Commentary on Jeremiah Volume 1 John Calvin (continued)
COMMENTARY ON JEREMIAH
the Assyrians? but ye are not equal to them: make your strength as great as you please, still the Chaldeans will be harder to break you; for if ye are iron, they are brass or steel, and so it will not be possible for you to sustain their violent attacks.''
As the meaning of the Prophet is sufficiently evident, I will not insist on words, though the rendering I most approve is this, ``Will iron break the iron (the repetition is emphatical) from the north and the brass?''
We here also see that the design of the holy man was, to divest the Jews of that false confidence in which they boasted: for how was it, that they were so refractory, except that they did not dread any misfortune? As then they were secure, predictions had but little weight with them. Hence the Prophet, in order to beat down this ferocity, says, that there would be greater hardness in the Chaldeans, for they would be like iron, yea, and steel also. 398 It follows ---
Jeremiah 15:13
13. Thy substance and thy treasures will I give to the spoil without price, and that for all thy sins, even in all thy borders.
13. Opes tuas et thesauros tuos in direptionem dabo, non in permutatione (hoc est, absque pretio,) et propter omne scelus tuum, et propter omnem finem tuum (vel, terminum tuum, in omnibus terminis tuis, ad verbum; sicuti etiam in omnibus sceleribus.)
But, there is a difference among interpreters as to the word {}גבולgebul. I indeed allow that it means a border: but Jeremiah, as I think, when he intended to state things that are different, made use of different forms of speech; but as the construction is the same, I see not how the word can mean the borders of the land.
I hence think that it is to be taken here metaphorically for counsels; as though he had said, ``On account of all thy wicked deeds and on account of all thy ends, that is, of all thy counsels, I will make thy wealth and thy treasures a plunder.'' For true is that saying of the heathen poet, There is something where thou goest and to which thou levellest thy bow. 399
When we undertake any buiness, we have some end in view. Then the Prophet calls their adulteries, frauds, rapines, violencies and murders, wicked deeds; but he calls their counsels, borders, such counsels as they craftily took, by which they manifested their depravity and baseness.
Then, in the first place, he declares that God would be a just avenger against their wicked deeds, and against all the ends which the Jews had proposed to themselves; and at the same time he points out and mentions the kind of punishment they were to have, --- that the Lord would give for a plunder all their wealth and treasures, and that without exchanging; some read, ``without price,'' and consider the meaning to 398If we consider what is said to the Prophet in Jeremiah 1:18, and in the twentieth verse of this chapter (Jeremiah 15:20), we shall see the meaning of this verse: he was no doubt the iron and the brass: and the opinion of Blayney is probable, that the "enemy" in the previous verse (which is a poetical singular for the plural enemies) is the nominative case to the verb "break." God, having before refered to what he had done for the Prophet, now says, — Can he break the iron, The iron from the north and the brass? God had made him an "iron pillar, and a wall of brass:" and he asks now, was it possible for his enemies to destroy him whom God had thus made. The hardest iron came from the north of Judea. The future tense is to be read here potentially. — Ed.
399Est aliquid quo tendis et in quod dirigis arcum. — Per. Sat. iii. 60.