently: You have deceived me in your souls, he says, because the thought of your mind did not correspond to the words and promises you made to me: for you pretended that you wished to obey God in all things; and yet you had a firm intention of fleeing to Egypt, even if I and God should dissuade you.
Morally, learn here that the disobedient create danger for themselves and are caught in their own snare. For just as Jonah, fleeing from God, fell into the belly of the whale, so the Jews, fleeing the counsel of God and Jeremiah, fell into the belly of that great dragon, namely Nebuchadnezzar. Let them therefore consider that verse of the Poet:
Where do you flee, Enceladus? To whatever shores you go, you will always be under Jupiter.
Here ends the Commentary of St. Thomas on Jeremiah: for, overtaken by death, he was unable to complete it.