1. Go and buy yourself a loincloth of linen. Jeremiah is now enjoined to carry out a symbolic performative act, following the precedent of Hosea and to be continued by Ezekiel. These might be regarded as dramatic visual illustrations of the prophecies. A loincloth that has fallen apart, as this one will do, exposes the genitals, and in the poetic prophecy that follows this prose prophecy, the skirts of the personified people will be hitched up to expose her shame.

and do not enter water. This slightly puzzling item in the instructions may be to ensure that nothing in the fabric of the loincloth is in any way damaged before it is hidden in the crevice.

4. Perath. This is a wadi located about two miles northeast of Anathoth.

9. pride. There is a certain disparity between the symbol and its referent because a loincloth is scarcely a person’s “pride.” The prophet may be thinking of the antithesis of pride, shame, which is what a person suffers without a loincloth to cover his nakedness. In the next verse, the disintegrated loincloth becomes the metaphor of the people itself, and the body to which it once clung but no longer clings is God’s.

12. Every jar will fill with wine. This bit of the prophecy is presented as a kind of riddle. The people responds by saying that, of course, jars are made to be filled. God’s rejoinder (verse 13) is to explain the jar as a riddling symbolic reference to the people, who will be filled with drunkenness—which is to say, a condition of mental confusion and physical tottering that is a prelude to collapse.

14. I will smash them. This verse carries forward the metaphor of the jar, since the jar would be earthenware and easily smashed.

15. Listen and give ear. Exhortations to listen are a conventional beginning of Prophetic and other kinds of biblical poems.

16. the twilight mountains. This beautiful phrase continues the idea of darkness falling: as the mountains are enveloped in the shadows of evening, one runs the danger of colliding with rocks or stumbling into pitfalls in the mountainous terrain.

17. because of pride. The Hebrew geiwah is obscure. Though this translation links it with gaʾawah, “pride,” that is no more than a guess. Others connect it with a rare word in Job that might possibly mean “community.”

18. sit down low. That is, descend from your exalted thrones.

20. the ones coming from the north. As elsewhere, these are the invading armies.

Where is the flock that was given to you. The “you” throughout this passage is feminine singular and so refers to the nation personified as a woman.

21. What will you say when he appoints over you. The reference is ambiguous. Rashi understood the appointer as God; Kimchi thought “he” refers to the enemy who, having conquered Jerusalem, chooses local governors for his own purposes, and that may be more likely.

and it was you who taught them. The most plausible meaning of this opaque clause is that if you resent these disagreeable leaders with whom you are saddled, you have only yourself to thank for fastening the administration of your society on morally dubious figures who can now be exploited by your conquerors.

22. your heels ripped back. The focus on the heels may seem puzzling. Women would have worn long robes, everything covered all the way down to the heels. The exposure of the heels then becomes a synecdoche for the exposure of the legs and most of the body. It should be noted that the verb here, neḥmesu, indicates a violent act or the perpetration of an outrage.

23. Can a Nubian change his skin, / a leopard its spots? This formulation—in traditional translations, kushi is rendered as “Ethiopian”—expresses a profound moral pessimism: just as these bodily features are ineradicable, your propensity for evil will never change, and so a national catastrophe is inevitable.

24. like floating chaff. Although qash usually means “straw,” straw is not easily windblown, and so there seems to be a semantic slide from “straw” to “chaff.” The image is akin to that of Psalms 1:4, where a different Hebrew word, mots, is used.

25. the lie. This may be, as some scholars have proposed, a pejorative epithet for Baal.

26. stripped back your skirts over your face. The relatively elliptical image of a woman stripped in verse 22 now becomes brutally explicit: her face covered by her own hitched up skirts, her entire naked body is exposed, and this looks like the sad condition of a woman about to be raped.

27. your adulteries and your neighings. While the latter term is often used for the noises made in revelry, it is also the word for a horse’s neighing, and that is a metaphor adopted by Jeremiah to represent unbridled lust (see 5:8).

the depravity. The Hebrew zimah is strongly associated with sexual depravity.

on the hills in the field / I have seen your vile things. As elsewhere, the sexual imagery mingles literal and figurative senses. Idolatry is conceived as adultery, the betrayal by Israel of her divine Spouse, and the “vile things” are a fixed epithet for idols. But this pagan activity on the hilltops often involved a fertility cult with orgiastic rites.

How much longer will it be? Though this is the evident sense of the final clause of the prophecy, the Hebrew syntax is rather crabbed. A literal rendering of the three Hebrew words would be: “after when still.”