1. saying. This single word begins the Hebrew text of this chapter. Either it should be deleted, or, more likely, the introductory formula here presented in brackets was inadvertently omitted in scribal transmission.

send away. This is the set term for divorce.

can he go back to her again? According to the law in Deuteronomy 24:1–4, a man is not permitted to remarry his divorced wife.

lovers. Though the Hebrew reʿim usually means “companions,” as it clearly does below in verse 20, the immediate context suggests the sense of “lovers,” the same association for this noun clearly indicated in Hosea 3:1.

2. to the bare heights. These are probably the same locations as “the high hills” where fertility rites were conducted.

Where have they not lain with you? The passive Hebrew verb in the consonantal text, shugalt, is evidently a ruder term, euphemistically corrected in the Masoretic marginal note to the verb that means “to lie.” Lundbom gets the flavor of the rudeness by translating the phrase as “where have you not been laid,” but that expression sounds too colloquially modern.

On the roads you sat waiting for them. “Waiting for” is elliptically implied in the Hebrew, as Rashi notes. The story of Tamar and Judah in Genesis 38 leads one to infer that prostitutes often stationed themselves by the roadside to ply their trade.

like an Arab in the desert. The Arab is perhaps imagined sitting in his tent waiting for passing caravans in order to conduct commerce. Others see a reference to Arab marauders waiting to attack travelers.

4. Have you not called Me, “My father.” These are the self-deluded words of Judah (still imagined in the second-person feminine singular as a woman), who has not truly turned back to God yet fancies that she has an intimate relationship with Him and that He will bear her no grudge.

5. will you prevail? The received text seems to say “And she will prevail,” which does not make much sense. This translation emends the verb to a second-person feminine singular, like the two preceding verbs in this sentence, and construes it as a rhetorical question.

8. And she saw. The Masoretic Text has “And I saw,” but both the Septuagint and the Peshitta show this more plausible reading, “And she saw.”

I sent her away and gave her a bill of divorce. The prophet, continuing his favored metaphor of the turn to pagan worship as sexual betrayal, represents the exile of the northern kingdom as God’s divorcing Israel.

9. from all her whoring. The received text seems to say “from the voice of her whoring,” miqol zenutah. Many scholars emend this to miqal zenutah, claiming it means “from her casual [or easy] whoring,” but qal is an adjective that does not make syntactical sense as a construct form with zenutah. This translation reads instead mikol zenutah.

11. Rebel Israel has shown itself more in the right than Judah the Treacherous. In this continuing allegory of the two sister-kingdoms, Judah is even worse than Israel—either because she has the monitory example of exiled Israel before her eyes yet does not pay heed, or because Jeremiah represents her as actually exceeding Israel in her paganizing promiscuity.

12. call out these words to the north. The likely location is not the kingdom of Israel, long destroyed and its population largely replaced by people brought in from elsewhere in the Assyrian sphere, but the northern reaches of the Assyrian empire, to which the inhabitants of Israel have been exiled. This prophecy, enunciated a century after the destruction of the northern kingdom, surely expresses what is no more than a utopian hope, for by Jeremiah’s time the exiles would have been assimilated into the surrounding peoples and would have lost their national identity.

Turn back, Rebel Israel. The Hebrew, shuvah meshuvah yisraʾel, exhibits sound-play (roughly like “turn back, backsliding Israel” in English). Verses 14 and 22 show a related sound-play, shuvu banim shovavim, “Turn back, rebellious sons.”

13. you have scattered your ways. The phrasing sounds a little odd, but the probable reference, as the medieval Hebrew commentator David Kimchi proposes, is to the many different gods that promiscuous Israel chose to worship.

14. one from a town and two from a clan. This looks like a version of the notion of the saving remnant articulated by Isaiah. Only a small minority will be saved and brought back to Zion.

15. shepherds. As before, these are the rulers of the people.

16. they no longer shall say “the Ark of the LORD’s covenant.” The Ark Narrative in 1 Samuel 5–7 suggests that a fetishistic conception of the Ark as a magical object had currency among the people.

nor shall it again be made. These words may indicate that the supposed original Ark had been removed from the Temple and lost, which one may infer from some biblical texts but not from others.

17. they shall call Jerusalem “Throne of the LORD.” The Ark, crowned with carved cherubim, was in fact conceived as God’s throne. In the new age, however, all Jerusalem will be a manifestation of God’s presence, and hence there will be no need for a material cult-object like the Ark.

18. the house of Judah shall go with the house of Israel. This culminates the utopian fantasy that the northern kingdom will be restored—“from the land of the north,” which is to say Assyrian exile—and will live in harmony with the southern kingdom.

21. the weeping supplications of Israel’s children. They have realized the dire straits into which their actions have brought them.

22. I will heal your rebellion. This is best understood as an ellipsis: I will heal the terrible consequences of your rebellion. What follows is a confession of wrongdoing by the penitent rebels.

falsehood is from the hills, / the clamor of the mountains. The hills are where the pagan gods were worshipped. The clamor would refer to the throng of celebrants on the heights, raising their voices in the performance of their rites.

23. the shameful thing. The noun boshet, “shame” or “shameful thing,” is regularly used as a pejorative substitution for “Baal.” One sees this in theophoric names, where the baal suffix has been editorially changed to boshet, as in “Mephibosheth,” originally “Mephibaal.”

consumed / the toil of our fathers. As the next line makes clear, the wealth of the fathers, their sheep and their cattle, has been eaten up in sacrifices to Baal, and, what is worse, their sons and daughters have been offered in sacrifice as well.