What Does Jeremiah 10:5 Mean?

(5) **Upright as the palm tree.**—Better, perhaps, *A pillar in a garden of gourds are they. *The Hebrew word translated “upright” has two very different, though not entirely unconnected, meanings—(1) “twisted, rounded, carved,” and in this sense it is translated commonly as “beaten work” (Exodus 25:18; Exodus 25:31; Exodus 25:36), and is here applied (if we accept this meaning) to the twisted palm-like columns of a temple, to which the stiff, formal figure of the idol, with arms pressed close to the side, and none of the action which we find in Greek statues, is compared; (2) the other meaning adopted by many commentators is that of “a garden of gourds or cucumbers,” and the word is so rendered in Isaiah 1:8. The comparison, in the so-called “Epistle of Jeremy” in the apocryphal book of Baruch (10:70), of an idol to “a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers” shows that the latter meaning was the accepted one when that Epistle was written. The thought, on this view, is that the idol which the men of Judah were worshipping was like one of the “pillars” (so the word for “palm tree” is translated in Song of Solomon 3:6; Joel 2:30), the Hermes, or Priapus-figures which were placed by Greeks and Romans in gardens and orchards as scarecrows. Like figures appear to have been used by the Phœnicians for the same purpose, and the practice, like the kindred worship of the *Asherah, *would seem to have been gaining ground even in Judah.