Baruch 6:40–44

In this fifth mockery, the author of the Letter of Jeremiah exposes the absurdity of Babylonian idolatry from within: the very Chaldeans who serve the idols demonstrate by their own behavior that these images are powerless. The section moves from the priests' manipulation of mute suppliants before Bel, to the degrading ritual prostitution practiced by Babylonian women in the precincts of the goddess — practices that shame the devotees rather than honoring any deity. The refrain "How could a man then think or say that they are gods?" (vv. 40, 44) frames the whole unit as a rhetorical verdict, not merely a polemical observation.

Verse 40 — The rhetorical frame: disbelief rooted in observed behavior The opening question — "How could a man then think or say that they are gods?" — functions as both a conclusion to what precedes and an introduction to the two case studies that follow. The word "think" (Greek: νομίσαι, nomisai) is significant: the author challenges not only cultic practice but the very mental assent that underwrites it. This is a challenge to religious epistemology. The argument's logic is empirical: what the Chaldeans do with their own gods refutes what they claim about them. Jeremiah's letter consistently insists that the behavior of worshipers and priests is itself diagnostic evidence about the nature of what is worshiped.

Verse 41 — The mute man brought before Bel The scene is arresting in its irony. When a mute person is brought into the temple, he is directed to "call upon Bel" — a god who cannot hear or respond — by priests who know this but proceed anyway. The word "understand" (Greek: νοῆσαι, noēsai) cuts two ways: the mute man cannot articulate speech, but Bel cannot receive or understand any petition regardless of how eloquent the petitioner might be. The god and the mute man are, in this sense, equally incapable of communication. The priests' act of placing a speechless man before a deaf idol achieves a kind of grotesque symmetry that the author exploits as devastating satire. Bel (Akkadian: Bēlu, "lord") was the supreme deity of Babylon, identified with Marduk; the irony of assigning the title "lord" to something incapable of acknowledging a single word spoken before it is theologically pointed.

Verse 42 — The priests' implicit unbelief The priests "can't perceive this themselves" and ultimately "forsake" the idols. The Greek verb for "forsake" (ἐγκαταλείπω, enkataleipō) is the same verb used in lament psalms for the abandonment of the righteous by God — here inverted: it is the supposed servants of a deity who abandon it, because "they have no understanding." The author is precise: the deficit of understanding lies with the idol, not merely the worshipers, yet the worshipers' abandonment of the idol reveals their own suppressed knowledge of its powerlessness. This anticipates what St. Paul will later call the culpable "suppression" of truth (Romans 1:18).

Verse 43 — The women of the sacred precincts This verse reflects a practice attested by the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories I.199), who describes how Babylonian women were required once in their lives to sit in the precinct of Ishtar and offer themselves to a stranger in a ritual act. The "cords" (Greek: σχοινία) around the women may be tokens of consecration or liturgical identification. The burning of bran as incense adds to the satirical texture: this is the cheapest possible offering, underscoring the degraded character of the cult. The competitive jealousy among the women — one reproaches another for being passed over, implying her cord was not broken — strips the ritual of any sacred veneer. The author presents it not as devotion but as a humiliation economy, where the women's value is measured by their attractiveness to passing strangers rather than by any authentic religious worth. The idol of Ishtar/Astarte, goddess of love, cannot even guarantee the dignity of her own devotees.

Catholic tradition reads the Letter of Jeremiah (Baruch 6) as canonical Scripture (affirmed at the Council of Trent, Session IV, 1546; cf. also the Council of Florence, Decree for the Jacobites, 1442), and its sustained polemic against idolatry is richly illuminated by the Church's theological tradition.

St. John Chrysostom, commenting on similar idol-polemic in Isaiah, observed that the idol's inability to receive prayer is the most damning testimony against it: a god who cannot hear a mute man is not qualitatively different from a god who cannot hear anyone. The passage thus aligns with what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the "signs of God's existence" accessible to natural reason (CCC §31–36): if even the idol's own priests abandon it in disgust, this functions as a negative sign pointing toward the living God who cannot be abandoned because He first refuses to abandon us (cf. CCC §301).

The practice described in verse 43 receives indirect theological commentary in Hosea and Ezekiel, where Israel's unfaithfulness to the covenant is figured as cultic prostitution. The Church Fathers — especially Tertullian (De Idololatria) and Clement of Alexandria (Protrepticus) — used exactly such passages to demonstrate that Greco-Roman cultic sexuality degraded rather than elevated the human person. This anticipates Catholic sexual ethics rooted in the dignity of the human body as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19; cf. CCC §2337).

The refrain "whatever is done among them is false" (v. 44) resonates with the Catechism's teaching that idolatry "perverts the innate sense of God" (CCC §2114): it is not merely a theological error but a distortion of the human person's fundamental orientation toward truth. Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est (§5) noted that eros distorted by the worship of fertility deities was ultimately a degradation of love itself — a precise theological commentary on verse 43.

Contemporary Catholics encounter this passage's challenge not primarily in Babylonian temples but in the subtler idolatries of the modern world: ideological systems that demand absolute loyalty, consumer identities built around brands and lifestyles, political movements that promise salvation through human power alone. Verse 42's observation — that even the idol's own servants eventually "forsake them, for they have no understanding" — is recognizable today in the exhaustion and disillusionment that follow the collapse of every utopian project built without God.

Verse 43's portrait of women degraded within a system that claims to honor a goddess of love speaks directly to any religious or cultural system that promises dignity but delivers exploitation. Catholics working in bioethics, social justice, or ministry to victims of trafficking will recognize this pattern instantly.

Most practically, the passage invites an examination of conscience: What do I actually trust to hear me, sustain me, and never abandon me? Where do I "call upon Bel" — bringing my deepest needs to something that has no understanding? The mockery here is not cruel but medicinal — designed, as satire always is in Scripture, to free the reader from what has imprisoned them.