Thus says the LORD: See 2.2.

The LORD of hosts: See 2.19.

The daughter of Babylon: See 50.42 and the note at 4.31.

Like a threshing floor … yet a little while … her harvest will come: The image here is unfamiliar to many. Before the harvest time, the place where the grain will be threshed, the threshing floor, is trampled on to make it smooth and ready for threshing. The LORD says here that Babylon is being trodden on now, and the harvest time will be soon. The Good News Translation restructuring places the marker for time (“Soon”) first in the sentence and then follows the order in which the processes take place, by speaking of the harvest (“will cut them down”) before trampling on the threshing floor. Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch restructures as follows: “When people stomp on the threshing place, the time of threshing is not far off. The first has already happened to Babylon, and the second is not far distant!” This is good, but if translators feel their readers need more information, they can say, for example, “The people of Babylon are like a threshing floor. When people stomp on it to prepare for threshing, the time for harvest is not far off. In the same way, Babylon has been stomped on, and soon the enemy will cut them down.”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Jeremiah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2003. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .