2. go down to the potter’s house. As many commentators have observed, the verb used suggests that the potter’s house was located in a lower part of the city, perhaps in a valley, near a water source.

6. like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand. This entire sentence was imported for an impressive liturgical poem in the Yom Kippur service. The symbolic use of the potter harks back to the version of the creation of humankind in Genesis 2, where God fashioned—the potter’s verb yatsar is used—the human creature from the soil.

11. to fashion. Pointedly, the verb used is yotser, which as a verbal noun is the word for “potter” that appears in the first part of this prophecy.

12. It is hopeless. The sense of the statement is: There is no point in hoping we will change our ways, for we are set on them. Lundbom, amusingly but also relevantly, proposes that the phrase means something like “we couldn’t care less.”

14. Does the snow of Lebanon / leave the rock of the highland field? As we are frequently reminded in biblical poetry, there are mountains in the region of southern Lebanon bordering on the Land of Israel. On the heights, snow would be the equivalent of permafrost. The point of the rhetorical question, then, is that the highland snow never leaves the rocks on which it has accumulated, yet Israel has forsaken its God (also called “the Rock”) to which it should have clung.

Do foreign waters dry up, / the cold flowing streams. This line has engendered conflicting interpretations. The verb that appears in the received text, yinatshu, “be smashed,” is scarcely appropriate for water and this translation accepts a widely used emendation, yinashtu, which involves merely a reversal of two consonants. The poet is evidently still thinking of Lebanon: its cold mountain streams never dry up, just as the snow on these slopes never melts from the rocks. One detects a polemic thrust in the idea that these foreign waters continue to flow faithfully whereas Israel has betrayed its God.

15. to a lie they burn incense. The word translated as “to a lie” could also mean “in vain,” but the context suggests that what the prophet has in mind is not simply the futility of burning incense but burning incense to a false god. The reference in the latter part of this verse to walking on wayward paths definitely accords with the sin of idolatry.

they stumble. The Masoretic Text shows “they caused them to stumble,” but one Hebrew manuscript and two ancient versions have the less cumbersome “they stumble.”

16. an everlasting hiss. This is the sound of revulsion emitted when one sees something horrendous.

17. Like the east wind will I scatter them. The hot wind blowing from the deserts to the east of the Land of Israel is regularly said in biblical poetry to bring trouble.

The nape, not the face, I will see of them. That is, they will be compelled to flee. Three ancient versions read “I will show them,” which is merely a difference in vocalization.

18. for teaching shall not cease from the priest. Jeremiah, in confronting the people with his prophecies of disaster, evinces, in their view, the arrogance of displacing the more comforting teaching, counsel, and oracles of the established priests, wise men, and prophets.

let us strike him with the tongue. This may suggest that the plot against Jeremiah was enacted through slander.

19. my quarrel. The Masoretic Text has yerivai, “my adversaries.” The reading of the Septuagint, rivi, a difference of a single consonant, makes better sense.

20. they have dug a pit for my life. Although the pit is in all likelihood metaphorical, the prophet is speaking, as he has before, about a real conspiracy to kill him. He will later be thrown into an actual pit.

my standing before You. The idiom implies intercession: the prophet actually pleaded to God on behalf of the people, and yet they now seek to kill him.

21. make them bleed. The literal sense of the verb is “make them pour.”

22. snares they laid for my feet. The metaphor of snares is conventionally paired with the metaphor of the pit as two allied methods for trapping animals or birds. Because the snare is hidden (the literal meaning of this verb), it suggests the deviousness of the plot against the prophet.

23. atone. The verb also has the sense of “cover up.”