Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 44:18

"But since we left off burning incense to the queen of heaven, and pouring out drink-offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine." — Jeremiah 44:18 (ASV)

To burn incense to the queen of heaven.— This form of worship, characterized especially by its offerings of crescent-shaped cakes, would seem to have been the dominant fashion of the idolatry of the time. (See Note on Jeremiah 7:18.) The men who felt themselves condemned by the prophet’s words vindicate their line of action. They had practiced this worship in the past, and would practice it still, and they set their experience of the prosperity of those past days against the prophet’s picture of the evil that had followed. Might they not argue, as the Romans did during the calamities that befell the Empire (Tertullian, Apology, chapter 40; Augustine, City of God, Book I, chapter 36), that they suffered because they had abandoned the worship under the influence of a different teaching?