Jeremiah 16:16-18—"'But now I will send for many fishermen,' declares the Lord, 'and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks. My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from me, nor is their sin concealed from my eyes. I will repay them double for their wickedness and their sin, because they have defiled my land with the lifeless forms of their vile images and have filled my inheritance with their detestable idols.'"
Initially, this might appear to be Yahweh proclaiming something as if it is justice despite disproportionate punishment being incapable of being just and all forms of punishment having maximum boundaries no matter what, as affirmed in his own laws regarding punishments for certain sins (for instance, see Exodus 22:3 and Deuteronomy 15:12). It is a logical fact that it could only be impossible for anything to be just if it is more severe than what the wrong objectively deserves, and here, in Jeremiah 16, Yahweh insists he will repay sinners double. A superficially similar statement is made in Exodus 22:4, where a thief must pay back double if they are caught with a stolen animal alive in their possession.
This contrasts with paying back five or four animals if the stolen animal is killed or sold, for the victim's property is no longer simply stolen, but destroyed or potentially unable to be reclaimed (Exodus 22:1). Yet, paying back two sheep is not actually overpunishment because the one of the two sheep to be paid back is merely given for the sake of restitution; returning or restoring the first sheep is always about giving the victim their own property back, and anything beyond this, which could entail far more than restitution at a 2:1 ratio as mentioned, is where the punitive element actually starts. Until this point, restoration is at hand rather than punishment.
Conceptually, this is not truly exacting double repayment in the sense of punishing the offender twice as much as their offense actually merits. But there is something more relevant to Jeremiah 16:18 in the Torah. Moses warns on God's behalf more than once about defiling the Promised Land with evil behaviors (such as in Deuteronomy 21:21-23 and 24:1-4). God himself warned about such a thing earlier, promising that if Israel did not avoid miscellaneous sins which caused him to hate the prior inhabitants of the land (Leviticus 20:1-23), he would allow them to be vomited out of the land just like the evildoers they displaced (Leviticus 18:5-30). Now, in Jeremiah 16:18, God does say precisely that it is because wicked Jews defiled his land and his inheritance given to them that they will be repaid double. As specified in Leviticus 25:23, the Promised Land belongs to God, and the Israelites were allowed to dwell there.
The sins of Israel receiving a double punishment were twofold. On one hand, deeds like idolatry are inherently wicked on Judeo-Christianity (Deuteronomy 17:2-5, Romans 1:21-25, etc.). On the other hand, the Israelites were up to a point in the Old Testament in the unique position of inhabiting a land specially devoted to them as their inheritance, due to the sins of the former residents (Deuteronomy 9:4-6), if only they would not also morally err so that they too are killed or expelled. By committing evil in the Promised Land, they both did things which by nature should not be done (at least on Biblical philosophy) and defiled the land God gave to them in the process. Thus, the failure of the Israelites in question has a layer beyond simply committing the base sins themselves.
If someone living outside of the literal boundaries of the Promised Land in a past era or the present day commits a sin like idolatry, this additional amplifier to their depravity is almost certainly not present, though there is nothing inconsistent with the uniqueness of Israel's inheritance about sin in a broader sense defiling any land. In Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, unrepentant sin is said to put the Israelites on a path to expulsion from the land where God has brought them for those who survive military attacks from a foreign power. By the time of Jeremiah, the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians loomed on the horizon. The repayment for the double-tiered evil of sinning and in doing so defiling the land Yahweh provided as an inheritance would accordingly be double.
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