The original text was written in Hebrew language. This chapter is divided into 22 verses in Christian Bibles, but 23 verses in the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew manuscripts and in the JPS Version, where Jeremiah 9:1 is recorded as Jeremiah 8:23. This article generally follows the common numbering in Christian English Bible versions, with notes to the numbering in Hebrew Bible versions.
The parashah sections listed here are based on the Aleppo Codex.[13] Jeremiah 8 is a part of the Fourth prophecy (Jeremiah 7-10) in the section of Prophecies of Destruction (Jeremiah 1-25). As mentioned in the "Text" section, verses 8:1-23 in the Hebrew Bible below are numbered as 8:1-22 + 9:1 in the Christian Bible. {P}: open parashah; {S}: closed parashah.
“At that time,” says the Lord, “they shall bring out the bones of the kings of Judah, and the bones of its princes, and the bones of the priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, out of their graves.[14]
According to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, Hyrcanus and Herod broke into the sepulchre of David to take the treasures, but the tombs of the kings were inaccessible.[15]
Verse 2
They shall spread them before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which they have loved and which they have served and after which they have walked, which they have sought and which they have worshiped.[16]
According to Streane, the bones were laid out before the sun and the moon so that "the objects of their former devotion might look down on the indignities to which those who had served them were subject".[2]
Verse 7
Even the stork in the heavens knows her appointed times; and the turtledove, the swift, and the swallow observe the time of their coming.
But My people do not know the judgment of the Lord.[17]
^"The Evolution of a Theory of the Local Texts" in Cross, F.M.; Talmon, S. (eds) (1975) Qumran and the History of Biblical Text (Cambridge, MA - London). p.308 n. 8
^Tov, Emanuel (1989). "The Jeremiah Scrolls from Qumran". Revue de Qumrân. 14 (2 (54)). Editions Gabalda: 189–206. ISSN0035-1725. JSTOR24608791.
^Josephus, Antiquitates, vii. 15. 3. "buried...a thousand and three hundred years afterward Hyrcanus the high priest, when he was besieged by Antiochus, that was called the Pious, the son of Demetrius, and was desirous of giving him money to get him to raise the siege and draw off his army, and having no other method of compassing the money, opened one room of David's sepulcher, and took out three thousand talents, and gave part of that sum to Antiochus; and by this means caused the siege to be raised, ..., after him, and that many years, Herod the king opened another room, and took away a great deal of money, and yet neither of them came at the coffins of the kings themselves, for their bodies were buried under the earth so artfully, that they did not appear to even those that entered into their monuments."
^The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Augmented Third Edition, New Revised Standard Version, Indexed. Michael D. Coogan, Marc Brettler, Carol A. Newsom, Editors. Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 2007. p. 1090-1092 Hebrew Bible. ISBN978-0195288810