A long, slow crawl through Jeremiah
Jeremiah 3: Prostitutes, Lovers
March 15, 2023
(four minute read)
If finishing something is important to you, let us advise you to move along to a different page. We will not finish. Because the Text is never really finished. You read through a book or a chapter today, and it means one thing. Read it next week, and it means something 
different. The proverb has it that you never step into the same river twice. And so it is with Scripture. All that to warn you that we plan to slog through Jeremiah on this page, pausing to reflect on particular words in the Text that catch our interest…and we are only in Chapter 3…at the FIRST VERSE! This is going to take a while. But hopefully, the journey will be worth the read.
“‘If a man DIVORCES his wife and she leaves him and marries another man, should he return to her again? Would not the land be COMPLETELY DEFILED? But you have LIVED AS A PROSTITUTE with many LOVERS – would you now return to me?’ declares the LORD.”
Jeremiah 3:1 (the upper case words give us our words)
In yesterday’s post, we looked at DIVORCE (SHALACH (שָׁלַח)) and COMPLETELY DEFILED (CHANEPH (חָנֵף)) in the verse. In today’s post, we will examine PROSTITUTE and LOVERS.
The Hebrew word translated as “lived as a prostitute” is ZANAH (זָנָה). It means “to commit fornication, to be a harlot”. It occurs over 90 times in the Text. Its first appearance is in Genesis 34, when the sons of Jacob defend the honor of their sister, Dinah. Responding to the father, who complained that the family was now obnoxious to their neighbours, Simeon and Levi say:
“But they replied, ‘Should he have treated our sister like a PROSTITUTE?’”
Genesis 34:31
ZANAH is used both literally for people, as in the verse above, and figuratively for nations, such as the nation of Israel, as in both our verse in question, and in other places, such as this:
“Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they PROSTITUTE themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you, and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons, and those daughters PROSTITUTE themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same.”
Exodus 34:15-16
The term, interestingly, is used to identify two heroes in Jesus’ genealogy: Tamar (Genesis 38:15,24), the daughter-in-law of Judah, and Rahab (Joshua 2:1, 6:17,22,25), the one who hid the spies.
Its final use is in the prophet Nahum, condemning the city of Ninevah, the city of blood and lies (according to the prophet):
“Charging cavalry, flashing swords, and glittering spears! Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses – all because of the wanton lust of a prostitute, alluring, the mistress of sorceries, who enslaved nations by her PROSTITUTION and peoples by her witchcraft.”
Nahum 3:3-4
Of our two words in question, LOVERS is the more intriguing. Hebrew, like Greek (and really like most languages), has several words that describe affection. The most common word for “love” in the Hebrew Bible is AHEB (אָהַב), with 249 uses as a verb or a noun. DOD (דּוֹד) , meaning “beloved”, “love”, and oddly, “uncle”, appears 61, including many in the Song of Solomon (which should give you an idea of how it’s used). CHABAB (חָבַב) appears once, in Deuteronomy 33:3. RACHAM (רָחַם), which can mean love, is most often translated as compassion. AGAB (עֶגֶב) means sensuous love or lust, and is found only twice (Ezekiel 33:31-32). Finally, YADID (יְדִיד) is used nine times and means “beloved”, such as in Isaiah 5:1.
The word in our verse is none of these. Our word behind “lovers” is REA (רֵעַ), which is a fascinating word for all the ways that it is used in the Text. Here is the first of its 186 appearances:
“They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar.”
Genesis 11:3
Can you guess which word in the verse is from REA? It is “other”. REA means “friend, companion, or fellow”, but as with many other Hebrew words, it also has other meanings.
For a religiously observant Jew who knows his Scriptures, however, REA has a singularly important reference point in the TORAH. Let’s turn to an ancient Rabbi, who was asked about the TORAH's greatest commandment (MITSVAH). Here is his answer:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Matthew 22:37-40
The two commandments are from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, respectively. There are two things to mention here.
First, the Rabbis in Jesus’ day often linked verses that shared common words, particularly at the beginning. These two commandments begin with the Hebrew verb phrase, “you shall love”: WƎ-AHAB-TA (וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥). They caJesus and others linked the verse in Leviticus with the verse in Deuteronmy as the two greatest commandments because of “you shall love”. They call this practice “stringing pearls”.
The second thing to mention relates to the second great commandment. The word for “neighbor” in this verse is REA. So when Jeremiah speaks of “many lovers”, he uses a term that will immediately remind his audience of the commandment they would doubtless know quite well. And its use in a pejorative sense would have been arresting.
The Hebrew Scriptures are replete with surprises and confounding images that are (we think) designed to grab your attention, hold it, and make you think about what you are reading. The trick is to slow down and look.
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