Catholic Commentary
Summoning the Mourning Women: A Dirge over Zion's Dead
17Yahweh of Armies says, “Consider, and call for the mourning women, that they may come. Send for the skillful women, that they may come.18Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids gush out with waters.19For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, ‘How we are ruined! We are greatly confounded because we have forsaken the land, because they have cast down our dwellings.’”20Yet hear Yahweh’s word, you women. Let your ear receive the word of his mouth. Teach your daughters wailing. Everyone teach her neighbor a lamentation.21For death has come up into our windows. It has entered into our palaces to cut off the children from outside, and the young men from the streets.22Speak, “Yahweh says, “‘The dead bodies of men will fall as dung on the open field, and as the handful after the harvester. No one will gather them.’”
Jeremiah 9:17–22 presents God commanding professional mourning women to voice Israel's catastrophic judgment through formalized lamentation over Zion's destruction. The passage depicts death violating the community like an invading force, leaving bodies unburied as ultimate covenantal shame, establishing communal grief as both spiritual necessity and transmitted practice across generations.
God commands Israel's women to wail over Jerusalem's dead—not because he is distant, but because he grieves with them, and named sorrow is the only path to repentance.
Commentary
Jeremiah 9:17 — "Yahweh of Armies says: Let them make haste..." The divine command opens with the solemn title Yahweh Sabaoth — "LORD of Armies" or "LORD of Hosts" — a title that evokes cosmic sovereignty and military authority. That this same commanding God summons mourning women rather than warriors is deliberately jarring. The urgency of the imperative ("make haste") reveals that the catastrophe is not future but imminent or already underway. God himself is, in a sense, the choreographer of this lamentation, not merely its observer. The Hebrew meqonenôt refers to professional mourners — women hired and trained in the art of public grief, a recognized social institution throughout the ancient Near East. Their craft was both ritual and rhetorical: to give communal voice to loss that ordinary speech could not contain.
Jeremiah 9:18 — "...and let them come to us" The shift to the first-person plural ("to us") is arresting. God, through the prophet, identifies himself with the mourning community. This is not a detached divine judgment but a divine solidarity with suffering — a theological note that Catholic tradition will later develop richly through the Incarnation. The mourning women are called so that "our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids gush with water." Tears here are not weakness but liturgical necessity; grief must be named, voiced, and embodied before healing can begin. St. John Chrysostom notes in his homilies on repentance that sorrow rightly ordered leads not to despair but to conversion.
Jeremiah 9:19 — "For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion..." The voice of lamentation from Zion anticipates what the mourning women will themselves sing. Zion, the theological center of Israel's identity — city of the covenant, seat of the Temple, symbol of God's dwelling among his people — is now the source of a death-wail. The phrase "How we are ruined! We are deeply shamed!" encapsulates the double catastrophe: military destruction (ruined, šuddadnû) and covenantal disgrace (shamed, bōšnû). The land's abandonment is not merely geopolitical but theological — Yahweh has withdrawn his protective presence because Israel has abandoned him.
Jeremiah 9:20 — "Yet hear Yahweh's word, you women..." The prophet now addresses the mourning women directly, instructing them to teach the lament to their daughters and neighbors. This is a crucial moment: the lamentation becomes traditioned, passed on as a form of communal memory. The Hebrew educational model here — mother to daughter — mirrors how Torah was transmitted domestically. The instruction to "teach your daughters wailing, and each to her neighbor a lamentation" suggests that grief over covenantal failure must become a structured, inherited spiritual practice, not merely individual sorrow.
Jeremiah 9:21 — "For death has come up into our windows..." This verse contains one of Scripture's most vivid personifications of death. Death is portrayed as a burglar or an invading enemy climbing through latticed windows — an image of violation, of the sacred domestic space being breached. The reference to the Canaanite god Mot (death) lurking in this imagery has been noted by scholars; Jeremiah subversively appropriates the language of pagan mythology to describe covenantal catastrophe. Death cuts down "the children from the streets and the young men from the squares" — the public spaces of communal life are emptied. The harvest metaphor ("like grain before the reaper") positions death as an anti-harvest: instead of life's abundance being gathered, lives are harvested by destruction.
