Jeremiah 23:25 - Exposition

I have dreamed . Jeremiah mentions it as one of the marks of a false prophet that he appealed to his dreams (comp. Jeremiah 29:8 ); true prophecy contented itself with less ambiguous media of communication with the unseen world. It may be objected that Abraham ( Genesis 15:12 ), at any rate, and Abimelech ( Genesis 20:3 ) received Divine revelations in dreams; but these were not officially prophets. Nathan and the contemporaries of the author of Job had messages from God by night, but these are called, not dreams, but visions. Deuteronomy (and this is one of its striking points of agreement with Jeremiah) expressly describes a false prophet as "a dreamer of dreams". Two passages in the Old Testament seem inconsistent with this discouragement of dreams as a medium of revelation— Numbers 12:6 , where the Lord is said to make himself known to prophets by visions and dreams, and Joel 2:28 , where the prophetic dreams of the old men are one of the features of a Messianic description; but it is noteworthy that the first of these refers to the primitive period of Israel's history, and the second to the distant Messianic age. In its classical period prophecy kept itself sedulously aloof from a field on which it had such compromising companionship (comp. Ecclesiastes 5:7 ).