Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 12

Yet let me talk with thee. —The soul of the prophet is vexed, as had been the soul of Job (Jeremiah 21:7), of Asaph (Psalms 73:0), and others, by the apparent anomalies of the divine government. He acknowledges as a general truth that God is righteous, “yet,” he adds, I will speak (or argue) my cause (literally, causes) with You. He will question the divine Judge until his doubt is removed. And the question is the ever-recurring one, Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? (Psalms 73:3). The “treacherous dealing” implies a reference to the conspirators of the previous chapter.

Wherefore are all they happy ... —Better, at rest, or secure.

You have planted them. —The words express, of course, the questioning distrust of the prophet. The wicked flourish, so that one would think God had indeed planted them. Yet all the while they were mocking Him with hypocritical worship (here we have an echo of Isaiah 29:13), uttering His name with their lips while He was far from that innermost being which the Hebrew symbolised by the “reins.”

You, O Lord, know me. — Like all faithful sufferers from evildoers before and after him, the prophet appeals to the righteous Judge, who knows how falsely he has been accused. In words in which the natural impatience of suffering shows itself as clearly as in the complaints of Psalm 69 and Psalm 109, he asks that the judgment may be immediate, open, terrible. As if recalling the very phrase which he had himself recently used (Jeremiah 11:19), he prays that they too may be as sheep for the slaughter, dragged or torn away from their security to the righteous penalty of their wrongdoing.

Prepare. — Better, devote. The Hebrew word, as in Jeremiah 6:4, involves the idea of consecration.

How long shall the land mourn ... —The Hebrew punctuation gives a different division: How long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of the whole field (that is, all the open country) wither? For the wickedness of them that dwell therein, cattle and birds perish, for, they say, he (that is, the prophet) will not see our latter end (that is, we will outlive him, though he prophesies our destruction).

A slightly different reading, however, adopted by the Septuagint and by some modern scholars, would give for the last clause, "He (God) seeth not our ways," that is, will leave us unpunished. The opening words point to a time of distress, probably of drought and famine.

But out of this wretchedness, the men who were Jeremiah’s enemies—the forestallers, and monopolists, and usurers of the time—continued to enrich themselves and scornfully defied all his warnings.

If thou hast run with the footmen. —The prophet is compelled to answer himself, and the voice of Jehovah is heard in his innermost soul rebuking his impatience. What are the petty troubles that fall on him compared with what others suffer, or with what might come upon himself? The thought is not unlike that with which St. Paul comforts the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 10:13), or what we find in Hebrews 12:4. The meaning of the first clause is plain enough. The man who was wearied in a foot-race should not venture (as Elijah, for example, had done, 1 Kings 18:46) to measure his speed against that of horses.

The latter (“the swelling of Jordan”) suggests the thoughts of the turbid stream of the river overflowing its banks in the time of harvest (Joshua 3:15; 1 Chronicles 12:15). In Zechariah 11:3, however, the same phrase (there translated “the pride of Jordan”) is used apparently in connection with the lions and other beasts of prey that haunted the jungle on its banks (Jeremiah 49:19; Jeremiah 50:44), and that may be the thought here. Commentators differ, and there are no data for deciding. In any case, there is no need for the interpolated words of the English Version. The sentence should run, “In a land of peace thou art secure (that is, it is easy to be tranquil when danger is not pressing). What wilt thou do in the swelling (or, amid the pride) of Jordan?”