Jeremiah 9:22 — "Speak, 'Yahweh says, the corpses of men shall fall like dung upon the open field...'" The divine oracle reaches its most brutal pitch. Human bodies — left unburied — become like dung upon the field and like sheaves behind the reaper with no one to gather them. In the ancient world, to be left unburied was the ultimate indignity, the negation of one's humanity and memory. Jeremiah does not soften this image. The literal sense is visceral historical warning; the anagogical sense points to the ultimate gravity of covenantal unfaithfulness — spiritual death is as real as physical death, and both are consequences of turning from God.
Typological and Spiritual Senses: Catholic exegesis, following the Pontifical Biblical Commission's The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1993), recognizes that this passage, in its typological sense, prefigures the lamentation over Christ's Passion. The mourning women of Jerusalem who accompany Jesus on the Via Dolorosa (Luke 23:27–28) echo these very figures. Jesus, however, reverses the command: he instructs them not to weep for him but for themselves and their children — a direct inversion of Jeremiah's summons that signals the fulfillment and transcendence of the old pattern of grief. The allegorical sense invites the Church to see in Zion's lamentation the Church's own calling to grieve over sin — both personal and social — as a precondition of renewal.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition brings several unique lenses to bear on this passage.
On Holy Mourning: The Church has consistently taught that compunction (compunctio cordis) — a piercing sorrow for sin — is a gift of the Holy Spirit and a prerequisite for genuine conversion. St. Gregory the Great in his Moralia in Job describes tears of compunction as a kind of interior baptism. The Catechism affirms that "Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart" (CCC 1431). The professional mourners of Jeremiah 9 function as a type of this holy compunction: their art is not mere cultural performance but a divinely commanded confrontation with the reality of death that sin produces.
On God's Co-suffering: The phrase "let our eyes run down with tears" (v. 18) points toward what Hans Urs von Balthasar developed as God's solidarity in suffering. While classical theism rightly guards divine impassibility, Catholic theology also affirms that in the Incarnate Son, God truly enters into human grief (cf. John 11:35). Jeremiah's text is a prophetic anticipation of this mystery.
On Women as Bearers of Tradition: The command to teach daughters the lament (v. 20) resonates with the Church's recognition of women's irreplaceable role in transmitting faith domestically — what John Paul II called the feminine genius (Mulieris Dignitatem, 1988). The mourning women are not marginal figures; they are custodians of communal spiritual memory.
On the Wages of Sin: The image of unburied corpses (v. 22) is a stark illustration of Romans 6:23 — "the wages of sin is death." The Catechism teaches that "sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts" (CCC 1865). Jeremiah's dirge externalizes what sin produces at a communal level.
For Today
Contemporary Catholic life rarely makes room for holy grief. Jeremiah 9:17–22 issues a counter-cultural summons: learn to lament. In a culture that pathologizes mourning and rushes toward resolution, the Church's own liturgical tradition — from the Office of the Dead to the Lamentations sung in the Tenebrae of Holy Week — preserves the wisdom that named grief is a spiritual discipline, not a failure.
Practically, this passage invites Catholics to recover three concrete practices. First, the Examen of conscience done with genuine sorrow, not merely as an accounting exercise. Second, participation in the Church's penitential seasons — especially Lent — as a real confrontation with one's covenantal failures, not a light self-improvement program. Third, solidarity with communities experiencing real devastation — refugees, the bereaved, victims of violence — recognizing in their grief an echo of Zion's lament that God himself refuses to ignore.
Jeremiah also warns against spiritual numbness: the women must be summoned because grief does not arise automatically. We must actively seek and cultivate sorrow over sin — our own and our culture's — as a precondition for encountering God's mercy.
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