The incomparability of the Day

Long ago, on a night by the bank of a small river, the Jabbok, a man stayed behind alone while his whole household had already crossed over. In the dark someone seized him, a stranger, a wrestler, and they rolled fighting on the ground, hour after hour, the whole night, until the light began to come. The man was Jacob, the deceiver, who had spent his whole life bending everything to his own advantage and who now, for the first time, neither won nor lost. At daybreak the Stranger touched his hip, and Jacob suddenly knew with Whom he was wrestling. I will not let You go, he gasped, unless You bless me. He received a blessing and a new name, Israel ("he who strives with God"), and he limped into the morning, crippled for the rest of his life, but blessed. His hardest night ended at dawn.

Centuries later a whole nation bears his name. Jacob is called Israel, and Israel stands at the edge of a night heavier than the one by the river. Babylon is advancing, and Jeremiah, who for years has had to announce mostly disaster, receives an instruction that seems to fit nothing before it: write all the words I have spoken to you in a book, for days are coming when I will restore the fortunes of My people (Jer 30:2–3). They become words of comfort, and they begin with a cry. Alas, for that day is great, there is none like it; it is a time of distress for Jacob, but he will be saved out of it (30:7). Jeremiah deliberately names the disaster after the man at the Jabbok. The nation that bears Jacob's name goes through Jacob's night, and as then, the wrestling lasts until the light comes.

There is none like it (me-ayin kamohu). In Scripture that formula is spoken almost always of God: there is no one like YHWH our God (Exod 8:10); there is no one holy as YHWH (1 Sam 2:2). Only now and then is it said of a human being. When Saul, a head taller than all the people, stood before Israel, Samuel cried: do you see the one YHWH has chosen? There is no one like him among all the people (1 Sam 10:24). That king ended on the slopes of Gilboa, on his own sword (31:4). From human lips, "no one like him" does not hold of a man; only where God Himself says it of His servant, as of Job (Job 1:8), does it stand. Jeremiah sets the words over a day, and there they do hold, because it is God's day. In the prophets "the day" is the hour when God Himself steps in, to judge and to save. For Jeremiah's first hearers that day coincided with the fall of Jerusalem; the prophets look through that disaster toward a last Day. The God without equal has a day without equal.

A chapter later it is night in Ramah. On a hill north of Jerusalem a woman is weeping, and she refuses to be comforted. It is Rachel, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, buried for centuries, and yet the prophet hears her lamenting for her children, because they are no more (Jer 31:15). The exiles file past in long columns on their way to Babylon, and their ancestral mother weeps after them from the grave. God speaks to her, softly, the way you speak to a mother beside an empty cot: keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears; there is hope for your future, your children will come back (31:16–17). While He comforts her, He gives Himself away. Ephraim, her grandson, He calls His own child: Is Ephraim My dear son, a child in whom I delight? For as often as I speak against him, I still remember him. Therefore My bowels are in turmoil for him; I will have compassion on him, compassion (31:20).

Rachel is not the only one lying awake that night. Hamu me'ai, the text says: My bowels are in turmoil. Me'im is a person's inmost self, the belly, the bowels, also the womb in which a mother carries her child, the place where the feeling lives that cannot be reasoned away. Hamah is the sound of something that will not settle: the roar of waves, the moaning of a dove, the wail of a flute. 15 verses later Jeremiah uses the same verb for the sea that God stirs up until its waves roar (31:35), and so too God's heart moaned for Moab like a flute (48:36). That is how it churns in God now over Ephraim. In Hosea His heart turned over within Him; here His inmost being will not grow still, and the close doubles the verb of the womb (rachem arachamennu). It is the language of a parent sitting bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night because a child has not come home, listening at every sound in the street for the door.

Where it all comes from, He had said shortly before: with everlasting love I have loved you; therefore I draw you with steadfast love (31:3). What He will do when the night is over, He says a chapter later in words God uses of Himself nowhere else: I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land, in faithfulness, with all My heart and all My soul (32:41). The great commandment of Deuteronomy 6:5 is fulfilled by God Himself, and the people He loves this way are a people in exile. Behind the distress of Jacob stands a Father who cannot bring Himself to give him up.

So the Day has two faces, as the Name on the mountain had two wings: a time of distress for Jacob, and the day out of which he is saved. The deepest judgment and the greatest deliverance fall on a single day. What stood side by side on the mountain, grace and justice, stands here one after the other in time, first the night and then the morning, and it is the same God in both. That does not make the Day any smaller than Jeremiah says. Yet the Name proclaimed over it is still the Name of the mountain, the Name of the God who delights in chesed and casts the sins into the sea. Over that Day His character has the first and the last word.

At the Jabbok Jacob held on until the light came: I will not let You go unless You bless me. Jeremiah shows the other side of that night. All along God could not let Jacob go; as often as He speaks against him, He has to remember him. The Day named after Jacob will be great, and there is none like it. But the God who brings it holds Jacob more tightly than Jacob ever held Him.

A note on the source text. The night at the Jabbok: Genesis 32:22–32. The book of comfort: Jeremiah 30:2–3. The Day: Jeremiah 30:7, with the incomparability formula מֵאַיִן כָּמֹהוּ ("there is none like him"); the same formula of God: Exodus 8:10; 1 Samuel 2:2; of Saul (אֵין כָּמֹהוּ): 1 Samuel 10:23–24; his end on Gilboa: 1 Samuel 31:1–4. Rachel in Ramah and God's comfort: Jeremiah 31:15–17. "My bowels are in turmoil" (הָמוּ מֵעַי) and the doubled compassion (רַחֵם אֲרַחֲמֶנּוּ): 31:20; cf. Hosea 11:8. הָמָה for the roaring waves: Jeremiah 31:35; for God's moaning over Moab: 48:36. The everlasting love: 31:3. "With all My heart and all My soul": 32:41; cf. Deuteronomy 6:5. The God who delights in steadfast love and casts the sins into the sea: Micah 7:18–19. "Not from His heart": Lamentations 3:33. The eschatological detail remains restrained here: character, not calendar. The divine Name rendered as YHWH.