Jeremiah 45:3

Thou didst say, woe is me now!.... What will become of me? I am ruined and undone; this he said in his heart, if not with his lips, perhaps both ways; and when the king gave orders for the

Thou didst say, Woe is me now! for the LORD hath added grief to my sorrow; I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest. Thou didst say ... the Lord hath added grief to my sorrow.

Upon Baruch’ s reading the prophecies after he had wrote them from the mouth of Jeremiah, both he and Jeremiah were sent for before the princes, and advised to hide themselves, as we read, ,19. This probably disturbed Baruch, and made him lament his condition in such-like expressions, of which the prophet had heard, probably by revelation from God.

Jeremiah 45:3 Thou didst say, Woe is me now! for the LORD hath added grief to my sorrow; I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest.Ver. 3. Thou didst say,] i.e., Thou didst think, like a poor pusillanimous creature as thou art. But Jeremiah could pity him in this infirmity, because it had sometime been his own case, and may befall the best. Pray for me, I say, pray for me, said Father Latimer, for sometimes I am so fearful and faint hearted that I could even run into a mouse hole. For the Lord hath added grief to my sorrow.] So do we oft complain, non quia dura sed quia molles patimur, without cause, through feeblemindedness. And when we speak of our crosses, we are eloquent oft beyond truth; we add, we multiply, we rise in our discourse, as here.

XLV. (1) The word that Jeremiah the prophet spake unto Baruch . . .—The chapter is obviously misplaced as far as chronological order is concerned. and ought to follow on Jeremiah 35, 36. It gives us a glimpse of singular interest into the character of the prophet’s helper. He was discouraged and desponding, and yet the very despondency was that of an ambitious temperament eager to take the lead. His master was in prison. Neither king nor nobles listened to him. He had, it may be, drawn for himself an ideal picture of a successful work, in which he himself should be a chief agent. (See Note on Jeremiah 43:3.) “Grief was added to his sighing, and he found no rest.” And now all seemed failure. The prophet had passed through such moods himself (Jeremiah 15:10-21; Jeremiah 20:7-18), and knew, when they found utterance in words that were the very echo of his own, how to deal with them. The scribe must accept the doom that fell on him as on others. He must not hope to pass unscathed, still less to attain the “great things” which he had imagined for himself. It was enough that his life was given him “as a prey” (Jeremiah 21:9; Jeremiah 39:18), as spoil rescued from the spoiler. What his future was to be was not revealed unto him, but the closing words pointed to a life of wandering and exile; and Baruch was, we know, among those who went down to Egypt (Jeremiah 43:6), and had probably been for some years at Babylon (Bar 1:1). According to one tradition he died in Egypt (Jerome, Comm. in Isaiah 30); another represents him as having returned to Babylon after his master’s death, and ending his life there. The apocryphal book that bears his name testifies to the reverence felt for him by a later generation. It is not without interest to note the general parallelism of the words in which Elisha rebuked the covetousness of Gehazi (2 Kings 5:26) and those with which our Lord met the ambitious request of the sons of Zebedee (Matthew 20:20-23).

Verse 3. Thou didst say, Wo is me now!] All that were the enemies of Jeremiah became his enemies too; and he needed these promises of support. The Lord hath added grief to my sorrow] He had mourned for the desolations that were coming on his country, and now he mourns for the dangers to which he feels his own life exposed; for we find, from Jeremiah 36:26, that the king had given commandment to take both Baruch and Jeremiah, in order that they might be put to death at the instance of his nobles.

3. sorrow to my pain] The “pain” was caused by the thought of his fellow-countrymen’s sins and of the judgements impending on them; the “sorrow” by knowing what was in store for himself.

Grief to my sorrow - Baruch’s sorrow is caused by the sinfulness of the Jewish nation, to which God adds grief by showing how severely it will be punished. I fainted in - Or, “am weary with” Psalms 6:6.

THE MESSAGE, Jeremiah 45:2-5.3. Grief to my sorrow — Better, sorrow to my pain; pain at the sin and obduracy of the people; sorrow for their calamities. I fainted in my sighing — I am weary with sighing.