What's On Your Mind?
Background
50. Again (as in v. 45) the exhortation to flee is given. You who have escaped from the sword, leave and do not linger! Those addressed were not among Israel’s slain (v. 49) but had survived the invasion of their land and had been deported to Babylon. Now they, as exiles, are urged to return home (v. 45; 50:8). Remember the LORD in a distant land/‘from afar’ (mērāhôq) may also convey the thought of temporal separation: ‘look back to the past’. ‘Remember’ is more than mental recall; it is a summons to action (2:2). They are called on to align themselves with the LORD’s cause (perhaps that would have involved abandoning any Babylonian practices they might have adopted during their exile there) and to commit themselves to him and all that he has pledged himself to be to his people. Think on Jerusalem/‘Let Jerusalem come up upon your heart/mind.’ The memories of the past are to engender a renewed devotion as they consider all that the LORD had previously given to them.
51. But the response of the people as they looked back was not just to former blessings, but also to the catastrophe that had overtaken them. It seems that Jeremiah gives voice to the prevailing disillusionment. ‘We are disgraced (<√bôš, 2:26), for (kî) we have been insulted and shame covers our faces.’ Their experiences at the hands of the Babylonians have left them downtrodden and depressed, and they cannot entertain good hopes for the future because of the reality of their present condition. They are experiencing shame (<√kālam, 3:3) since what they have undergone—and still are undergoing—runs counter to what they had expected. More than personal loss of dignity and status is involved; there has been open violation of the Jerusalem sanctuary. Because (kî) foreigners have entered the holy places of the LORD’s house. ‘Foreigners/‘strangers’ (2:25) are not merely people who are not known; there are negative overtones of those who are hostile, political enemies. Thinking about Jerusalem does not engender hope. It merely reminds them of the success of Babylon. The plural ‘holy places’ denotes the various parts of the sanctuary, either the multiple holy precincts within the tabernacle (Lev. 21:23) or the Temple complex (Ps. 73:17). If the LORD had not prevented such violation of his holy place in the past, could he be relied on to reverse the situation in the future?
In elaborating the doom of Babylon, these chapters provide great hope for the exiles by spelling out God’s strategy for fulfilling the restorative promises of chapters 30–33. The concluding oracles also put the captives in Babylon on advance notice to abandon it while they can, once God sets in motion his plan for the destruction and desolation of their temporary habitation in Mesopotamia (51:6). In 539, the conquering Medo-Persian army of Cyrus earned Jeremiah’s designation as destroyer from the north, which until now he had assigned to the newcomer’s principal victim, Babylon. Much of the material in these chapters portrays the demise of the Babylonian Empire as accomplished fact—fulfillment of the prophetically symbolic act of Seraiah (brother of Baruch, Jeremiah’s secretary) by his going to Babylon in ca. 594, between the first (597) and second (586) deportations of Judahites (51:59–64; 2 Kgs. 24:10–25:12).
Ver. 50. Ye that have escaped the sword, go away, stand not still, &c.] The Jews, who had escaped the sword of the Chaldeans when Jerusalem was taken, and were carried captive into Babylon, where they had remained to this time; and had also escaped the sword of the Medes and Persians, when Babylon was taken; these are bid to go away from Babylon, and go into their land, and not stay in Babylon, or linger there, as Lot in Sodom; or stop on the road, but make the best of their way to the land of Judea: remember the Lord afar off; the worship of the Lord, as the Targum interprets it; the worship of the Lord in the sanctuary at Jerusalem, from which they were afar off at Babylon; and had been a long time, even seventy years, deprived of it, as Kimchi explains it: and let Jerusalem come into your mind; that once famous city, the metropolis of the nation, that now lay in ruins; the temple that once stood in it, and the service of God there; that upon the remembrance of, and calling these to mind, they might be quickened and stirred up to hasten thither, and rebuild the city and temple, and restore the worship of God. It is not easy to say whose words these are, whether the words of the prophet, or of the Lord by him; or of the inhabitants of the heavens and earth, whose song may be here continued, and in it thus address the Jews.