Heath

The heath, in the prophetic figure that uses the word, is the desert shrub that lives stripped of any green prospect — rooted in salt land, blind to coming good, fit only as the picture of the man who has cut himself off from Yahweh. Jeremiah uses the image twice: once by the name "heath," once by the name "juniper," in two oracles that turn the same kind of wilderness plant into a warning.

The man who trusts in flesh

The first oracle pronounces the curse on the one whose heart turns away, and reaches for the desert plant as the figure of his life: "For he will be like the heath in the desert, and will not see when good comes, but will stay in the parched places in the wilderness, a salt land and not inhabited." (Jer 17:6). The plant fails to register the rain when it comes — "will not see when good comes" — and stays in the salt land where nothing settles. The figure carries its own verdict: a life rooted away from the spring is a life that does not respond to relief.

Flee like a juniper in the wilderness

The second oracle, against Moab, takes the same desert-shrub image and turns it into an order to flee: "Flee, save your⁺ souls, and be like a juniper in the wilderness." (Jer 48:6). Here the plant is rendered "juniper," and the plural-you (⁺) shows the command is collective. Where the heath of Jer 17 is the still-life of a cursed man, the juniper of Jer 48 is the moving-image of a people scattering for cover — the same desert-shrub vocabulary turned from the picture of a settled curse into the means of escape.