Jeremiah;- The pride of Jerusalem (ch13)

The second half of chapter 13 (apart from a couple of verses) is an address to Jerusalem, treating the city as a woman.

This is an expanded version of the two verses at the end of ch4, where Jerusalem is described as a painted harlot dressed in scarlet (the original model for Harlot Babylon) and as a mother about to experience pain in exile like the pains of giving birth.

V15 “Hear and give ear; be not proud”.
Pride is what stops them listening to God. They need to give glory to him.

Otherwise he will bring them into a state of darkness, turning their light into gloom, so that their feet will stumble as they try to travel across the mountains. This “darkness” is a metaphor about being taken into captivity (v17). This is the kind of darkness that is reversed in Isaiah ch9 v2 (“have seen a great light”).

V20 She is invited to lift up her eyes and see the invaders who are coming from the north. She will be asked what she has done with the beautiful flock of sheep (that is, God’s people), which was left under her care. Yes, they are about to be given worse governors or even taken into exile.

V21 “What will you say when they set as head over you those whom you yourself have taught to be friends to you?”
Many prophets have complained about the habit of looking for allies in foreign peoples, such as Egyptians and Assyrians and Babylonians, instead of trusting in the Lord. This is repeating the point made at the end of ch4, that these false friends will betray her. Anyone left in the land when Babylon has finished dealing with Jerusalem will find themselves under governors appointed by the Babylonians (see later chapters in Jeremiah).

Continuing the echo from ch4, Jerusalem will, as a notional “woman”, suffer the experience of “pangs lie those of a woman in travail” and rape (“your skirts are lifted up and you suffer violence”). All this because of the greatness of her iniquity.

V23 “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil”.
The Lord is about to give up on expecting any repentance to come from them. Instead he will scatter them as chaff is scattered by the wind.

V25 This will be their new “lot” or “portion”; in deliberately pointed contrast with the “portion” they were given when they first came into the land. All this because the people have forgotten the Lord and trusted in “lies” (used here as a nickname for the other gods, contrasting with the God of truth).

He ends the chapter by returning to the “shamed woman” theme. God has seen her [spiritual] harlotries and adulteries, “neighing” after other gods like a lustful mare (an image used as far back as ch2). How long will it be before she is made clean? That is a rhetorical question, since he has ceased to expect any true change from her. Instead he will “lift up the skirts over her head” to reveal her “shame”. Another word-play there, because “shame” [BOSHETH] is also used in prophetic speech as a substitute for the name of Baal.

Vv18-19 “Say to the king and the queen mother”.
These two verses are not part of the address to Jerusalem, but a separate instruction to Jeremiah.

Identifying the king and queen mother in question requires a little detective work. In fact we need to be able to follow the sequence of kings between the battle of Megiddo and the fall of Jerusalem, as part of the background of this prophet’s work, so I’ll be re-describing the sequence from time to time whenever it’s relevant to the setting of the chapter.

The history is complicated by the habit of adopting a new “throne-name” at the beginning of the reign, which is probably how David’s precious child Jedidiah became the ruler Solomon. This practice remains the norm for the Popes, but it used to be more common among the kings of Europe generally. Even the present Queen of Britain was asked on her accession what name she proposed to adopt as Queen; she is said to have replied “My own, of course”, but the question had to be asked because that “of course” had not yet become a settled assumption.

When Josiah died, the people in Jerusalem chose his son Shallum, son of Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. He took the name Jehoahaz.

Pharaoh Neco took Jehoahaz captive, and replaced him with his elder brother Eliakim, son of Zebidah the daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah. Eliakim was made to take the name Jehoiakim. Why was he not not chosen in the first place? My theory is that he was a captive in Pharaoh’s hands.

Jehoiakim rebelled against Babylon, died before Nebuchadnezzar got there, and was followed by his own son, confusingly called Jehoiachin. Certainly the similarity is enough to confuse the writers of 2 Chronicles and Daniel ch1, let alone any modern reader. This young man is the one who gets taken off into the first stage of the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah calls him “Coniah”.

Nebuchadnezzar then replaced him with Mattaniah, the last of the sons of Josiah, son of Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. Mattaniah was made to take the name Zedekiah. Obviously he was Coniah’s uncle, as identified correctly in 2 Kings. The Chronicler calls him Coniah’s brother, but that’s part of the confusion caused by the similarity of names. This is the king involved in the final Fall of Jerusalem.

Two of those kings, you may have noticed, have the same mother, Hamutal. Ezekiel ch19 contains “a lamentation for the princes of Judah”, an obscure allegory about a lioness and two of her whelps, of which one was taken captive into Egypt and the other was taken captive into Babylon. Although commentators tend to assume that the mother lioness is Jerusalem, it is tempting to take the chapter as a story about Hamutal and her sons Jehoahaz and Zedekiah. The first was taken captive into Egypt, and the second (before the event) looked as though he was about to follow Coniah into Babylonian captivity. If so, the allegory is highlighting the significance of Hamutal, which suggests that she may have been the kind of queen mother, very common in history, who attempted to rule through her sons. That in turn would explain why she gets brought into this message from Jeremiah.

The message for the royal pair is that “Judah is taken into exile”. That is why the cities of the Negeb are empty. This has to be the anticipatory prophecy meaning “will be taken into exile”; when the exile was a completed event, the king was already dead. This being the case, they may as well step down from their throne and take a lowly seat, because they have lost their crown (just the one crown- they are not officially joint rulers).
So this looks like a warning being given to the young Zedekiah and his probably domineering mother as the Babylonian army approached.

Word explanation mainly for the benefit of confused Britons

History is full of queen-mothers. Or perhaps the correct plural form is “queens mother”, since “mother” is really an adjective in that expression. Following the analogy of “knights-errant”, “Astronomers Royal”, and “mothers-in-law”.

The true origin of the term is that the woman began as a queen, being the wife of a king. When the king died, their son would succeed. As the old king’s widow and the new king’s mother, the woman would retain the honorary status of “queen”, with the addition of “mother” to distinguish her from the new king’s wife. In other words, she was queen AND mother. Queen mother. All this was obvious enough when schools history was still talking about kings and queens instead of about social history and costumes, and would highlight a number of notorious examples.

It ceased to be obvious in the second half of the twentieth century. The confusing factor was that from 1952 the Queen Mother was also the Queen’s mother. The former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was the widow of the Queen’s father, George VI. And the two ladies co-existed under those titles, Queen and Queen Mother, for at least half a century. Consequently, three or four generations of Britons appear to have grown up under the impression that the term “Queen Mother” means “mother of the Queen”. As a direct result, even supposedly intelligent newspapers like the Times were inventing the absurd and horrible neologism “King mother” as a potential future title for Princess Diana. It may be some consolation that her death put an end to that line of speculation, which was a great relief to lovers of the English language.

I remember seeing a Goldie Hawn character addressing the Queen’s picture (on a roll of banknotes) as “Queen Mother, God bless her”, so I suppose that’s the American version of the confusion.

Joseph was of the line of Jeconiah/Coniah, cursed that none on that line would ever sit on the thrown.

That's right if we followed the true succession of Israel Joseph, husband of Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, was next in line to be king. And as such his first born would be the Next in Line.