2. Stand in the gate of the house of the LORD. The position is strategic: crowds of worshippers, presumably having a fetishistic notion of the intrinsic efficacy of the Temple (verse 3), would pass through this gate on their way to worship, “to bow to the LORD.”

3. Make your ways and your acts good, and I will make you dwell in this place. The people’s tenure in Jerusalem (and, implicitly, in Judah) is conditional upon honest behavior. This idea is a Deuteronomistic emphasis.

4. The LORD’s temple, the LORD’s temple, the LORD’s temple. The triple repetition reflects something like a mantra recited by the people: this is the LORD’s temple, and hence those who enter it to worship have nothing to fear.

are these. This phrase is a little obscure but probably refers to the multiple structures of the Temple.

6. if you do not oppress orphan and widow . . . nor go after other gods. The prophet now concretely defines “making your ways good,” combining an imperative of social justice with one of cultic loyalty.

7. the land that I gave to your fathers for all time. The last adverbial phrase shows a grand flourish in the Hebrew—literally, “from everlasting to everlasting.” This notion of an eternal gift of the land stands in dialectic tension with the idea that the gift is conditional.

8. you put your trust in lying words. These words, of course, are the triple “the LORD’s temple.”

9. swear by a lie. This would be to swear by a pagan god, most probably, Baal.

11. an outlaws’ cave. Most translations render the word for the place as “den” in the interest of English idiomatic usage. But the Hebrew term clearly means “cave,” and caves, especially abundant in the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea, were favored sites for hideouts. There is surely an intended contrast between the Temple, celebrated in the Book of Kings as a magnificent architectural structure erected by Solomon, and a dark hollow in a cliff used as a refuge by criminals.

12. go, pray, to My place which is in Shiloh . . . and see what I have done to it. Shiloh, which figures importantly in the early chapters of the Book of Samuel, was a significant northern sanctuary in the early Israelite occupation of the land. It was probably destroyed by the Philistines in the middle of the eleventh century B.C.E.

14. I will do to this house . . . as I did to Shiloh. This is an especially bold and stark prophecy. Jeremiah, speaking scant years after Josiah’s radical cleansing of the Temple and his confirmation of its exclusive centrality, announces that the Temple, in which the people complacently trust, is about to be destroyed.

15. And I will fling you from My presence. God’s presence is in Zion, so this is a prophecy of exile.

as I flung all of your brothers, the seed of Ephraim. “Ephraim” indicates the northern tribes, which were exiled by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E.

16. As for you. The Hebrew here switches from a plural “you” to a singular, indicating that God is now no longer addressing the people but rather the prophet. Hence “Jeremiah” has been added in brackets.

18. The children gather wood, and the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough. This language represents idol worship as a family project, with both genders and all generations implicated.

to make cakes for the Queen of the Heavens. The Queen of the Heavens is the Assyro-Babylonian fertility goddess Ishtar, associated with the evening star Venus. The Canaanite equivalent is Astarte. The cult of astral deities was especially popular in the last two centuries of the First Temple period. There is archaeological evidence that sweet cakes, shaped in the image of the goddess, were used in the cult of Ishtar. One should note that the Masoretic Text has melekhet, “work of,” instead of malkat, “queen of,” but that is almost certainly a pious euphemistic alteration by the Tiberian grammarians in order to avoid the suggestion that there could be a Queen of the Heavens.

20. and it shall burn and not be quenched. The Hebrew exploits the implication of heat in the word for “wrath,” ḥamah. The image of wrath pouring forth suggests something like a tide of hot lava.

21. eat meat. Part of the sacrificial animals was reserved for human consumption.

22. For I did not speak to your fathers nor did I charge them. Some interpreters think these words reflect a view that sacrifices were not enjoined in the wilderness, only in the settled Land of Israel. But the main point seems to be in what the prophet goes on to say in the next verse, that any obligation of sacrifice was always secondary to heeding God’s voice.

25. And I sent you all My servants, the prophets, day after day. Jeremiah repeatedly stresses the crucial spiritual authority of the prophets. It is with them that he identifies himself. Although he was born in the priestly caste, he accords no special weight of authority to the priests.

30. they have placed their foul things in the house upon which My name is called. There are several reports in the Book of Kings that sundry Judahite monarchs—most egregiously, Manasseh—actually introduced idols and a pagan cult into the Jerusalem temple.

their foul things. As elsewhere, this is a scornful designation for idols.

31. the high places of Topheth, which are in the Valley of Ben-Hinnom. All that is known about Topheth is that he is a god to whom child sacrifices in fire were offered. The vocalization of the name in Hebrew follows that of boshet, “shame,” and so is probably an alteration of the original pronunciation. The Valley of Ben-Hinnom is just to the west of what was the ancient city of Jerusalem. The Hebrew name, gei hinom, through the Greek of the New Testament, gehenna, came to be a term for hell. “Topheth” in later Hebrew equally was used for hell.

32. Valley of the Killing. Because of the reference to piled-up unburied corpses, this name records not the child sacrifice practiced in this place but the ghastly measure-for-measure retribution to come, in which the masses of pagan sacrificers will be slaughtered.

34. for a ruin the land shall become. This movement of the prophecy—it will continue with another movement in the next chapter—ends on a grim note of destruction: not only will the Valley of Ben-Hinnom be piled up high with the corpses of the slaughtered, but the entire land will be turned into a desolation.