What Does Jeremiah 18:14 Mean?

(14) **Will a man leave . . .?**—The interpolated words “a man” pervert the meaning of the verse, which should run thus: *Will the snow of Lebanon fail from the rock of the field? or shall the cold *(or, with some commentators, “rushing “) *flowing waters from afar *(literally, *strange, *or, as some take it, *that dash down*)* be dried up? *The questions imply an answer in the negative, and assert in a more vivid form what had been expressed more distinctly, though less poetically, in Jeremiah 2:13. The strength of Jehovah was like the unfailing snow of Lebanon (the “white” or snow mountain, like Mont Blanc or Snowdon), like the dashing stream that flows from heights so distant that they belong to a strange country, and which along its whole course was never dried up, and yet men forsook that strength for their own devices. The “streams of Lebanon” appear as the type of cool refreshing waters in Song of Solomon 4:15. The term “rock of the field” is applied in Jeremiah 17:3; Jeremiah 21:13 to Jerusalem, but there is no reason why it should not be used of Lebanon or any other mountain soaring above the plain. The notion that the prophet spoke of the brook Gihon on Mount Zion, as fed, by an underground channel, from the snows of Lebanon, has not sufficient evidence to commend it, but the “dew of Hermon, *and as the dew *that descended upon the mountains of Zion” (Psalm 133:3) presents, to say the least, a suggestive parallel. Possibly the prophet has the Jordan in his mind. Tacitus (*Hist. v.* 6) describes it as fed by the snows of Lebanon, the summit of which is, in his expressive language, faithful to its snows through the heat of summer.