Thus shall you say to them: Let the gods, who did not make heaven and earth, perish from the earth and from under these heavens. (Jer 10:11 1985 JPS Tanakh)
This verse, written in Aramaic unlike the rest of the book of Jeremiah, is seen by most scholars as a later interpolation. While I am not dogmatic, that is the position, I hold to, too. For more, see:
Notwithstanding, in the interest of fairness, the following from Jennifer Marie Creamer (adjunct professor of New Testament at the Boston campus of Gordon-Cornwell Theological Seminary) presents her case that the verse is probably original to Jeremiah:
Verse 11 appears in Aramaic, rather than Hebrew, in the Masoretic Text. This abrupt change of language for a single verse has led some to question the integrity of the text (Craigie, Kelley, & Drinkard, 1991:160). Garrett Reid argues that Jeremiah 10:11 is a genuine part of the Masoretic Text, against those who surmise that the use of Aramaic indicates an interpolation or gloss. He proposes that structural evidence boosts the authenticity of the text: the verse sits in the apex of a chiastic parallelism (Reid, 2006:229). The translation of Jeremiah 10:11 into Greek and its inclusion in the Septuagint also may attest to its genuineness. But this still does not answer the question, why does it appear in Aramaic in the Masoretic Text? F.B. Huey suggests that it may have retained the Aramaic for emphasis (Huey, 1993:127). If a proverb, then the concept that false gods “did not make the heaven and the earth” would have been a well-known idea among the Israelites. Craigie, Kelley, and Drinkard affirm that the presence of Aramaic in this verse “confirms that the passage was addressed to the exiles, for Aramaic was the language of the land where they were exiled” (Craigie, Kelly, & Drinkard, 1991:160).
The Targum of Jeremiah surrounds Jeremiah 10:11 with additional text to suggest that this verse originally may have been part of a letter sent to the exiles by Jeremiah (Craigie, Kelley, & Drinkard, 1991:160; McKane, 1986:225; Reid, 2006:233):
This is a copy of the letter which Jeremiah the prophet sent to the remnant of the elders of the Exile who were in Babylon. “If the nations among whom you are should say to you, Worship the idols, O house of Israel: thus you shall answer and thus you shall say to them: ‘The idols which you worship are idols in which there is no profit. They cannot bring down rain from heaven, and they cannot make fruits sprout forth from the earth. They are those who worship them shall perish from the earth, and shall be destroyed from under these heavens.’” (Hayward, 1987:79)
In this Targum, Jeremiah 10:22 comprises the content of what the Israelites were instructed to say to their Babylonian captors. It is an anti-idolatry polemic.
Whether verse 11 was originally part of a letter to the exiles, as the Targum suggests, or a proverb, as Huey suggests, or both, the presence of Aramaic in the Masoretic Text suggests that Jeremiah intended this anti-idolatry message to extend further than his Israelite audience. In the words of Reid, “it is a capsule worldview polemic for the people of God living in a pagan culture” (Reid, 2006:232). A polemic against the idolatry of the nations is given to Israel in the lingua franca of the nations so that they may proclaim it cross-culturally (Reid, 2006:237-38). (Jennifer Marie Creamer, God as Creator in Acts 17:24: An Historical-Exegetical Study [Africanus Monograph Series vol. 2; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2017], 69-70)
Some critics of Latter-day Saint theology often use this passage against our belief in the plurality of gods and robust deification. Notwithstanding, even allowing for the verse to be original to the book of Jeremiah, it is not problematic to our theology. As D. Charles Pyle wrote:
. . . the phrase “from the earth, and from under these heavens” plainly refers to the here and the now, or life on this earth and under this sky, and as the context shows, it is referring to the idols and graven images of the nations rather than those who would become gods through the grace and atonement of Christ, or who already were gods and, hence, in heaven (critics of course also would deny this). But the passage also nowhere states that the gods who are in heaven would perish. Nor does this passage specify that there were no other gods under God in heaven (And we know that this is the case for the Bible refers to God as the God of gods. Just as he is the King of kings and Lord of lords, and we know that other lords and other kings are real beings, so other gods also must in like manner exist). And nothing within this passage affirms that God cannot make other gods and enthrone them in heaven, like the early Christians believed (and also the Latter-day Saints). (D. Charles Pyle, I Have Said Ye are Gods: Concepts Conducive to the Early Christian Doctrine of Deification in Patristic Literature and the Underlying Strata of the Greek New Testament (Revised and Supplemented) [CreateSpace, 2018], 308)
Previously in his excellent book,
Pyle noted:
. . . God several times is referred to in the
Bible as the “God of gods” (Deuteronomy 10:17; Joshua 22:22; Psalms 136:2;
Daniel 2:47; 11:36) just as he is spoken of as “King of kings and Lord of lords”
in the Bible. We know that there really are other kings and other lords over
which God is both King and Lord. These beings really exist and existed. So it
is with the gods in heaven over whom God is God. (Ibid., 80-81, note a)
