The Heart is Not Desperately Wicked

Re-reading Jeremiah 17:9

The Secret of the Heart: The Beginnings of a Theology of the Deep Heart

1. The Kinde Yerning of the Soule: Simone Weil and Julian of Norwich on the Secret of the Heart

2. The Hidden Man of the Heart: Silouan the Athonite and Sophrony of Essex on the Deep Heart as Battlefield and Burning Bush

3. The Springs Are Very Deep: Teresa of Avila on the Heart of the Heart

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“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17.9). This passage—actually, this line from this passage—does not mean what it’s usually taken to mean. Stripped from its context, it’s reduced to no more than a “saying,” a generic proposition about the depravity of the heart. But Scripture never works in this way. Ironically, tragically, what in the text is a word of promise has become in conventional interpretation a word of accusation.

If we hope to understand what Jeremiah is actually saying, we have first to ask a question of translation. Here are a few of the more familiar versions, all drawn from the Hebrew, which suggests insidiousness, incurability, and incomprehensibility:

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?[NIV]

The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. Who can understand it? [NASB]

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? [RSV]

The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?[NRSVUE]

The LXX reads quite differently: Βαθεία ἡ καρδία παρὰ πάντα, καὶ ἄνθρωπός ἐστι, καὶ τίς γνώσεται αὐτόν. In Brenton’s translation, it reads: “The heart is deep beyond all things, and it is the man, and who can know him?” Irenaeus takes the verse as a prophetic description of Jesus:

Now, who is it that has shared food with us? Is it the Christ from on high who is imagined by these [heretics], who has extended himself across Limit and has given form to their Mother? Or is it Emmanuel who was born of the Virgin, who ate butter and honey, of whom the prophet said, And He is a man, and who will recognize Him? This same one was announced by Paul…¹

Both the (Greek) LXX and the (Hebrew) MT are authoritative for Christians, so we have to allow both readings to stand side-by-side.² That said, we also have to work with the texts as they actually come to us—in the liturgy, the sermon, the prayerbook, etc.—and as they appear in the translations the people we serve are actually reading. That means we have to face the conventional reading of this line and deal with it head-on; we cannot simply work around it by appeal to the LXX’s rendering.

Robert Alter translates the first part of the verse “More crooked the heart than all things,” noting that the word for “crooked” in Hebrew is ‘aqov, the root of Jacob’s name, which Esau takes as a prediction of his betraying (cf. Gen. 27.36). This connection is crucial to understanding the text on its own terms, I believe, because the Word of the Lord in Jeremiah’s prophecy addresses “the sin of Judah” that has been “engraved on the tablet of their heart, and on the horns of their altars” (Jer. 17.1).

The threat of judgment that comes in the word of the Lord Jeremiah receives opens with the familiar distinction between the cursed and the blessed. Cursed are those who put their trust in the strength of flesh and whose hearts turn away from the Lord. The blessed trust, not in the flesh, but in God as their trust and their hearts are inclined toward the Lord, the hope of Israel. Just so, however, they find themselves drawn face to face with the darkness of their own innermost depths—the heart in all its terrifying inscrutability and unpredictability.

If we have followed it closely, the text has led us to this point: the blessed man’s heart is the one in question. Indeed, it comes into question because of the blessing. Only those who have seen the light, who have been drawn to it and into it, have any sense of the darkness within. The saints are the only ones who know anything worth knowing about their sins and their sinfulness. That knowledge is one of the effects of being blessed. The heart, then, is not desperately wicked. It is desperate for God.

Earlier, Jeremiah’s heart had fainted at the alarm of war (Jer. 4.19). Now, stirred by the Spirit, he faints before his own weakness like Paul in Romans 7. How can Israel can hope to be Israel if the heart of even the righteous is always Jacob-like? This is the trouble Jeremiah is forced to face about himself and all of his people, and who knows how long he was left suspended over the abyss. At some point, however, he realized, suddenly, the answer to the question his trembling heart had been afraid to ask. Who can know the unknowable? The all-knowing, unknowable Lord.

“I the Lord search the mind
    and try the heart,
to give every man according to his ways,
    according to the fruit of his doings.” (Jer. 17.10)

God is said to try the heart and test its worth, but this is not a threat—it is the only sure word of comfort. It is the Lord, the one whose heart is always open wise to us, who does the testing. The fire of the Spirit comes not to expose the weaknesses of those the Father loves, nor to punish them for their failings, but to heal them, to cleanse and purify their hearts, and exactly in that way to make them whole.

The heart's darkness is not to be feared. The Lord has a heart and the heart belongs to him; he turns it—without coercion or violation—as he wills (Prov. 21:1). Those who have had sin engraved into the stone of their hearts, making themselves altars to false (that is, nonexistent) gods, will in the end be written into the earth, ground to dust (Jer. 17.1, 13)—exactly like Aaron’s golden calf. But that is not their last end. Their last end is their true beginning, the God whose heart is always turned toward us, the God who has become, like us, “earth that suffers,” the God who has a heart, and who has taken all things to heart. Seeing this, Jeremiah is freed to sing in hope against hope for full restoration:

Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Like these good figs, so I will regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I have sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldeans. I will set my eyes upon them for good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up, and not tear them down; I will plant them, and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart. (Jer. 24.5-7)

“Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jer. 31.31-33)

I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them; and I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul. (Jer. 32.39-41)

In the end, then, Jeremiah’s cry is a cry not only from the heart, but even more so a cry for the heart. It is a sign of his confidence in the Lord. A question he can ask only because the answer has already been given.

1. AH 3.18.3.

2. See Ignacio Carbajosa, Hebraica veritas versus Septuaginta auctoritatem: Does a Canonical Text of the Old Testament Exist? (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2024).