The cup of wrath

[NightskyeB4Dawn]

In Jeremiah ch25, the prophet is instructed to take a "cup of the wine of wrath" and present it to the various kings of all the nations round about, from Egypt to Babylon. "They shall drink and stagger and go crazed because of the sword which I am sending among them" (v16). On another site which I now frequent, somebody was talking about this episode and observing that the cup could not have been a physical cup because of the logistics problem of travelling to the different places. I replied;

I agree, and I would add that no physical cup would have been necessary because the wine itself was only metaphorical.

The "drinking wine" metaphor is an important image which keeps recurring all the way up to Revelation ch17. I think in Jeremiah's usage it is fundamentally about loss of power. Babylon is the last nation to drink in this chapter, and in ch51 v7, there is a slightly different scenario in which Babylon is making the other nations drink. That is, Babylon takes power away from the other nations and finally loses power itself.

The thought -connection between getting drunk and losing power is intriguing. The most obvious connection is loss of judgement. Being drunk is a state of temporary madness, as well as leaving people incapacitated in other ways (compare v16 and the porter's speech in Macbeth).

But I think I've discovered a less obvious connection, a double metaphor. The archetypical drunken state of the Bible is the case of Noah after he first invented wine (Genesis ch9), and an important element in the story is that it left him naked. I suggest that the Israelites continued to associate getting drunk with getting naked, one more reason to disapprove of wine-drinking. I would also suggest that they associated nakedness with vulnerability. In Genesis ch3 v7 and again in Revelation ch3 v18 and ch16 v15 it appears to be a symbol of "being vulnerable to the critical eye of God's judgment". In that case, the thought process behind Jeremiah's image could be "Becoming drunk means becoming naked, becoming naked means becoming vulnerable, and becoming vulnerable means becoming powerless".

But the implication of all this is that "drinking the cup of wrath" ultimately means "being about to face judgment". That's the apparent meaning of the cup which the Harlot is offering in Revelation ch17. It appears that Jesus is applying the same image to his own prospective death on the Cross (Mark ch10 v38). That could even be part of the meaning of the cup at the Last Supper. I've only just thought of that last point, but it's possible that I read it somewhere and it's just re-emerged from my subconscious memory.

Ever have those times when you read the Bible and find yourself looking at a Bible verse for over a thousandth time. and suddenly you see it in a different way?

I think much can go into reading the Bible, and even much more comes out.