God poses this question to expose the absurdity of equating false dreams with His revealed word. By asking rather than merely asserting the contrast, the Lord forces both prophets and people to recognize the fundamental incompatibility between human fabrication and divine truth, making their complicity in deception indefensible.

The text records no verbal response from the prophets to this question. God continues His pronouncement through Jeremiah, declaring that His word is like fire and like a hammer that breaks rocks in pieces (verse 29), contrasting the power of genuine revelation with the emptiness of false dreams.

God’s rhetorical question demands recognition that chaff and wheat share nothing essential despite superficial similarity. The Hebrew construction emphasizes stark incompatibility, the question expects no answer because the answer is obvious to anyone who has witnessed winnowing. By framing this as a question rather than a declaration, God invites self-examination: prophets and people must judge for themselves whether they’ve been treating worthless chaff as nourishing wheat. The agricultural metaphor carries devastating implications for false prophets who dress up their dreams in prophetic language, for just as chaff cannot sustain physical life, fabricated revelations cannot nourish souls or guide communities. This question underscores God’s intolerance for diluting His word with human invention, establishing a standard of faithfulness that demands prophets speak His word and nothing but His word.