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From: Jeremiah 13:1-11

The linen waistcloth entirely spoiled

[1] Thus said the Lord to me, “Go and buy a linen waistcloth, and put it on your
loins, and do not dip it in water.” [2] So I bought a waistcloth according to the
word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. [3] And the word of the Lord came to
me a second time, [4] “Take the waistcloth which you have bought, which is up-
on your loins, and arise, go to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the
rock.” [5] So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me.
[6] And after many days the Lord said to me, “Arise, go to the Euphrates, and
take from there the waistcloth which I commanded you to hide there.” [7] Then
I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the waistcloth from the place where
I had hidden it. And behold, the waistcloth was spoiled; it was good for nothing.

[8] Then the word of the Lord came to me: [9] “Thus says the Lord: Even so will
I spoil the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. [10] This evil people,
who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own heart and have
gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this waist-
cloth, which is good for nothing. [11] For as the waistcloth clings to the loins of
a man, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling
to me, says the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and
a glory, but they would not listen.

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Commentary:

13:1-11. This is the first of Jeremiah’s symbolic actions reported in the book. Ac-
tions of that sort, sometimes appearing to make sense, have the advantage of
catching the audience’s attention better than an oracle does. It is not easy to i-
magine how Jeremiah, in the difficult circumstances of the time, could have twice
gone to the Euphrates (about 1000 km. or 570 miles away). Therefore, scholars
think that this symbolic action may have been something seen in a vision, or
else they interpret it as containing a play on the words Parah, the name of a tor-
rent near Anathoth (cf. Josh 18:23) and “Perath”, the word used in Hebrew for the
river Euphrates. Anyway, this symbolic action means that Judah, the Lord’s de-
corative loincloth (of the sort worn by priests in the temple), will be corrupted by
Babylonian influences and thereby destroyed.

God asked Jeremiah to buy a loincloth and put it on, to symbolize that, just as
that garment fitted his waist exactly, God wanted the house of Israel and the
house of Judah to cling to him (v. 11). The Lord wanted his people to trust in him
completely: the word for “clinging” or adhesion often occurs in the book of Deu-
teronomy, too, to mean the fidelity due to God (cf. Deut 4:4; 10:20; 11:22; 13:5;
30:20). This “cleaving” to God comes about through faith. “Faith is first of all a
personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a
free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed. As personal adherence to
God and assent to his truth, Christian faith differs from our faith in any human
person. It is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and to believe abso-
lutely what he says. It would be futile and false to place such faith in a creature
(cf. Jer 17:5-6; Ps 40:5; 146:3-4)” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 150). Je-
remiah’s symbolic action may help us, then, to see that when someone forsakes
God and puts all his trust in created things, be they other people or material
things, it spoils that person’s heart entirely. The passage also reminds us of
what our Lord says in Matthew 5:13 about salt that has lost its taste being
“good for nothing” (v. 10).

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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.