Jeremiah 8:20

8:14-22 At length they begin to see the hand of God lifted up. And when God appears against us, every thing that is against us appears formidable. As salvation only can be found in the Lord, so the present moment should be seized. Is there no medicine proper for a sick and dying kingdom? Is there no skilful, faithful hand to apply the medicine? Yes, God is able to help and to heal them. If sinners die of their wounds, their blood is upon their own heads. The blood of Christ is balm in Gilead, his Spirit is the Physician there, all-sufficient; so that the people may be healed, but will not. Thus men die unpardoned and unchanged, for they will not come to Christ to be saved.

The harvest is past,.... Which was in the month of Ijar, as Jarchi observes, and answers to part of April and May: the summer is ended; which was in the month Tammuz, and answers to part of June and July: and we are not saved; delivered from the siege of the Chaldeans; and harvest and summer being over, there were no hopes of the Egyptians coming to their relief; seeing winter was approaching; and it may be observed, that it was in the month of Ab, which answers to part of July and August, that the city and temple were burnt. These are the words of the people of the Jews, despairing of help and salvation. So the Targum, "the congregation of Israel said, the time is passed, the end is up, and we are not redeemed.''

Jeremiah 8:20 . The harvest is past, &c. — Here the prophet speaks again in the name of the people, or, rather, represents the people besieged in Jerusalem complaining on account of the length of the siege. Their false prophets had amused them with vain hopes of deliverance, and they had expected the Egyptians to come to their relief; but now the harvest and the summer were past, and yet there was no appearance of succour or deliverance coming to them. Jerusalem began to be besieged in the winter of the year, but was not taken till the end of the summer of the following year.

Verse 20. - The harvest is past , etc. For "summer," read fruit-gathering (the vintage began in September). The people again becomes the speaker. The form of the speech reminds one of a proverb. When the harvest was over and the fruit-gathering ended, the husbandmen looked for a quiet time of refreshment. Judah had had its "harvest-time" and then its "fruit-gathering;" its needs had been gradually, increasing, and, on the analogy of previous deliverances (comp. Isaiah 18:4 ; Isaiah 33:10 ), it might have been expected that God would have interposed, his help being only delayed in order to be the more signally supernatural. But we are not saved (or rather, delivered ). Jeremiah 8:20

20. The harvest lasted from April to June; later came “the summer,” better (mg.), ingathering of summer fruits . As when the harvest was bad, there remained yet hopes from the yield of grapes, figs, olives, etc., and till these hopes had failed to be realised, men did not despair; so the people had lost one chance after another, and were now without any hope. It is probably a proverbial saying applied by the prophet.

(20) The harvest is past . . . —The question of Jehovah, admitting of no answer but a confession of guilt, is met by another cry of despair from the sufferers of the future. They are as men in a year of famine—“The harvest is past,” and there has been no crop for men to reap. Summer.—In Isaiah 16:9; Jeremiah 40:10, and elsewhere, the word is rendered by “summer fruits.” “The summer” (better, the fruit-gathering) is ended, and yet they are not saved from misery and death. All has failed alike. The whole formula had probably become proverbial for extremest misery. It is well to remember that the barley-harvest coincided with the Passover, the wheat-harvest with Pentecost, the fruit-gathering with the autumn Feast of Tabernacles.

The summer - Rather, the fruit-gathering, which follows the grain-harvest. The grain has failed; the fruit-gathering has also proved unproductive; so despair seized the people when they saw opportunities for their deliverance again and again pass by, until God seemed utterly to have forgotten them.

The harvest is past, and the winter no time for war; the people’s continued complaint, not unlike that Jeremiah 8:15 . The year is gone, and we are still frustrated in our expectations, the time that we expected help from Egypt, Isaiah 30:2,3,5 . We are not saved, viz. by the Egyptians, or any other confederates.

From a far country he hears the people complain: Is Jahveh not in Zion? is He no longer the King of His people there? The suffix in מלכּהּ refers to "daughter of my people," and the King is Jahveh; cf. Isaiah 33:22 . They ask whether Jahveh is no longer King in Zion, that He may release His people from captivity and bring them back to Zion. To this the voice of God replies with the counter-question: Why have they provoked me with their idolatry, sc. so that I had to give them over into the power of the heathen for punishment? "Images" is expounded by the apposition: vanities (no-gods; for הבל, see on Jeremiah 2:5 ) of a foreign land. Because they have chosen the empty idols from abroad ( Isaiah 14:22 ) as their gods, Jahveh, the almighty God of Zion, has cast them out into a far country amidst strange people. The people goes on to complain in Jeremiah 8:20 : Past is the harvest...and we are not saved. As Schnur. remarked, these words have something of the proverb about them. As a country-man, hoping for a good harvest, falls into despair as to his chances, so the people have been in vain looking for its rescue and deliverance. The events, or combinations of events, to which it looked for its rescue are gone by without bringing any such result. Many ancient commentators, following Rashi, have given too special a significance to this verse in applying it to the assistance expected from Egypt in the time of Jehoiakim or Zedekiah.

Hitz. is yet more mistaken when he takes the saying to refer to an unproductive harvest. From Jeremiah 8:19 we see that the words are spoken by the people while it pines in exile, which sets its hopes of being saved not in the productiveness of the harvest, but in a happy turn of the political situation.