Baruch 2:1-3:8; Dan 9:7-19, Deuteronomy 28:15-69; Deuteronomy 30; Jeremiah 24:1-10; 2 Chronicles 6:12-42.
As we saw in the last episode, Baruch is a short but important book, composed of three major parts: the first (1:1-3:8) focusses upon confession, the second (3:9-4:29) commends wisdom to the people in exile, and the last (4:30-5:9) comforts the exiles as well as those few who have remained in the Holy Land. In chapter one of the confession, we witnessed the unity of the exiles with the remnant in Judea, and how the confession in which Baruch leads the exiles is meant for the entire people of God, who are reminded of the danger of going their own way rather than obeying the LORD.
These themes of repentance and renewed obedience continue in chapters two and three. In these chapters we hear echoes of other parts of Scripture— the warnings of Deuteronomy and the prophet Jeremiah, the confession of Daniel the prophet, and the prospect of hope following repentance articulated by Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Solomon in his dedicatory prayer for the Temple. These chapters of Baruch are particularly appropriate for us to contemplate during the time of Lent, when we call upon God’s mercy, and soberly assess ourselves before the holy God. David DeSilva, in his text on the Readable Books (Introducing the Apocrypha, 2002, p. 211) speaks aptly of Baruch’s “Deuteronomic pulse,” in which sin is punished, but repentance is heard by God.
In Deuteronomy 28, Moses tells the people about the blessings of obedience, and then in verse 15 about the dangers of rejecting God’s ways: “If you do not obey …the LORD your God… curses will come upon you.” He lists poverty, death, blight of the land, slaughter by enemies, personal illness, and even captivity. Horrifically, he speaks of the people eating the flesh of their children during siege, and a return to “the evil pain of Egypt,” with only a remnant left. “The LORD your God will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other” (28:64), and their shame will be so great that as slaves no one will even want to buy them. Recalling these horrific curses, the confession of Baruch says,
As can be seen in what was written in the law of Moses, there has been nothing comparable anywhere, under all the heavens, as to that which has been done in Jerusalem, that a man eat the flesh of the son and the flesh of his daughter. God put them under subjection to all the kingdoms around us to be a reproach and a desolation…And because we sinned….we have been brought low and have not been exalted. To the Lord our God belongs righteousness, but to us and our fathers shame on our faces. All these calamities that the Lord proclaimed against us have come upon us.
(Baruch 2:2-6)
God’s punishment upon them is just, they confess, and the worst of it is that the people did not repent at the time when the calamities struck. But now, the people remind God of His mercy upon them in the Exodus, and ask “Let your wrath turn away from us” again. It is not that they are worthy, or even that their ancestors were (2:19) but that the Lord should deliver them for his own sake, so that the world will recognize Him as God, who made promises to Israel. “O Lord, look down…and consider. O Lord, incline your ear… O Lord, open your eyes.” They recall the words of God through Jeremiah the prophet (seen in Jeremiah 34) that they should have subjected themselves to the king of Babylon, and the warning that if they would not, then “the whole land [would] become desolate.” Indeed, even the honored bones of their forefathers would be desecrated, Jeremiah had prophesied in his eighth chapter, and these exiles acknowledge that this has happened, along with the sacking of the Temple itself (Baruch 2:24-26).
The prayer of the people, led by Baruch, closely follows that prayer of confession that Daniel prays while in exile. It acknowledges that God is just, and has warned of all this in the Law of Moses, that Israel has shame both for its exiles and the remnant in the Holy Land, that even the fathers sinned, that the LORD has seen and brought calamities because of sin, that the final shame has been exile, and that God should act because it will demonstrate His mercy to the nations (Daniel 9:1-19). Daniel’s prayer, like the confession in Baruch, pleads with great emotion: “O LORD, hear! O LORD, forgive! O LORD, give heed and act!”
Though in Deuteronomy 28, Moses gave only two options, blessing for obedience and curse for disobedience, the prophets take to heart the prayer of Solomon, in which he foresaw a time of repentance and restoration. Jeremiah put this picturesquely in his parable of the good and bad figs, where the good figs represent not people who are not virtuous in themselves but those who repent, “returning with their whole heart” to the LORD (Jeremiah 24:1-10). The prophet Jeremiah puts in picture the confidence that Solomon had regarding God’s presence in the newly dedicated Temple:
When they sin against You (for there is no one who does not sin) and You become angry with them, and deliver them to the enemy; and they are taken captive to the land of the enemy, far or near; yet when they turn their hearts in the land where they were carried captive and repent, and make supplication to You in the land of their captivity, saying, ‘We have sinned and done wrong,’ and they return to You with all their heart and with all their soul in the land of their enemies who led them away captive, and pray to You toward their land You gave to their fathers, the city You chose, and the Temple built for Your name, then You will hear in heaven from Your dwelling place…and You will grant them compassion before those who took them captive, and they will have compassion on them, for they are Your people and Your inheritance, whom You brought out of the land of Egypt.”
