When God Says “Don’t Get Married”: The Shocking Command of Jeremiah 16
What’s Jeremiah 16 about?
Jeremiah receives one of the most jarring personal commands in all of Scripture: don’t get married, don’t have children, and don’t even attend funerals or celebrations. This isn’t random divine cruelty—it’s a living prophecy that makes Jeremiah’s entire existence a warning sign of the catastrophic judgment coming upon Judah.
The Full Context
Picture this: you’re a young prophet in ancient Judah, probably in your twenties, watching your nation spiral toward disaster. The people have abandoned God for foreign idols, social injustice runs rampant, and religious leaders are more interested in popularity than truth. Into this chaos, God calls Jeremiah to be His mouthpiece—but with a twist that would make anyone’s heart sink.
Around 627 BC, during the reigns of Josiah through Zedekiah, Jeremiah begins his prophetic ministry. His message is consistently grim: Babylon is coming, Jerusalem will fall, and the temple will be destroyed. But God doesn’t just want Jeremiah to speak this message—He wants Jeremiah to live it. The prophet’s personal sacrifices in chapter 16 serve as a three-dimensional sermon that no one in Jerusalem can ignore. His unmarried, childless, socially isolated life becomes a walking embodiment of the desolation coming upon the land. In a culture where family, community celebrations, and mourning rituals formed the fabric of social life, Jeremiah’s enforced separation makes him a living symbol of the broken relationship between God and His people.
What the Ancient Words Tell Us
The Hebrew word nadad appears in Jeremiah 16:5 when God tells Jeremiah to withdraw His peace from the people. This isn’t just about removing a feeling—nadad means to flee, to wander restlessly, to be displaced. It’s the same word used for birds startled from their nests. God is essentially saying, “My protective presence that has been settled over this people like a brooding bird is about to take flight.”
Grammar Geeks
The phrase “do not take a wife” in verse 2 uses the Hebrew qach ishah, which literally means “do not take/acquire a woman.” In ancient Near Eastern culture, this wasn’t just about romance—it was about acquiring the most fundamental social and economic unit. By forbidding marriage, God is telling Jeremiah to opt out of the basic building block of society itself.
When God lists what He’s removing in verse 5—chesed (steadfast love), rachamim (compassion), and shalom (peace)—He’s dismantling the very foundation of covenant relationship. These aren’t just nice feelings; they’re the bedrock promises that hold a community together.
What Would the Original Audience Have Heard?
To Jeremiah’s contemporaries, his lifestyle would have been scandalous and deeply unsettling. In a culture where childlessness was seen as divine curse and where family lineage determined social standing, a deliberately unmarried prophet was unprecedented.
Did You Know?
In ancient Israel, attending funerals and celebrations wasn’t optional social courtesy—it was covenant obligation. When someone died, the entire community was expected to participate in mourning rituals that could last for weeks. Similarly, wedding celebrations involved the whole neighborhood for up to seven days. Jeremiah’s absence from these events would have been noticed and gossiped about constantly.
The people would have understood immediately that something was catastrophically wrong. Just as a doctor quarantining himself signals deadly contagion, Jeremiah’s social isolation screamed danger. His neighbors would have whispered: “If God’s prophet won’t participate in normal life, what does he know that we don’t?”
The irony wouldn’t have been lost on them either. Here was a man called to speak about restoration and hope for God’s people, yet he himself was cut off from the very relationships and rituals that made life meaningful. His personal sacrifice validated his harsh message in a way mere words never could.
Wrestling with the Text
But why would God ask this of Jeremiah? The answer reveals something profound about how prophecy works. God doesn’t just want information delivered—He wants transformation demonstrated. Jeremiah’s life becomes a mashal, a living parable that embodies the message.
“Sometimes God’s love looks like protection from a future we cannot see coming.”
The three prohibitions in verses 2, 5, and 8 create a complete picture: no marriage (no future generation), no mourning (no honor for the dead), no celebrating (no joy in the present). This isn’t divine meanness—it’s divine mercy. God is protecting Jeremiah from the unbearable pain of watching his own children starve during the siege, from the trauma of mass death that would make normal grieving impossible, and from the bitter irony of celebrating while catastrophe approaches.
But Wait… Why Did They Ask That Question?
When the people inevitably ask Jeremiah “Why has God pronounced all this great evil against us?” (Jeremiah 16:10), their question reveals something fascinating about human nature. They genuinely don’t understand what they’ve done wrong.
Wait, That’s Strange…
The Hebrew construction in verse 10 suggests the people aren’t being defensive or sarcastic—they’re genuinely confused. The phrase mah chatanu (“what have we sinned?”) uses a form that indicates they truly believe they’re innocent. This psychological blindness to our own spiritual condition is one of the most devastating effects of prolonged rebellion against God.
This isn’t unusual. When we gradually drift from God, each small compromise seems reasonable in the moment. The people of Judah had normalized idolatry, injustice, and covenant-breaking until these sins became invisible to them. They remind me of someone with carbon monoxide poisoning—they can’t detect the very thing that’s killing them.
God’s answer in verses 11-12 is brutal in its honesty: “Your fathers abandoned me… and you have done worse than your fathers.” The Hebrew word ra’a (worse/evil) here isn’t just moral—it’s about causing active harm, like a wound that keeps reopening and spreading infection.
How This Changes Everything
The devastating honesty of this chapter sets up one of the most beautiful promises in all of Scripture. After cataloguing the complete breakdown of relationship, God pivots dramatically in Jeremiah 16:14-15. He promises a second exodus that will make the original liberation from Egypt look small by comparison.
The Hebrew phrase hineh yamim ba’im (“behold, days are coming”) appears over 30 times in Jeremiah, and it always signals hope breaking into despair. God specializes in resurrection, and the deeper the death, the more glorious the resurrection.
Notice that God doesn’t minimize the judgment or skip the consequences. The exile must happen, the temple must fall, and the land must be cleansed. But beyond judgment lies restoration so complete that it will redefine what God’s people think is possible.
Jeremiah’s enforced singleness becomes a picture of Israel’s exile—cut off from normal relationship with God, isolated and waiting. But just as God promises to restore the nation, there’s something beautiful about imagining Jeremiah finally free to experience the human connections he sacrificed for his prophetic calling.
Key Takeaway
Sometimes God’s hardest commands are actually His most protective love. When God asks us to sacrifice what seems normal or natural, He might be shielding us from pain we cannot yet see and preparing us for restoration we cannot yet imagine.
Further Reading
Internal Links:
External Scholarly Resources:
- The Message of Jeremiah by Derek Kidner
- Jeremiah: A Commentary by John Bright
- The Book of Jeremiah by J. A. Thompson
- Jeremiah, Lamentations by F. B. Huey Jr.
Tags
Jeremiah 16:2, Jeremiah 16:5, Jeremiah 16:10, Jeremiah 16:14-15, Judgment, Prophecy, Sacrifice, Covenant, Exile, Restoration, Obedience, Divine Love, Babylonian Captivity, Social Isolation, Living Parable
