And I will make this city an astonishment and a hissing; every one that passeth by shall be astonished and hiss because of all the plagues thereof.
Jeremiah stands outside Jerusalem in the valley of Hinnom. He holds a clay bottle, and the city's elders and priests are watching. There God tells him what Jerusalem itself is about to become. The verse raises two questions: why would God turn His own city into a spectacle, and is such a sentence ever final?
The location is part of the message. The place he stood in already carried a meaning.
In Jeremiah 19 the sign of the potter's earthen vessel goes a step further. Now the valley of the son of Hinnom comes into view, and that valley always stands for judgment. "So look, the days are coming, says the Lord, when this place will no longer be called Tophet, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but The valley of slaughter." Tophet shows the great judgment the Lord will carry out when He Himself comes. It is not only the place where men carry out a sentence. Clearly, the subject is the judgment of Jerusalem.
The ruin is not random. God gives His reasons before He gives the sentence.
"Because they have forsaken Me, and have made this place strange to Me, and have burned incense in it to other gods that neither they, nor their fathers, nor the kings of Judah have known. They have filled this place with the blood of innocent people. They have also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal. I never commanded that, I never spoke of it, and it never came into My mind."
The earlier sign made one point about God. This one makes another about the city.
The earthen bottle of chapter 19 stands for Jerusalem and the people. The earlier sign meant that God has the right to handle any nation or kingdom as He sees fit, and the power to do so. Here is the solemn sign that God will punish the city, its surroundings and its people in public for their sin and idolatry, in such a way that when others hear of it, their ears will tingle. So it becomes a powerful witness to how terrible sin is. The vile names Tophet and Hinnom were not strong enough to describe the place of their punishment; it was to be called "The valley of slaughter" (v. 6).
Chapter 18 showed soft clay on the potter's wheel. Chapter 19 puts something else in Jeremiah's hands.
This time it is not clay that can still be formed but an earthen vessel that has been hardened in the fire. It can only be broken. The message is clear but solemn: there is a time when we can accept discipline and profit from it, and there is a time when it is too late. The warning not to harden the heart (Heb. 4:7) applies.
Jeremiah acted out several signs. What happened next tested them all.
Striking signs like the belt (Jer. 13) came true exactly. The Lord had taken up Israel for His honour; but they sought their own honour with "great pride" (v. 9), so they would be destroyed as a nation. The same is true of the potter's vessel of Jeremiah 18, the earthen vessel of Jeremiah 19, and the bonds and yokes of chapters 27 and 28. We know how all this came about, and in a way that leaves no room to doubt either God's prediction or His carrying it out.
The lesson does not stop with Jerusalem. One writer traces it to the end of the Bible.
But all this has a lesson for us today. Christendom, or Babylon, has now taken the place Israel once held. Babylon trusts in her safety, despite her moral state. She says, "I sit as a queen, I am no widow, and I shall never see sorrow." (Rev. 18:7.) Revelation 18 is another act like the prophet's act in the potter's house, or in the valley of the son of Hinnom. It teaches the unfaithful steward that the doom of the shattered vessel is waiting for him.
- Place: God announced judgment in Hinnom, where they had burned their own children. The sin and its sentence share one address.
- Cause: God gives His reasons first — they left Him, served other gods, and filled the place with innocent blood.
- Sign: A hardened vessel can only be broken; there is a time when correction still works, and a time when it is too late.
- Reach: God makes the ruin public. Passers-by hiss, and their shock tells everyone how terrible sin is.
- Result: Every sign came true. The same warning still reaches anyone who carries God's name but trusts in his own safety.
And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat everyone the flesh of his friend, in the siege and in the straitness wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.
This verse holds some of the most terrible words in the Bible. God warns that a siege will drive parents in Jerusalem to eat their own children — so why does He say it, and did it happen?
God does not threaten this out of nowhere. The threat comes at the end of a list of charges, and He gives it in the valley of Hinnom, just outside the city — the very place where the people had burned their own children to idols.
In Jeremiah 19 the Lord tells the prophet to take a potter's earthen bottle before the elders of the people and of the priests. In the valley of Hinnom he is to proclaim His new message... "Because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known. They have filled this place with the blood of innocents. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind."
This threat was not new. Deuteronomy 28 had already spelled out what a siege would do to a people who turned away from God, including the loss of natural love inside the family.
They would besiege the cities, no matter how well fortified, causing the starving occupants to go so far as to eat their own children (v.53). See 2 Kings 6:28-29 and Jeremiah 19:8-9... in verse 54 we read that even the most refined of people would become hostile toward their wives and their children. Such would be the desperation caused by hunger that there would be no consideration left for even the closest loved ones (v.55).
Israel went through the same thing in another siege. The suffering did not turn their hearts back to God.
Israel's heart was hardened, so that in the famine accompanying the siege, instead of turning to the Lord, some of the inhabitants in their terrible extremity turned to the horrible deed of eating even their own offspring! See Leviticus 26:26-29; Deuteronomy 28:52-53; which was finally fulfilled under the Romans.
God puts the act in His own hand: "I will make them eat." He used an army to do it. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, surrounded Jerusalem, and commentators point to that siege as the fulfilment of this verse.
Nebuchadnezzar builds ramparts all around Jerusalem and undertakes a siege which lasts about eight months. Famine intensifies in the city, according to the word of Jeremiah (Jer. 19:9). During all this time, despite the countless dangers threatening him, Jeremiah stands firm for the Lord.
Lamentations mourns the fall of Jerusalem. It reports what the siege produced inside the walls.
Every trace of compassion and even of natural feeling had gone. We are next told: "The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food during the destruction of the daughter of my people" (v. 10). Nothing could account for such barbarity but what the prophet adds right after (v. 11): "The Lord gave full vent to his wrath; he poured out his hot anger, and he kindled a fire in Zion that consumed its foundations." What can be more thorough than to devour foundations?
Jeremiah spoke these words holding a potter's clay bottle. What the Lord told him to do with it shows what the words meant.
The earthen bottle of chapter 19 represents Jerusalem and the people. It is the solemn sign that God will publicly punish the city, its surroundings and its people for their sin and idolatry. News of it will make the ears of everyone who hears tingle. It becomes an eloquent witness to how awful sin is. Even the vile names Tophet and Hinnom could not describe the place of their punishment strongly enough; it would be called "the Valley of Slaughter." To the prophet the Lord said, "Then you shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you, and shall say to them, 'Thus says the LORD of hosts: So will I break this people and this city.'"
- Warned — None of this came out of nowhere. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 had described this siege, this famine and this act centuries in advance.
- Deserved — The charges came first: God abandoned, other gods served, innocent blood spilled, children burned to Baal.
- Refused — Israel had already lived through the same horror, and still would not turn back. Suffering by itself does not produce repentance.
- Fulfilled — Nebuchadnezzar's siege lasted about eight months and made the words literal. Lamentations records mothers boiling their own children, and commentators point to a later fulfilment under the Romans.
- Signified — The Lord told Jeremiah to smash the clay bottle in front of the men with him: He would break this people and this city in the same way. News like that makes the ears of all who hear it tingle.