Jeremiah 2:15 describes the devastation that falls on a land when enemies are let loose against it: cities are burned, fields are laid waste, and the people are gone. The verse is a picture of what happens when a nation turns away from God and trusts in its own strength and foreign alliances. It is spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, who was sent to the people of Judah in the decades before Jerusalem fell to Babylon, and it is his description of the ruin already coming upon them.
The young lions have roared at him, and yelled. They have made his land waste. His cities are burned up, without inhabitant.
Jeremiah 2:15 (WEB)
What Jeremiah 2:15 Means
The image opens with “young lions” that roar and yell at the land. Lions in the Bible often stand for fierce, destructive power, and here they represent invading armies. Their roaring is the sound of an attack that cannot be stopped by the people of the land. The verse then moves from sound to result: the land is made waste, meaning emptied and ruined, and its cities are burned until no one lives in them. Each phrase builds the same picture of total loss.
What the verse does not do is offer comfort or a promise of rescue. It is a statement of consequence, not a word of hope in its own right. Read alone, it describes what has happened and what will continue to happen. Its meaning becomes clearer when you see that Jeremiah is naming the results of Judah’s choices, not announcing random misfortune. The verse shows what it looks like when a people has walked away from the God who gave them their land and their life.
The Context of Jeremiah 2:15
The book of Jeremiah is traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, a priest from Anathoth who served God for about forty years in Judah, roughly from the late seventh century BC through the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC. His audience was the southern kingdom of Judah, and chapter 2 opens with the LORD recalling the early faithfulness of Israel and then accusing the people of forsaking him. Verses 12 and 13 describe their two evils: abandoning the spring of living waters and digging broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Just before verse 15, God asks whether Israel is a slave or a captive by birth, a question that presses on the people’s sense of identity and freedom. Right after it, in verses 16 to 18, the prophet points to the peoples of Memphis and Tahpanhes and to Egypt and Assyria, and asks what good these alliances will bring. Seen in this setting, verse 15 is part of a sustained argument: Judah’s suffering is the fruit of its own choices, and the foreign powers it leans on are not its rescuers. This changes how the verse reads, because it is no longer only a description of invasion but an exposure of the false security that led there.
Key Phrases in Jeremiah 2:15
Jeremiah 2:13
“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
(WEB)
Verse 13 names the two evils directly, forsaking the spring of living waters and digging broken cisterns. It shows the root cause behind the devastation described in verse 15, and reading the two together makes clear that the ruin is the outcome of a choice made long before the enemies arrived.
Psalm 1:3
He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, that produces its fruit in its season, whose leaf also does not wither. Whatever he does shall prosper.
(WEB)
This psalm pictures the person who delights in God’s law as a tree planted by streams of water, rooted and fruitful. It stands in quiet contrast to the dry, ruined land of Jeremiah 2:15, and it shows what becomes of those who draw their life from the source rather than from broken cisterns.
A Short Prayer From Jeremiah 2:15
Lord, you are the spring of living water, and I have too often dug my own cisterns and hoped they would hold. Show me where I have turned away from you and placed my trust in things that cannot sustain me. Where my land has been laid waste by loss or fear, teach me to come back to you honestly and to ask for your mercy. Gather what has been scattered in my life, and make me rooted again in your faithfulness. Amen.
