Jeremiah 7:1-15

The Temple Sermon. The prophet is sent to the gate of the Temple, to rebuke the false confidence of Yahweh's worshippers in the possession of this block of buildings (these, Jeremiah 7:4). Yahweh desires social justice (Jeremiah 7:6), moral conduct (Jeremiah 7:9), and wholehearted worship; otherwise the security inspired by the fact that the Temple belongs to Him (Jeremiah 7:10, note mg.) is utterly baseless. Yahweh will not permit His Temple to become like some cave which shelters robbers (Jeremiah 7:11; cf. Matthew 21:13), but will destroy it as He destroyed that of Shiloh, and will banish Judah as He banished the northern tribes (Ephraim) from His land. The confidence in the possession of the Temple which is here rebuked was a natural outcome of the reformation under Josiah (2 Kings 22 f.), which made it the only centre of worship; the remarkable deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib in 701 (2 Kings 19:35) had also contributed to the belief that the city was inviolable. The effect of the prophet's words in denouncing this sense of security is described in Jeremiah 26, which refers to the same occasion, i.e. soon after 608 B.C.

Jeremiah 7:6. Stranger denotes the settled foreigner; cf. Deuteronomy 1:16, etc.

Jeremiah 7:12. Shiloh: in Ephraim, with Eli as its priest (1 Samuel 1-3), and the Ark as its pride; it was probably destroyed by the Philistines after the victory described in 1 Samuel 4:10 ff.; cf. 1 Samuel 7:1 *, Psalms 78:60.

Jeremiah 7:15. Omit the first all, with LXX.