Catholic Commentary
Sixth Mockery: Idols Are Merely Manufactured Objects, Soon to Be Exposed
45They are fashioned by carpenters and goldsmiths. They can be nothing else than what the workmen make them to be.46And they themselves who fashioned them can never continue long. How then should the things that are fashioned by them?47For they have left lies and reproaches to those who come after.48For when there comes any war or plague upon them, the priests consult with themselves, where they may be hidden with them.49How then can’t men understand that they are no gods, which can’t save themselves from war or from plague?50For seeing they are only wood and overlaid with gold and silver, it will be known hereafter that they are false.51It will be manifest to all nations and kings that they are no gods, but the works of men’s hands, and that there is no work of God in them.52Who then may not know that they are not gods?
Baruch 6:45–52 argues that idols are merely human artifacts fashioned from perishable materials like wood and overlaid with precious metals, and therefore lack any divine nature or power. The passage demonstrates their falsity through observable evidence—particularly that priests hide the idols during war or plague rather than entreating them for protection, proving they cannot save themselves or their worshippers.
The moment a priest hides an idol during war, the people know it isn't a god — and so do we, every time what we worship proves unable to save us.
Commentary
Baruch 6:45 — The Fatal Origin: Fashioned by Mortal Hands The author opens with brisk, artisanal specificity: carpenters and goldsmiths. The deliberate naming of trades matters. Carpenters work wood — a material that rots, burns, and warps. Goldsmiths overlay that perishable substrate with precious metals, producing a glittering surface that disguises a decaying core. The logic is airtight: a thing is bounded by the nature of its making. An idol shaped by human tools carries within it the limitations of human tools. It can be nothing else than what the workmen make them to be. This is not merely satirical; it is a philosophical claim about ontology. The idol has no being beyond what is conferred upon it by a creature, and therefore its "divinity" is precisely as real as any other artifact — a chair, a bowl, a dagger. The author anticipates Scholastic categories: what lacks the power of self-origination lacks the power of self-transcendence.
Baruch 6:46 — The Maker Perishes; the Made Perishes With Him The argument pivots with devastating economy: even the craftsmen themselves cannot continue long. Human artisans die. Their skill, their breath, their animating intelligence are all temporary. The rhetorical question — How then should the things fashioned by them? — implies that if the source of an idol's form is perishable, the idol is doubly mortal: once by material decay, and once by the vanishing of the intelligence that shaped it. This is a proto-philosophical argument that anticipates Aquinas's argument from contingency: a being that depends entirely on another contingent being for its existence is not, by any stretch, a necessary being — and only a necessary being deserves the name God.
Baruch 6:47 — A Legacy of Lies The idols leave a poisoned inheritance: lies and reproaches to those who come after. The word "reproaches" is striking — not merely error, but shame. Idol worship deforms not just the worshiper but the community and its descendants. Generations are handed a spiritually bankrupt inheritance. This has profound moral weight: false religion is never purely private. It corrupts culture, family, and national memory. The author anticipates what Catholic Social Teaching will later articulate — that the common good includes the cultivation of authentic religious truth.
Verses 48–49 — The Crisis Reveals the Counterfeit War and plague — the two great ancient catastrophes — serve as a kind of eschatological litmus test. When catastrophe comes, what do the priests do? They hide the idols. This is the confession embedded in pagan cult: the priests, who should entreat the gods for protection, instead protect the gods. The inversion is total. A god who must be smuggled to safety during a siege is not saving anyone. The author's incredulity is genuine: How then can men not understand? The inability of idols to save themselves from the very evils they were prayed against to avert is the final proof of their nullity.
Verses 50–51 — Wood, Gold, Silver, and the Coming Revelation The author now strips away the gilded surface entirely: they are only wood and overlaid with gold and silver. The "only" carries all the weight. Gold and silver are not substantive — they are cosmetic. They create the appearance of permanence, radiance, and divine majesty, while the rot of the wood beneath waits. But this will be known hereafter — the eschatological note is important. There is a day of unmasking coming, a moment of apocalyptic clarity when all nations and kings will acknowledge what the text has been arguing all along: these are works of men's hands. The phrase "no work of God in them" is theologically dense. It does not merely say they are inert; it says divine agency is entirely absent. God has not spoken into them, breathed into them, ordered them, or blessed them. They are God-vacant.
Baruch 6:52 — The Question That Answers Itself The cluster closes with a rhetorical question that is structurally an appeal to universal reason: Who then may not know that they are not gods? The force of the question suggests that idol worship is not simply a theological error but a culpable suppression of what is knowable. The nations are without excuse. The Letter of Jeremiah throughout has appealed to observable evidence — decay, powerlessness, dependence — as sufficient grounds for rejection of idolatry.
Typological and Spiritual Senses Typologically, the contrast between the manufactured idol (wood overlaid with precious metal) and the Incarnate Word (who overlays divinity with human flesh) is arresting. Where the idol is a false covering — perishable wood gilded to seem divine — Christ is the inverse mystery: true divinity enfleshed in genuine humanity. The idol is appearance without substance; the Incarnation is substance beyond all appearance.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition reads this passage as a sustained meditation on what the Catechism calls the "first commandment's" positive demand: "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve" (CCC 2096). The idolatry condemned here is not merely Bronze Age paganism; the Church has consistently taught that idolatry persists wherever human beings render to creatures the devotion that belongs to God alone (CCC 2113).
St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book VIII), makes precisely the author of Baruch's argument in philosophical register: pagan gods are the products of human minds and hands, and anything produced by a mind lower than the divine Mind cannot mediate divine reality. Augustine's polemic against the dii fabricati — manufactured gods — echoes verse 45's "fashioned by carpenters and goldsmiths" almost verbatim.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Contra Gentiles (I.13), develops the ontological principle latent in verse 46: a being that receives its form entirely from another cannot be the uncaused cause. What is made cannot be the Maker. Aquinas's Five Ways are, in a sense, the philosophical elaboration of the author of Baruch's pastoral argument.
The First Vatican Council (Dei Filius, 1870) teaches that God can be known by the natural light of human reason from created things — which implies that the failure to recognize idols as non-gods is a failure of right reason, not merely of revelation. This gives verse 52's rhetorical question its sharpest edge: the nations are culpable, not merely ignorant.
Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' (§65), warns against a technocratic paradigm that treats creation as raw material to be fashioned according to human will alone — an observation that resonates with the idol-maker who believes he creates the divine by manipulation of matter.
For Today
Contemporary Catholics live in a culture saturated with sophisticated idolatry — not the crude woodcarving of antiquity, but the manufactured gods of consumerism, ideological identity, technological utopianism, and celebrity. Baruch 6:45–52 offers a practical diagnostic: ask of any object of cultural devotion, who made this, and what happens when catastrophe comes? The economy collapses — do market gods save? The body ages — does the cult of physical appearance redeem? Political movements fail — do ideological saviors endure? Verse 48's image of priests hiding the idols is a precise icon of the moment when any false absolute is exposed: its devotees scramble to protect the very thing they claimed protected them. For the Catholic reader, this passage is an invitation to ruthless inventory of what, practically speaking, one trusts for security, identity, and ultimate meaning. The Church's tradition of regular examination of conscience — particularly within the Sacrament of Reconciliation — is the concrete practice by which Catholics submit their attachments to the test of verse 52: Who then may not know that these are not gods?
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