Why does he say, “I looked on the mountains and they were quaking”?

In Hebrew poetry, mountains and hills are typically images of the stability and strength of the Lord’s ordered creation. But in Jeremiah’s vision the cosmic disturbance described in  Jeremiah 4:23 is disrupting the Lord’s creation on earth as the mountains quake and the hills move to and fro.¹ The very foundations of the earth are crumbling.