Baruch 6:66–73

In this powerful closing section of the Letter of Jeremiah (Baruch 6), the author delivers his final, devastating verdict on idols: they are utterly impotent—unable to curse or bless, to illuminate the heavens, or even to match the instinctive self-preservation of animals. Using a trio of darkly comic images—a garden scarecrow, a thorn bush crowded with birds, and a rotting corpse—the text reduces idol worship to absurdity. The passage culminates in a beatitude: the just man who has no idols is blessed, for he alone escapes the reproach that will consume the gods of wood and gold.

Verse 66 — "They can neither curse nor bless kings." Ancient Near Eastern religion assigned enormous power to divine beings to pronounce blessings and curses that shaped the fate of nations and monarchs. The Babylonian gods, for instance, were invoked at coronations and in royal treaties to sanction or destroy rulers. By denying idols even this most basic divine function, the author strips them of every credential they might possess in the eyes of their worshippers. The contrast with Israel's God is implicit and shattering: the LORD blessed Abraham and cursed those who cursed him (Gen 12:3); He blessed kings and removed them (1 Sam 2:7–8). These idols can do nothing of the kind.

Verse 67 — "They can't show signs in the heavens… or give light as the moon." Signs in the heavens were regarded as communication from the gods—eclipses, comets, and celestial omens were the bread and butter of Babylonian divination (cf. Isa 47:13). The author denies that idols have any relationship to the luminaries whatsoever. This implicitly invokes the creation account: the sun and moon were set in the vault of heaven by the one true God to govern day and night (Gen 1:14–18). The "gods" cannot replicate or command what only the Creator made and rules.

Verse 68 — "The beasts are better than they." This is among the most mordant observations in all of Scripture. Even a wild animal—a creature possessing no reason or worship—surpasses the idol, because the beast at least acts according to its nature: it seeks shelter and looks after itself. The idol, by contrast, cannot even do what an insensible brute does instinctively. The author's logic is almost scholastic in its precision: if the idol cannot preserve itself, how can it preserve anyone else?

Verses 69–70 — The Scarecrow in the Cucumber Garden The declaration "Therefore don't fear them" is the practical, pastoral conclusion toward which the entire letter has been building. Fear of the gods was the fundamental social glue of pagan religion; to remove that fear was to dismantle the entire system. The scarecrow image is particularly devastating in its homeliness. A scarecrow is a human simulacrum designed to deceive—a figure that looks authoritative from a distance but is revealed on close inspection to be stuffed with straw. It "keeps nothing"; birds eventually learn its secret. The idol, which is merely a human artifact dressed up to look divine, is no different: it deceives those who do not think carefully, but it protects nothing and no one.

Verse 71 — The White Thorn and the Dead Body Two further images pile up with increasing grimness. The "white thorn in an orchard that every bird sits upon" pictures the idol as a perch for casual, indifferent creatures—it has no dignity, no separateness, no holiness. Holiness, in biblical thought, means being set apart (Hebrew ); the idol is the opposite, available to every passing bird. The comparison to a dead body "thrown out into the dark" is even starker. Corpses in the ancient world were associated with ritual impurity (Num 19:11–13); to compare an idol to a corpse thrown into darkness is to pronounce it not merely powerless but actively defiling.

Catholic tradition reads this passage within the broader theology of the First Commandment and the fundamental ordering of the human person toward God alone. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God" (CCC §2113). The Letter of Jeremiah, preserved in the Catholic canon precisely because the Church recognized its enduring prophetic value, offers a canonical locus classicus for this teaching.

St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book VIII), employs a similar philosophical argument: he demonstrates that the pagan gods, being unable to make their worshippers virtuous or blessed, cannot be true gods at all—a point that resonates directly with verse 73's beatitude of the just man. Tertullian, in De Idololatria, drew on texts like this to argue that idolatry is the fundamental sin underlying all other sins, a position ratified by the Council of Trent's emphasis on the First Commandment.

The closing beatitude (v. 73) carries Christological weight in the Fathers. St. Cyril of Alexandria saw in the "just man without idols" a type of Christ, the perfectly righteous one who is not bound by any divided allegiance. Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (§8), recalled that Scripture's polemic against idols is ultimately a positive statement: there is a Word behind creation, and the human heart is restless until it rests in the living God (cf. Augustine, Confessions I.1). This passage's negative theology—stripping away all false gods—functions as a via negativa that clears the ground for authentic encounter with the living God.

Contemporary Catholics live in a culture saturated with what Pope Francis has called "liquid idolatry"—the worship not of carved wood but of consumption, status, digital affirmation, and ideological identity. The scarecrow image of verse 70 is more precise than it might seem: a social media profile, a career identity, a political tribe can all function as scarecrows—impressive-looking constructs that, on inspection, protect nothing and no one from the darkness of meaninglessness. The question the text poses concretely is: what do I actually fear? The author's repeated refrain—"do not fear them"—is not an abstraction but a daily discipline of reorientation. The just man of verse 73 achieves his blessedness not through dramatic heroism but through the quiet, habitual refusal to let anything other than God occupy the throne of ultimate concern. A practical application: regular examination of conscience on the First Commandment—not merely avoiding superstition, but asking honestly what one trusts, fears, and loves above all else.