Jeremiah Asked God Four Questions and Only Got Two Answers

At the edge of everything, after the city had burned and the people had been taken and the prophet had walked back through the highway of corpses, Jeremiah asked God four questions. Not in anger exactly. In the mode of a counselor who has watched his client destroyed and needs to know what happens next.

The four questions were: Have You despised Judah? Have You rejected Zion? Have You abandoned us? Have You forgotten us? The Yalkut Shimoni on the book of Nach, a compilation of midrashic material assembled in thirteenth-century Ashkenaz, preserves the tradition that God answered the first two and left the last two in silence. God had not despised Israel. God had said so explicitly in (Leviticus 26:44): even in the land of their enemies, I will not despise them nor reject them. That promise was on record. Jeremiah had his answer on despising and rejection.

Abandonment and forgetting: silence.

The tradition that follows Jeremiah into exile finds Zion herself taking up the two unanswered questions. Isaiah 49:14 records the complaint: the Lord has forsaken me, and the Lord has forgotten me. The Midrash reads the doubled name as deliberate. She was not saying God had abandoned her in one mode. She was saying that even the two attributes of divine mercy, the two instances of the name that appear in the great declaration of (Exodus 34:6), had abandoned her. Both faces of divine compassion had turned away. The Yalkut Shimoni, drawing on traditions as old as the tannaitic period, treats Zion not as a metaphor but as a speaker capable of making legal arguments before the heavenly court.

God's response is one of the more elaborate passages in this tradition. The stars in their courses, the constellations arranged opposite the twelve tribes, the thirty troops for each constellation, the thirty routes for each troop, thirty legions for each route, thirty camps for each legion, and on down through a multiplication of structures until the number of stars equals the days of the solar year. All of this, God says, was created for you. And you say I have forgotten you?

Zion then raised the counter-argument that has the sharpest edge: if there is truly no forgetting before Your throne, then perhaps You will also not forget what we did with the Golden Calf. God answered: I will also forget that. Then Zion pressed further: if there is forgetting before Your throne, perhaps You will forget what we did at Sinai, in the covenant itself. God said: I will not forget you.

The exchange works like a legal proceeding. Zion is representing herself before a court she has accused of abandonment. She is discovering, in the course of the argument, that the evidence cuts in two directions. The same divine memory that holds the Golden Calf holds the covenant. God cannot forget one without, in some sense, acknowledging the other. The tradition resolves this by making selective forgiveness explicit: I will forget the sin. I will not forget you. The distinction is the whole of the promise.

The Midrash then steps back and places this whole exchange inside a longer complaint about ingratitude. God runs through a catalogue of what had been done for Israel and what Israel said in response. Manna was provided and they called it rotten bread (Numbers 21:5). The Exodus was accomplished and Israel complained their way was hidden from the Lord (Isaiah 40:27). Now Zion complains of abandonment while God is in the process of removing the fourth kingdom from the world, as He had already removed Babylon and Maday and Greece. The complaint arrives, the tradition notes, in the middle of the rescue.

What saves the exchange from becoming a scolding is the final promise. The argument goes on for so long, with Zion pushing and God responding, that the persistence itself becomes a form of relationship. Jeremiah asked the questions because he believed asking them mattered. Zion continued the argument because she believed God was still listening. Both of them were right. The two unanswered questions that God left in silence when Jeremiah first asked them were eventually answered, through Zion's own advocacy, in God's own time. The tradition seems to have concluded that the silence was not refusal. It was an invitation for Zion to come and make her case directly. She accepted the invitation. The case is still running.

The parable the Midrash uses to frame the whole episode is worth pausing over. A king had a matron whom he loved greatly. Because she knew he loved her, she violated his honor and transgressed his decrees. He decreed that his servants come and drag her by her hair. Her dear friend, standing there, ran before the king and said: tell me your intentions. If you intend to return to her, treat her as a wife who is under her husband's discipline. If you do not intend to return to her, divorce her, so she can go and make her life elsewhere. The friend who speaks is Jeremiah. The question he asks is exactly the question a prophet who has watched the destruction of everything must ask: is this punishment within a relationship, or is it the end of the relationship? God answered that the first two counts, despising and rejection, did not apply. The relationship was intact. The punishment was real. The relationship was intact. Jeremiah's four questions were not a challenge to God's justice. They were a request for clarification so that the people in exile would know whether to wait or to give up waiting. The answer was: wait. The answer has not changed.