The eighteenth verse begins in the Hebrew with a highly anomalous word, which is generally supposed to mean "my source of comfort" (מבליגיתי). But both the strangeness of the form itself, which can hardly be paralleled in the language, and the indifferent sense which it yields, and the uncertainty of the Hebrew MSS., and the variations of the old versions, indicate that we have here another corruption of the text. Some Hebrew copies divide the word, and this is supported by the Septuagint and the Syro-Hexaplar version, which treat the verse as the conclusion of ver. 17, and render "and they shall bite you _incurably, with pain of your perplexed heart_" (Syro-Hex. "without cure"). But if the first part of the word is "without" (מִבְּלִי "for lack of" ...), what is the second? No such root as the existing letters imply is found in Hebrew or the cognate languages. The Targum does not help us: _Because they were scoffing_ (מלעיגין) _against the prophets who prophesied unto them, sorrow and sighing will I bring_ (איתי) _upon them on account of their sins: upon them, saith the prophet, my heart is faint._ It is evident that this is no better than a kind of punning upon the words of the Masoretic text.[33] I incline to read "How shall I cheer myself? Upon me is sorrow; upon me my heart is sick." (The prophet would write עַל not עֲלֵי for "against," without a suffix. Read יָגוֹן עָלַי אַבְלִיגָה מָה Job ix. 27, x. 20; Ps. xxxix. 14.) The passage is much like iv. 19.
Another possible emendation is: "Iahvah causeth sorrow to flash forth upon me" (יהוה מבליג; after the archetype of Amos v. 9); but I prefer the former.
Jeremiah closes the section with an outpouring of his own overwhelming sorrow at the heart-rending spectacle of the national calamities. No reader endued with any degree of feeling can doubt the sincerity of the prophet's patriotism, or the willingness with which he would have given his own life for the salvation of his country. This one passage alone says enough to exonerate its author from the charge of indifference, much more of treachery to his fatherland. He imagines himself to hear the cry of the captive people, who have been carried away by the victorious invader into a distant land: _Hark! the sound of the imploring cry of the daughter of my people from a land far away! "Is Iahvah not in Sion? or is not her King in her?"_ (cf. Mic. iv. 9). Such will be the despairing utterance of the exiles of Judah and Jerusalem; and the prophet hastens to answer it with another question, which accounts for their ruin by their disloyalty to that heavenly King; _O why did they vex Me with their graven images, with alien vanities?_ Compare a similar question and answer in an earlier discourse (v. 19). It may be doubted whether the pathetic words which follow--_The harvest is past, the fruit-gathering is finished, but as for us, we are not delivered!_--are to be taken as a further complaint of the captives, or as a reference by the prophet himself to hopes of deliverance which had been cherished in vain, month after month, until the season of campaigns was over. In Palestine, the grain crops are harvested in April and May, the ingathering of the fruit falls in August. During all the summer months, Jehoiakim, as a vassal of Egypt, may have been eagerly hoping for some decisive interference from that quarter. That he was on friendly terms with that power at the time appears from the fact that he was allowed to fetch back refugees from its territory (xxvi. 22 _sq._). A provision for the extradition of offenders is found in the far more ancient treaty between Ramses II. and the king of the Syrian Chetta (fourteenth cent. B.C.). But perhaps the prophet is alluding to one of those frequent failures of the crops, which inflicted so much misery upon his people (cf. vers. 13, iii. 3, v. 24, 25), and which were a natural incident of times of political unsettlement and danger. In that case, he says, the harvest has come and gone, and left us unhelped and disappointed. I prefer the political reference, though our knowledge of the history of the period is so scanty, that the particulars cannot be determined.