Jeremiah 11:19 - Exposition

Like a lamb or an ox ; rather, as a mild lamb ( as one of the old translations has it), equivalent to quasi agaus mansuetus (Vulgate). Jeremiah says that he was as unsuspicious as a tame lamb which has grown up with its master's family ( 2 Samuel 12:3 ). The Arabs use the very same adjective in a slightly different form as an epithet of such tame lambs. It is impossible to help thinking of that "Servant of Jehovah," of whom Jeremiah was a type, who is said, in prophetic vision, to have been "brought as a lamb to the slaughter," and "not to have opened his mouth "( Isaiah 53:7 ). The tree with the fruit thereof ; apparently a proverbial expression. Giving the words their ordinary meaning, the rendering would be , the tree with its bread ( b'lakhmo ). Our translators appear to have thought that the transition from "bread" to "fruit" was as justifiable in Hebrew as it is in Arabic (in which 'uklu means properly "food" in general, but also "date fruit"). Fruit, however, was not such an important article of food with the Israelites as with the Arabs; and we must either, with Hitzig, suppose a letter to have intruded into the text, and render (from a corrected reading b'lekho ), with its sap (comp. Deuteronomy 34:7 , Hebrew), or else appeal to the etymology of lekhem (commonly "bread"), which is "firm, consistent," and render, the tree with its pith (Hence lahmu in Arabic means "flesh," and luhmatu , "a woof"). It is no credit to St. Jerome that he followed the absurd version of the Septuagint, "Let us put wood into his bread."