Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 10

House of Israel. —This forms the link that connects what follows with what precedes. The “house of Israel” had been told that it was “uncircumcised in heart,” on a level with the heathen; now the special sin of the heathen, which it was disposed to follow, is set forth in words of scorn and indignation.

Be not dismayed at the signs of heaven. —The special reference is to the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators of the Chaldeans (Isaiah 47:13), finding portents either in the conjunction of planets and constellations, or in eclipses, comets, and other like phenomena. In singular contrast with the abject attitude of mind thus produced, the prophet shows that what has been called in scorn an anthropomorphic theology, was then the one effectual safeguard against the superstition that bows in fear before anything that is unusual and unexplained.

The customs of the people. —Better, ordinances of the peoples.

The prophet is speaking, not of common customs, but of religious institutions, and of these as belonging, not to “the people,” i.e., Israel, but to the nations around them. The verses that follow are so closely parallel to Isaiah 41:7; Isaiah 44:9–17; Isaiah 46:5–7 (see the notes on these passages), that the natural conclusion is that one writer had seen the work of the other. The grandeur and fullness of Isaiah’s language, and the unlikeness of what we find here to Jeremiah’s usual style, makes it more probable that he was the copyist, and thus adds to the argument for the authorship of the chapter ascribed to Isaiah.

It is, however, possible, as some critics have thought, that these verses are an interpolation, and in that case they supply no evidence either way. The fact that they are found in the Septuagint as well as in the Hebrew is, however, in favor of their genuineness. It may be noted that the substance of what follows has a parallel in the Epistle ascribed to Jeremiah in the apocryphal book of Baruch.

Upright as the palm tree.

Perhaps a better translation is, A pillar in a garden of gourds are they.

The Hebrew word translated “upright” has two very different, though not entirely unconnected, meanings:

1. First, “twisted, rounded, carved.” In this sense, it is commonly translated as “beaten work” (Exodus 25:18; Exodus 25:31; Exodus 25:36). If we accept this meaning, it is applied here to the twisted, palm-like columns of a temple. The stiff, formal figure of the idol—with arms pressed close to its side and none of the action found in Greek statues—is compared to these columns.
2. Second, the other meaning adopted by many commentators is “a garden of gourds or cucumbers,” and the word is rendered this way in Isaiah 1:8.

The comparison in the so-called “Epistle of Jeremy” in the apocryphal book of Baruch , where an idol is likened to “a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers,” shows that this latter meaning was the accepted one when that Epistle was written.

According to this view, the thought is that the idol the men of Judah were worshipping was like one of the “pillars” (the word for “palm tree” is translated this way in Song of Solomon 3:6 and Joel 2:30). These were like the Hermes or Priapus figures that Greeks and Romans placed in gardens and orchards as scarecrows.

Similar figures appear to have been used by the Phoenicians for the same purpose. This practice, like the related worship of the Asherah, seems to have been gaining ground even in Judah.

Forasmuch as. —A somewhat flat addition to the Hebrew text, which opens with a vigorous abruptness, None is there like unto thee ...

Great in might. —The latter is an almost technical word (Psalms 21:13; Psalms 145:11) for the Divine Omnipotence. (Compare the Mighty God of Isaiah 9:6.)