Jeremiah

Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah was a priest from the village of Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, called by Yahweh during the reign of Josiah and active through the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation that followed (Jer 1:1; Jer 3:6). His ministry began in the days of reform and ended in forced exile to Egypt, and his book records both the public oracles he spoke against Judah and the nations and the private griefs he carried under that vocation. Sirach summarizes his life from the womb forward as a prophetic charge "to pluck up, to break down, and to destroy, and likewise to build, and to plant" (Sirach 49:6-7), echoing the language Yahweh had spoken at the call itself.

Call at Anathoth

The opening oracle frames Jeremiah's whole career. Yahweh addresses him as one already known and consecrated: "Before I formed you in the belly I knew you, and before you came forth out of the womb I sanctified you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations" (Jer 1:5). When Jeremiah pleads inexperience — "Ah, Sovereign Yahweh! Look, I don't know how to speak; for I am a child" — Yahweh refuses the excuse, touches his mouth, and commissions him with the sixfold task of plucking up, breaking down, destroying, overthrowing, building, and planting (Jer 1:6-10). The promise of presence is given in the UPDV idiom for divine accompaniment: "for my [Speech] is with you to deliver you" (Jer 1:8). The same charge ends the chapter as Yahweh hardens him into "a fortified city, and an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against its princes, against its priests, and against the people of the land" (Jer 1:18-19).

Symbolic Acts

Much of Jeremiah's preaching is enacted rather than merely spoken. He is told to buy a linen loincloth, wear it, then hide it in a cleft by the Euphrates; when retrieved long afterward "the loincloth was marred, it was profitable for nothing" — an enacted parable of how Yahweh would mar the pride of Judah and Jerusalem (Jer 13:1-11). He is sent to the potter's house to watch a marred vessel be remade on the wheel, and is told "as the clay in the potter's hand, so are you⁺ in my hand, O house of Israel" (Jer 18:1-6). The image then darkens: he buys a potter's earthen bottle, takes it out to the valley of the son of Hinnom, and breaks it before the elders, declaring, "Even so I will break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter's vessel, that can't be made whole again" (Jer 19:1-11).

In Zedekiah's reign the symbolic acts turn political. Yahweh commands, "Make bonds and bars for yourself, and put them on your neck," and Jeremiah wears the yoke as a sign that Judah and the surrounding kingdoms must submit to Nebuchadnezzar (Jer 27:2-12). The prophet Hananiah of Gibeon publicly breaks the wooden bar from off Jeremiah's neck and prophesies that Yahweh will likewise break the king of Babylon's yoke within two years; Jeremiah is told to replace it with bars of iron, and to announce that Hananiah, who "make[s] this people to trust in a lie," will die within the year — which he does, in the seventh month (Jer 28:1-17).

The last enacted sign comes in Egypt. After the deportation, Yahweh tells Jeremiah to take great stones in his hand and hide them in mortar in the brickwork at the entry of Pharaoh's house in Tahpanhes; over those buried stones Nebuchadnezzar will set his throne when he comes to strike the land of Egypt (Jer 43:8-13).

Conflict with Priests, Princes, and False Prophets

The conflict Jeremiah was promised at his call is constant. The men of his own village conspire against him: "You will not prophesy in the name of Yahweh, that you will not die by our hand" (Jer 11:21-23). Pashhur, the son of Immer the priest and "leading officer in the house of Yahweh," strikes him and puts him in the stocks at the upper gate of Benjamin; the next day Jeremiah renames him Magor-missabib ("terror on every side") and announces that he, all his household, and his friends will go into Babylonian captivity, "because you have prophesied falsely" (Jer 20:1-6). The personal cost surfaces immediately afterward in one of the so-called "confessions": "O Yahweh, you have persuaded me, and I was persuaded; you are stronger than I, and have prevailed... if I say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak anymore in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I can't [contain]" (Jer 20:7-9).

Other officials defend him. When Jehoiakim has the prophet Uriah hunted down in Egypt and executed for prophesying along the lines of Jeremiah, "the hand of Ahikam the son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah, that they should not give him into the hand of the people to put him to death" (Jer 26:20-24).

The Scroll and Baruch

Jeremiah's prophecies were written down through his scribe, Baruch the son of Neriah. In the fourth year of Jehoiakim, Yahweh tells Jeremiah to dictate everything he has spoken since the days of Josiah onto a roll, and Baruch writes it from his mouth and reads it in the temple, since Jeremiah is "shut up" and cannot go there himself (Jer 36:1-8). When the roll is read in the king's winter-house, Jehoiakim cuts it column by column with a penknife and burns it in the brazier; Yahweh hides Jeremiah and Baruch from the officers sent to seize them, and a second roll is dictated, "and there were added besides to them many like words" (Jer 36:21-32). A separate oracle is delivered as a personal word to Baruch in the same year (Jer 45:1). Later, when Zedekiah travels to Babylon, Jeremiah commands Seraiah the son of Neriah to read out a written prophecy against Babylon, bind a stone to the book, and cast it into the Euphrates as a sign of the city's irrecoverable fall (Jer 51:59-64).

