Why will nations ask, “Why has the Lord dealt thus with his great city?”

In the final two verses of this passage (Jeremiah 22:29–30), the Lord’s devastating judgment of the kings of Judah, and Zedekiah in particular, is described from the vantage point of the nations around Judah. The Lord says that those who pass Jerusalem will ask, Why has the Lord dealt thus with this great city? The answer that will be given is, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God and worshipped other gods and served them. The language that is used here is the language of the covenant. As Moses renews the covenant with Israel at Moab, he anticipates this day of judgment that the Lord speaks of here in Jeremiah. He says to Israel, And the next generation, your children who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land, will say, when they see the afflictions of the land and the sickness with which the Lord has made it sick—the  whole land burned with brimstone and salt, nothing sown and nothing growing, where no plant can sprout, an overthrow like that of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and wrath—all the nations will say, Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What caused the heat of this great anger? Then people will say, ’It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt and went and served other gods and worshipped them, gods they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them’ (Deuteronomy 29:22–26). The kings of Judah have failed because they have not been faithful to the covenant, and they had led the people into unfaithfulness. Therefore, the judgment that the covenant both anticipated and promised has come.