Jeremiah 1:5 is not a Refutation of Abortion – It is about Working in Clay!

Clay in the potter’s hand...We’ve heard it before…We've sung it. But do we understand what we are affirming?

Modern exegetes like to convince us that this simply describes the act of creation performed in a society where pottery and agriculture were primary forms of commerce. Such an explanation would explain all those farming allusions Jesus makes in his parables, right? After all, if we're not dealing in figurative speech, then the contention that the Judeo-Christian witness has universal application available to all becomes a little narrow. But perhaps it is not correct to assign this to the figurative language bin before we recognize that there was a very real primitive belief in the Near East that man was formed from the earth. We all recognize this in Genesis 1. But what we often fail to recognize is that the Hebrew word selection used is not arbitrary and that when we see similar words find their way into other passages of the Bible, we need take heed. What was the author getting at? Why did he use a word? Was it because only this was available to him? Or was it something more?

Of course there are cases like this: The word dag for fish in Hebrew has no equivalent. Social anthropologists and linguistics believe this is simply because the ancient Jews were not primarily maritime peoples, say, like their cousins the Philistines. But when it comes to sheep, there are multiple words! That’s because the Hebrews were shepherds. When our modern Christian apologists take verses like Jeremiah 1:5 to report how the prophet was alluding to his political mind on anti-abortion, they need to realize that the yasar (יָצַר) the writer uses for the word “form” may very well be connected to the primitive usage of the word. One good reason for this is because we see words like tohu wabohu in Genesis appear in other places in the Bible when the concern is about cosmology. There were certainly other cognates of the word “to make, to form, or to create.” But יָצַר has a distinctive meaning that is often connected to formations of pottery. Go read Jeremiah 18! The clay motif clearly goes back to Adam. God formed Adam from the dirt (adamah/ אדמה). (So the next time someone says their name is dirt, say “why yes, this is true!”) Of course, the authors knew how babies were born.

So to say this baby was formed in clay would have been absurd. I think what Jeremiah is doing here is connecting the concept of birth with the first act of human creation (the forming of Adam from clay). It was a way of seeing oneself in the ebb and flow of sacred history and to affirm that Jeremiah’s generation was connected with Adam’s generation, that God is a faithful God, and continues his work in creation.