Verse 13
THE FOLLY OF JUDAH'S CHOICE
"Therefore thus saith Jehovah: Ask ye now among the nations, who hath heard such things?; the virgin Israel hath done a very horrible thing. Shall the snow of Lebanon fall from the rock of the field? or shall the cold waters that flow down from afar be dried up?"
"The willfulness of Israel in forsaking Jehovah their God was without parallel in the ancient world, as Jeremiah had already mentioned in Jeremiah 2:9-13; Jeremiah 5:20-25, and in Jeremiah 8:7. The horror is heightened by calling her a virgin. She had indeed been a virgin hedged about by the Lord to protect her sanctity."[14]
There are no known examples of where ancient peoples ever forsook their ancestral or tribal gods; but Israel indeed had denied the very God who delivered them from slavery and made a mighty nation of them.
Israel had forsaken her status as a virgin and had prostrated herself abjectly before the sensuous fertility gods of ancient Canaan, the worship of which was a key factor in God's proscribing and displacing the Canaanites in order to give the land to Israel! It was not merely horrible, but incredible as well. "Their sin was as irrational as it was tragic."[15]
With reference to Jeremiah 18:14, Thompson said: "All translations of this verse are conjectural; but while certainty is not possible the main thrust of the passage is clear."[16] The view preferred by this writer is that God is here comparing the irrational and almost incredible behavior of Israel to that of a foolish farmer who would desert a farm watered by the melting snows of Lebanon's Mount Hennon, in favor of an arid, rocky desert farm! Feinberg accepted this same understanding of the passage, saying that, "Nature does not change its course, but Judah has. Nature's reliability puts to shame Israel's instability."[17]
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