This, then, is the reason why the land is waste and deserted. And _therefore_--because past and present experience is an index of the future, for Iahvah's character and purpose are constant--therefore the desolation of the cities of Judah and of Jerusalem itself, will ere long be accomplished. _Therefore thus said Iahvah Sabaoth_, the God of Armies and _the God of Israel; Lo, I am about to feed them_--or, _I continue to feed them_--to wit, _this people_ (an epexegetical gloss omitted by the LXX.) _with wormwood, and I will give them to drink waters of gall_ (Deut. xxix. 17. An Israelite inclining to foreign gods is "a root bearing wormwood and gall"--bearing a bitter harvest of defeat, a cup of deadly disaster for his people; cf. Am. vi. 12), _and I will "scatter them among the nations," "whom they and their fathers knew not"_ (Deut. xxviii. 36, 64). The last phrase is remarkable as evidence of the isolation of Israel, whose country lay off the beaten track between the Trans-Euphratean empires and Egypt, which ran along the sea-coast. They knew not Assyria, until Tiglath Pileser's intervention (circ. 734), nor Babylon till the times of the New Empire. In Hezekiah's day, Babylon is still "a far country" (2 Kings xx. 14). Israel was in fact an agricultural people, trading directly with Phenicia and Egypt, but not with the lands beyond the Great River. The prophets heighten the horror of exile by the strangeness of the land whither Israel is to be banished.
_And I will send after them the sword, until I have consumed them._ The survivors are to be cut off (cf. viii. 3); there is no reserve, as in iv. 27, v. 10, 18; a "full end" is announced; which, again, corresponds to the aggravation of social and private evils in the time of Jehoiakim, and the prophet's despair of reform.
The judgment of Judah is the ruin of her cities, the dispersion of her people in foreign lands, and extermination by the sword. Nothing is left for this doomed nation but to sing its funeral song; to send for the professional wailing women, that they may come and chant their dirges, not over the dead but over the living who are condemned to die: _Thus said Iahvah Sabaoth_ (here as in ver. 6, LXX. omits the expressive _Sabaoth_), _Mark ye well_ the present crisis, and what it implies (cf. ii. 10; LXX. wrongly omits this emphatic term), _and summon the women that sing dirges, that they come, and unto the skilful women send ye, that they come_ [LXX. omits], _and hasten_ [LXX. _and speak and_] _to lift up the death-wail over us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids pour down waters_. The "singing women" of 2 Chron. xxxv. 25, or the "minstrels" of St. Matt. ix. 23, are intended. The reason assigned for thus inviting them assumes that the prophet's forecast is already fulfilled. Already, as in viii. 19, Jeremiah hears the loud wailing of the captives as they are driven away from their ruined homes: _For the sound of the death-wail is heard from Sion, "How are we undone! We are sore ashamed"_--of our false confidence and foolish security and deceitful hopes--"_for_, after all, _we have left the land, for our dwellings have cast_ (_us_) _out_!" The last two lines appear to be parallels, which is against the rendering, _For men have cast down our dwellings_. Cf. Lev. xviii. 25; chap. xxii. 28. From the wailing women, the address now seems to turn to the Judean women generally; but perhaps the former are still intended, as their peculiar calling was probably hereditary and passed on from mother to daughter: _For hear, ye women, the word of Iahvah, and let your ear take in the word of His mouth! and teach ye your daughters the death-wail, and each her companion the lamentation; for_