Jeremiah 13:3

"And the word of Jehovah came unto me the second time, saying, Take the girdle which thou hast bought, which is upon thy loins, and arise, go to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock. So I went and hid it by the Euphrates, as Jehovah commanded me."

"The word of Jehovah came to me the second time ..." (Jeremiah 13:3). The implication, though not clearly stated, is that some considerable time-lapse had occurred, at least ample time for the loincloth to have required washing had not God forbidden it.

"Go to the Euphrates, and hide it ..." (Jeremiah 13:4). This statement has precipitated a whole barrage of quibbles and denials by commentators. The problem is that the Euphrates river was almost four hundred miles from Anathoth; and the two journeys to that river by Jeremiah would have required his traveling a distance of some sixteen hundred miles.

We have no problem at all with this, because Jeremiah 13:5 flatly declares that, Jeremiah went and hid it as Jehovah had commanded him. Where is there any problem? Rationalistic critics, however, believe that such an extended amount of traveling, while not impossible, was certainly not very practical in those times. Therefore, other solutions are proposed. They are interesting, and we include these alternative understandings on the premise that they might even be correct, although we cannot be sure.

(1) One alternative interpretation is that the Hebrew word rendered here as "Euphrates" may not be a reference to the "Euphrates River" at all but to a village three and one half miles north of Anathoth (where Jeremiah probably lived), which was also known locally as "Euphrates." This appears to be possible. It is principally upon the authority of the Septuagint (LXX) and the Vulgate that translators insist on making it refer to the Euphrates River. The Hebrew word is actually [~Phrath]; and there is no doubt that in many other Old Testament passages the word does refer to the Euphrates River. The word occurs fifteen times elsewhere in the Old Testament and four times in this chapter. Nevertheless, as Henderson noted: "In twelve of the other fifteen references another word is included with [~Phrath], a word that means river. It seems a little strange, therefore that the word [~Phrath] should occur no less than four times in this chapter without that qualifying term which means river.[2] This is certainly enough to suggest the possibility of the word's being in this instance a reference to a local village. If this was indeed the case, the close identity of the name with the Great River would have had the same symbolical meaning that accrued to the Euphrates itself. Thus the meaning of the parable is not affected, no matter which view of the meaning of [~Phrath] is accepted.

And what is that meaning? The meaning is that the apostate nation, symbolized by the dirty, unwashed loincloth will be "hidden," that is, in captivity in Babylon on the Euphrates River.

(2) Another interpretation suggested by Dummelow is also plausible, perhaps even more so, than No. 1, cited above. "Jeremiah appears to have been absent from Jerusalem during a major part of Jehoiachin's brief three-year reign; and he may very well be supposed to have been during that time in or near the city of Babylon. This would account for the kindly feeling toward him by Nebuchadnezzar after his capture of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 39:11).[3] There is nothing at all unreasonable about this understanding of the passage, in which [~Phrath] would be understood as actually a reference to the Euphrates River itself.

(3) Another school of commentators have suggested that, "We are here dealing with a visionary experience,"[4] an interpretation which does not appear to be in any manner reasonable to this writer. We believe that Jeremiah actually bought a clean, white, linen girdle, wore it until it became thoroughly dirty, then hid it in the earth until it was completely rotted, mined, and spoiled, that he also recovered it as God commanded him, and that he showed it to his fellow-Israelites, expounding the whole history of that girdle to them as a parable of what was going to happen to the apostate nation.