Cistern, Court of the Guard, and Zedekiah's Inquiries

During the Babylonian siege Jeremiah is arrested at the gate of Benjamin on a charge of defection (Jer 37:13) and committed to the court of the guard, where Zedekiah orders him fed daily from the bakers' street "until all the bread in the city was spent" (Jer 37:21). The princes accuse him of weakening the soldiers' hands and lower him by cords into the cistern of Malchijah, the king's son: "in the dungeon there was no water, but mire; and Jeremiah sank in the mire" (Jer 38:6). Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, a eunuch in the king's house, intercedes with Zedekiah, takes thirty men, and draws Jeremiah out with rags and worn-out garments cushioning the cords (Jer 38:7-13).

Zedekiah keeps consulting him in private even while permitting his abuse. Earlier in the siege he sends messengers asking, "Inquire, I urge you, of Yahweh for us; for Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon is making war against us" (cf. Jer 21:3). Now he meets Jeremiah secretly at the third entry of the temple, swearing not to put him to death, and Jeremiah tells him plainly that surrender to Babylon's princes is the only way the city and his own household survive (Jer 38:14-23). The princes' cross-examination is deflected by the cover story Zedekiah dictates, and "Jeremiah remained in the court of the guard until the day that Jerusalem was taken" (Jer 38:27-28).

Field at Anathoth

In the same imprisonment Yahweh tells Jeremiah that his cousin Hanamel will come asking him to exercise the right of redemption on a field in Anathoth, and Hanamel does. Jeremiah weighs out seventeen shekels of silver, signs and seals the deed before witnesses, and gives the sealed and open copies to Baruch with instructions to put them in an earthen vessel, "that they may continue many days. For this is what Yahweh of Hosts says, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards will yet again be bought in this land" (Jer 32:6-15). The transaction, made under siege from a prison, is itself a prophecy of return.

Fall of Jerusalem and Release

When the city falls, Nebuchadrezzar gives explicit orders concerning Jeremiah to Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard: "Take him, and look well to him, and do him no harm; but do to him even as he will say to you" (Jer 39:11-14). Nebuzaradan finds him bound in chains at Ramah among the deportees, releases him, offers him passage to Babylon with provisions, and tells him plainly that the disaster came "because you⁺ have sinned against Yahweh, and haven't obeyed [his Speech]" (Jer 40:1-5). Jeremiah chooses to remain with Gedaliah the son of Ahikam at Mizpah among the people who were left in the land (Jer 40:6).

Egypt

After Gedaliah's assassination, Johanan and the captains of the forces gather the remnant and ask Jeremiah to inquire of Yahweh whether they should go to Egypt; they swear to obey whatever answer comes (Jer 42:1-6). Ten days later the word comes: stay in the land, do not fear the king of Babylon, "for [my Speech] is with you⁺ to save you⁺, and to deliver you⁺ from his hand" (Jer 42:7-12). Johanan and the proud men reject the oracle as falsehood, blame Baruch for inciting Jeremiah, and forcibly carry the whole remnant — Jeremiah and Baruch among them — into Egypt, settling at Tahpanhes (Jer 43:1-7). There Jeremiah continues to prophesy: against the Jewish colonies at Migdol, Tahpanhes, Memphis, and Pathros, who are still burning incense to other gods (Jer 44:1-14), and against Egypt itself, which Nebuchadrezzar will strike (Jer 43:8-13). The book preserves no later word about Jeremiah's death.

Lamentations and the Oracles Against the Nations

Alongside the narrative, the book of Jeremiah carries his sorrow in his own voice: laments over the prosperity of the wicked, over the desolation of God's heritage, and over Jerusalem itself. The Chronicler records that "Jeremiah lamented for Josiah: and all the singing men and singing women spoke of Josiah in their lamentations to this day; and they made them an ordinance in Israel" (2 Chronicles 35:25). The oracles against the nations — concerning the Philistines before Pharaoh struck Gaza (Jer 47:1), concerning Egypt and the rest (Jer 46:1) — are introduced as words of Yahweh that came to Jeremiah the prophet, and the book closes by signing off the Babylon oracle: "Thus far are the words of Jeremiah" (Jer 51:64).

Reception

Jeremiah's celibacy is itself prophetic. The word of Yahweh comes to him: "You will not take for yourself a wife, neither will you have sons or daughters, in this place," because the children born in Judah will die grievous deaths in the coming siege (Jer 16:1-4). His vision of the two baskets of figs at the temple — Yahweh asks, "What do you see, Jeremiah?" — sorts the early exiles to Babylon as the good figs and those left under Zedekiah as the bad (Jer 24:3).

The later canon reads Jeremiah as both authority and pattern. Daniel, in the first year of Darius, "understood by the books the number of the years of which the word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah the prophet, for the accomplishing of the desolations of Jerusalem, even seventy years," and turns to fasting and prayer (Daniel 9:1-3). Sirach places him in the gallery of the great, recalling that the Holy City was burned "by the hand of Jeremiah, Because they persecuted him" (Sirach 49:6-7). The new-covenant oracle that stands at the center of his book — "Look, the days come, says Yahweh, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah... I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart I will write it" (Jer 31:31-34) — is taken up at length in Hebrews and applied to the priestly work of Christ: "Look, the days come, says the Lord, That I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah" (Hebrews 8:8-12).