Jeremiah Curses The Day Of His Birth (Jeremiah 20:14-18).
This passage closes off the section with a heart rending call by Jeremiah that the day of his birth be cursed, along with all who assisted in ensuring his survival, on the grounds that it would have been better for him to have been left in the womb than ever to have seen daylight. It is clear from what he says that even more shame must have been heaped on him to such an extent that it has become almost unbearable. It sums up how arduous he was finding his ministry to be. He has almost reached the end of his tether.
It is a reminder that those who serve God in dark times do not come off lightly. They simply have to persevere whatever happens. (compare Hebrews 11:36-38). This cry from the heart may have been part of his reflections during his painful night in the stocks, vividly remembered as he looked back on it, or he may have prayed it when in hiding from Jehoiakim after his book had been cut to pieces (Jeremiah 36:23), or he may even have written it when, having written down many of his prophecies up to this point, and seeing a grim future ahead, he felt the burden of them piercing his soul, especially if his body was still suffering the consequences of the time spent in the stocks. But whenever it occurred he has chosen it as providing a fitting conclusion to this first section of his book with all its ups and downs, in order to bring home that his ministry was not without agony. As he had stated, he would carry on prophesying because it was forced upon him, but let none think that he was enjoying it.
‘Cursed be the day on which I was born,
Let the day on which my mother bore me not be blessed.
Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying,
“A male child is born to you”, making him very glad.'
And let that man be as the cities which YHWH overthrew,
And he did not relent,
And let him hear a cry in the morning, and shouting at noontime,
Because he did not slay me from the womb,
And so my mother would have been my grave,
And her womb always enlarged (great).
Why did I come forth from the womb to see labour and sorrow,
That my days should be consumed with shame?'
Familiar with the scenes which regularly took place on the birth of a newborn son, Jeremiah pictures his own birth in those terms and curses the very day. His mother would have been thrilled and would have blessed the day, as would her relatives, while the good news would have been speedily carried by a messenger to the waiting father, resulting in great gladness of heart. But Jeremiah calls for the day now to lose its blessedness, and for a curse to come upon it.
Indeed so bitter are his feelings about that day that he calls for the man who bore the news of his birth to be like Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities which YHWH overthrew (Genesis 19:29), something which YHWH, he points out, carried through without any thought of retraction. So Jeremiah says, let Him now show the same constancy in destroying the messenger who bore the news of his birth. The reference to the crying of lamentation in the morning, followed by the shouting at noontide as the invaders break in, indicates that he expects it to happen when his prophecies are fulfilled in the overthrow of the city (compare Jeremiah 6:4; Jeremiah 15:8; Jeremiah 18:22; Jeremiah 9:17-22). And the man was to experience this fate because he had failed to show mercy in preventing the birth of Jeremiah. Better far, he claims, would it have been if he had died in his mother's womb, the only sign of his presence then being a distended stomach, rather than coming forth into life where it would involve such shame and trouble.
We must not take the curse as intended too seriously. Jeremiah was well aware that to curse his father and mother would have been a heinous offence and so he was looking for substitutes. But he would not really have expected anyone genuinely to accept the thought that God would punish a man for allowing a baby to be born normally (the opposite position being that He would have blessed him had he murdered the young Jeremiah). He is rather using the idea in order to express the depths of his grief.
With these words ends the series of more general undated prophecies of Jeremiah, and it is noteworthy that from this point onwards we hear no more complaints from him, in spite of all that he will later go through. Having come struggling through his own Gethsemane he becomes a man of steel.