Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 235 · August 23
Balm in Gilead
“Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?”
A line of camels on the road down to Egypt, loaded with spicery and balm and myrrh. Genesis has them passing a pit with a boy in it. Balm was what that country traded in, and every one of Jeremiah's hearers knew you could buy it.
Which is why his question is not about supply. Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? The medicine exists. The chapter has already said where the trouble is: they refuse to return, and no man repented him of his wickedness, saying, What have I done. It names the malpractice going on meanwhile: they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace. Jeremiah says the same to Egypt later with the outcome attached, in vain shalt thou use many medicines; for thou shalt not be cured. And the next words out of his mouth after our verse are no answer to it. Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears.
A spiritual answers him anyway, sung long before anybody troubled to write it down: there is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole. Somebody took the question and moved the punctuation, and they were entitled to, because they were singing on the far side of a physician who came to the house without being fetched. Jeremiah was not given that. His chapter ends with the harvest past, the summer ended, and we are not saved. So here is the blessing on this passage, uneven as it is. A medicine that was never out of stock, in a country you could reach in a day. People near you singing the line as a statement while your chapter is still a question. And a summer that, where you are sitting, has not ended yet.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 235 is Ready to Forgive (Psalm 86:5).