(3 Kingdoms/1 Kings 8:42-49)
In this first telling of the story in 1 Kings, that is 3 Kingdoms, Solomon actually envisages the exile in detail, and the clemency of the enemy, and the renewed compassion of God upon His people. The same prayer in 2 Chronicles is a little less detailed, but puts the stress upon praying towards the Temple: “If your people Israel are defeated before an enemy because they sinned against You, and return and confess your name, and pray and supplicate before You in this house, then hear from heaven and have mercy on the sins of Your people Israel and bring them back to the land You gave them and their fathers” (2 Chronicles 4:24-25).
Baruch’s prayer recognizes both the importance of honoring the Temple of God, which eventually will be rebuilt, and turning back with whole hearts away from evil. It also takes as a promise the words of Jeremiah regarding the good figs, and the prayer of Solomon which says that God “will grant them compassion” and bring them back. Moreover, the people remember that even back in the time of Moses, God was aware that the people were stiff-necked and stubborn, but gave them the gift—promised repentance. Though only two options were given in the warning of Deuteronomy 28, in Deuteronomy 30, Moses assures the people:
Now it shall be, when all these things come upon you…you will reflect in your heart among all the nations where the LORD your God scatters you, and you [will] return to the LORD Your God…the LORD your God will purify your heart and the heart of your seed to love the LORD your God from your whole heart and from your whole soul, that you may live.”
(Deuteronomy 30:1-6)
So, then, in the confession, the people remember God’s “escape hatch” for them, and His promise to “give them a heart and ears that obey” (2:31). They lay hold, too, on His promise to bring them back and “establish an everlasting covenant with them” (2:35). This everlasting covenant, of course, looks forward to Jesus, the seed of David, who showed what it truly was to love the Father, and whose kingdom will never end. Moreover, as St. Paul tells us in Romans 11, God has not turned His back even now on the original fleshly Israel, but will always receive those who return to Him, whether Gentile or Jew, so that the whole people of God can be, in Christ, dedicated to Him. For the promises of God are everlasting.
The confession concludes in 3:1-8 with a heartfelt plea, mingled with outright praising of the God who has “granted in …hearts the fear of You, to call upon Your name,” and to praise Him even in exile. With sober realism, the exiles acknowledge their poverty before the LORD, and His righteousness, but hope that He will have mercy. It is especially noteworthy that they refuse even to exonerate their fathers, when it is instinctive to honor those who have died, and in refraining from doing so remain completely honest before the LORD. Yet, they know that it is the living person, the one who is in great distress, who will ascribe glory to God, and this is their status: “The person who is greatly distressed, who walks bent over, who is ailing and going blind, and the person who hungers—these will give glory and righteousness to You, O Lord” (Baruch 2:18). Out of the depths, these exiles, with those few poor remaining close to the destroyed Temple, cry out to the Lord, asking Him to act because they know His merciful character, and trust in the promised repentance that He offered to them centuries before, knowing the weakness of humankind.
Sometimes as Christians, we may be tempted to take God’s mercy for granted—after all, it is His character to forgive. When we do this, we do not recognize the seriousness of our condition, nor the great mercy of our holy God, against whom all of us offend. How much more fervent would be our confession if we really recognized our condition: distressed, bent over, ailing, blind, hungry, rebellious, stubborn! And how much more exuberant would be our praise if we recognized that God has mercy, puts repentance in our heart, and heals, out of His sheer goodness, and nothing that He owes to us. The promises that God has given to us, including His ongoing offer of forgiveness when we repent, show Him to be heartbreakingly vulnerable, like the father in Jesus’ parable who waits always for the lost son, and runs out to greet him when He sees him coming far away. May this time of Lent be for us, as it was for the exiles, a time of weeping, fasting, and prayer in the presence of this astonishingly loving God, who has, out of His mercy, established an everlasting covenant with us through the Lord Jesus and by the continued witness of the Holy Spirit.
* I use the capitals LORD when quoting from the Hebrew Bible, because capitals signal the use of the holy Name for God, YHWH (sometimes vocalized as Yahweh, but not spoken in Jewish society out of reverence for God’s Name). In the LXX version, the consonants YHWH are rendered by the Greek word Kyrios, meaning Lord: occasionally KYRIOS is capitalized and shortened to consonants even in the Old Greek versions, but usually the term “Lord” is simply understood to speak of God’s divine monarchy, without the use of capitals. When quoting from Baruch, then, which we have in Greek manuscripts, I simply render Kyrios as “Lord.” We should, however, be mindful that some or all of Baruch was probably originally in Hebrew, and thus would have used the YHWH convention for the holy Name, along with the rest of the Old Testament in Hebrew. Moreover, when the New Testament speaks of Jesus as Lord, it means that Jesus is divine as well as human, and so we could use the title “LORD Jesus.” (See especially St. Paul’s use of the term in 1 Corinthians 8:6, where the LORD Jesus is spoken of as the One through whom creation has come –that is, YHWH– while “God” is used to translate the Hebrew term Elohim, and refers to the Father, from whom creation has come.)
Edith M. Humphrey 