1. in the fourth year . . . of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylonia. This would be 599 B.C.E., six years after the Babylonian army defeated the Egyptians in the decisive battle of Carchemish, thus threatening to dominate the entire Fertile Crescent.

5. saying: Turn back. In this sprawling sentence, all the words of this verse have to be the essential content of the message that the prophets who were constantly sent by God brought to the people.

for all time. The Hebrew shows a grand rhetorical flourish—literally “from everlasting to everlasting.” Although the taking away of the land might seem to contradict this notion of its eternal donation to Israel, the Hebrew idiom actually suggests something short of eternity, on the order of “from a very long time ago to a very long time to come.”

7. harm. As in the previous sentence, the Hebrew raʿ means both “evil” and “harm.”

9. against all these nations round about. Nebuchadrezzar’s campaign was in fact not just against Judah but against the sundry small kingdoms of trans-Jordan, and against Philistia, Phoenicia, and Egypt.

10. the sound of millstones and the light of the lamp. The former are not large millstones but hand mills used domestically by women on a regular basis to grind grain. The lamp (a small earthenware oil lamp) would have been used in these domestic settings when the sun went down.

11. these nations shall serve the king of Babylonia seventy years. This number is formulaic, though much would be made of it later, as the Book of Daniel illustrates.

12. I will reckon with the king of Babylonia. As elsewhere in biblical prophecy, there is a double calculus here. God calls the Babylonian emperor “My servant” because he is the instrument of divine punishment against Judah. Yet, the havoc that he wreaks is a “crime,” and in the end he will have to pay for it. This notion is elaborated in verse 14.

15. this cup of wine, of wrath. The Hebrew syntax is slightly odd. It seems to say: this cup of wine, the wrath. In this translation, the words are understood as standing in apposition: “this cup of wine, [this cup] of wrath.”

16. And they shall drink and retch and go mad before the sword. The prophecy in effect telescopes two different images: the cup of wrath is a figure for the destruction that will overtake the Babylonians; the sword is then a synecdoche for the onslaught of the army that will overwhelm Babylonia.

17. And I took the cup from the hand of the LORD. This is a bold and quite uncommon move: the metaphoric cup of wrath seems to become an actual cup that the prophet takes from God’s hand. Such quasiphysical proximity between God and prophet is altogether unusual. But since the cup is, after all, symbolic, the prophet’s taking it from the hand of the LORD finally must be understood as a purely figurative act, and that understanding is confirmed by his making the nations drink from it, an act that could not be literally performed.

19. Pharaoh king of Egypt. These words launch a sweeping catalogue of the surrounding nations marked for destruction (the agency of destruction being the Babylonian army that in fact advanced across the entire region)—Egypt to the south, the Philistines along the coast to the west, Tyre and Sidon to the north, and the sundry kingdoms east of Jordan going all the way to Dedan, Tema, and Buz in the Arabian peninsula and to Media in the far northeast.

26. And King Sheshak shall drink after them. The name “Sheshak” has long been understood as a coded reference to Babylon (Hebrew bavel), in which the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet is substituted for the first, the second from the last letter for the second in the alphabet, and so forth. It remains unclear why the code was used.

27. Drink . . . and fall down, and you shall not arise because of the sword. In this instance, the metaphorical act (drinking from the cup of wrath) and the literal event (falling by the sword) are linked sequentially: the nations, fallen drunk after imbibing the potent wine, are unable to protect themselves against the sword.

28. if they refuse to take the cup from your hand to drink. Given the metaphorical status of the cup, this would have to mean that they will refuse to accept Jeremiah’s prophecy of doom. But they cannot escape the prophesied end—“You shall surely drink”—and the prophet goes on to articulate its terrible inevitability by casting it in poetry (verse 30ff.).

30. the LORD roars from on high. The poetic representation of the warrior as a fierce lion is conventional and would have been immediately recognized by the ancient audience.

His abode. This is the earth, which in biblical parlance belongs to God

a shout like grape-treaders. The shout, heydad, of the treaders would be a shout of joy, or perhaps, as some scholars have suggested, a rhythmic chant or song. But here it becomes a shout that spells destruction.

31. a dispute. The Hebrew term suggests a legal dispute.

34. you shepherds. As before, shepherds are the leaders of the people.

I will smash you. The grammatical form of the Hebrew verb is anomalous, seemingly combining a verbal conjugation and a noun formation, but the meaning is not in doubt.

35. the shepherds / . . . the lords of the flock. These two epithets, repeated three times in three verses, become a kind of anaphora that insistently conveys the dire fate of the Judahite leaders.

37. And the peaceful meadows shall be silent. Even though some interpreters construe the verb as “shall be destroyed” (a phonetically similar verbal stem), “silent” makes better sense. The meadows, once filled with the lowing of flocks, are now deadly silent. This ominous silence is a complementary counterpoint to the screams and wailing of the people’s shepherds.

38. Like a lion, He has left His lair. The lion that was implied in the roaring at the beginning of the poem is now made explicit, forming an envelope structure.

before the oppressive sword. The Masoretic Text shows “before the oppressive wrath,” but ḥaron, “wrath,” is probably an inadvertent scribal duplication of that word in the second verset here. Several Hebrew manuscripts as well as the Septuagint and the Targum read ḥerev, “sword.” The word represented here as “oppressive,” yonah, looks like the noun that means “dove,” which makes no sense in the present context. Some Hebrew exegetes understood it to mean “enemy,” but without much philological warrant. It is most plausibly linked with the verbal stem y-n-h, which means to “oppress,” and the word here would be a participle modifying “sword,” not a noun.