King of the Nations

There is a scarecrow standing in a cucumber field, and Jeremiah cannot take his eyes off it. A post with a crossbeam, a garment draped around it, maybe a hat on top; from a distance it almost looks human. The birds startle at it, the first few days. After a week they figure out that it does not move, does not speak, and goes nowhere. That, says the prophet, is what the gods of the nations are like. Do not fear them, for they can do no harm, and no good either.

Against that post Jeremiah sets the confession, and it comes out like a sigh of relief: there is no one like You, YHWH. You are great, and great is Your Name in might. Who would not fear You, King of the nations? For that is Your due. For among all the sages of the nations and in all their kingdoms, there is no one like You. He is King of all nations, including those who do not know Him, including Babylon that mocks Him, including Moab. That fear does not make a person small. Whoever kneels before this King stands upright before everything else, and the scarecrows become again what they are: a post with a garment.

Then the prophet sets two words side by side, worthlessness and life. The word he uses for the idols means a breath, a puff of breath on a cold morning, gone before you have properly seen it. There is no spirit in them, he says; you can gild them until they gleam, but you will never get breath into them. YHWH is the living God and the everlasting King. When He utters His voice, there is a roar of waters in the heavens; He makes the clouds rise from the ends of the earth, He makes the lightning for the rain and brings out the wind from His storehouses. The storm rolls in over that same cucumber field. The thunder rolls across the land like a voice, and the scarecrow stands motionless beneath it, its garment flapping in the wind.

For God such a post is more than a folly. At the beginning of his book Jeremiah lets Him look back on the wilderness (2:2). He still remembers: a people that followed Him through sand and stone, without asking where the water would come from, because He was there. After that He asks the question of every abandoned lover: "What wrong did your fathers find in Me, that they went far from Me, ran after a breath, and became breath themselves?" (2:5). What did I do wrong? The Creator of wind and clouds asks it of His people. He gives the answer Himself, with an image from a dry land: "My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water" (2:13). They traded a spring that flows for a hole in the rock that leaks. A post with a garment is nothing. Yet it wounds God, because His people kneel before it.

There is one more thing that sets the King of the nations apart from every gilded post, and Jeremiah lets it be heard where one least expects it. Moab was one of Israel's oldest enemies. Its king Balak once hired a prophet to curse Israel, and Moab had always laughed at Israel (48:27). Now judgment falls on Moab, and Jeremiah describes it as a harvest that never happens. The vineyards of Sibmah are stripped, the wine has ceased from the presses, no one treads the grapes with shouting anymore, and the shouting that is still heard is no shout of joy (48:32–33). In the middle of that silent land Someone begins to weep. It is God Himself. "Therefore I wail for Moab, for all Moab I cry out [...] More than for Jazer I weep for you, O vine of Sibmah [...] Therefore My heart moans for Moab like a flute" (48:31–32, 36). The flute was the instrument of the funeral procession; whoever carried a dead person to the grave had flute players walk ahead. God walks in the funeral procession of His enemy. The King who carries out the sentence weeps over those it strikes, and the chapter does not end in the ruins: "Yet I will restore the fortunes of Moab in the latter days, declares YHWH" (48:47). His tears over Moab are not a farewell.

A scarecrow cannot weep; it cannot even look around at the field it stands in. The King of the nations looks around, at Babylon that laughed at Him and at Moab that mocked His people, and His heart moans like the flutes in the vineyards of Sibmah. Who would not fear such a King? Jeremiah could not have known how far his question would reach. At the end of all things it sounds again, beside a sea of glass: who would not fear You, Lord, and glorify Your Name? For all nations will come and worship before You. By then the scarecrows have long since fallen. Centuries before Jeremiah there was already a Moabite woman who took the road to Bethlehem, to take refuge under the wings of the God of Israel, and who became the great-grandmother of David. The King who wept over Moab gets Moab back, singing.

*A note on the source text. The idol as scarecrow in a cucumber field: Jeremiah 10:2–5. "There is no one like You [...] who would not fear You, King of the nations": 10:6–7. The living God against the idols as breath (hevel): 10:3, 8, 10, 14–15. The Creator-hymn (the voice like a roar of waters, the wind from the storehouses): 10:12–13. The memory of the wilderness and the abandoned God: 2:2, 5, 13. Balak and Balaam: Numbers 22–24; Moab's mockery: Jeremiah 48:27; the grape harvest falling silent: 48:32–33; God lamenting over Moab: 48:31–32, 36; the restoration: 48:47. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem: Luke 19:41. In the second Expert box: the ironic reading in R. D. Jones and J. R. Lundbom, the stylistic device in W. McKane, the literal reading in H. G. L. Peels, Jeremiah 46–51 (HCOT; Leuven: Peeters, 2025); G. Fischer: "der weinende König der Nationen." Flute players at mourning: cf. Matthew 9:23. Ruth the Moabite: Ruth 2:12; 4:17. "Who would not fear You" beside the sea of glass: Revelation 15:3–4. The divine Name as YHWH.*