Book of Baruch

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The Book of Baruch is a short book of the Old Testament, set during the Babylonian exile and written in the name of Baruch ben Neriah, the secretary who, in the Book of Jeremiah, takes down the prophet’s words. It survives in Greek, in the Septuagint, and from there entered the Latin Bible; it is held canonical by the Catholic and Orthodox churches and treated as apocryphal — useful but not scriptural — by Judaism and most Protestant traditions. In the Latin Vulgate a separate text, the Letter of Jeremiah, travels with it as a sixth chapter; in the Greek manuscript tradition the Letter is a distinct book, transmitted nearby rather than attached.

The scribe whose name it carries

Baruch enters the record in the Book of Jeremiah as a man with ink on his hands. He is the prophet’s secretary: in the great scene of the scroll, Jeremiah dictates the oracles of two decades and Baruch writes them on a roll, reads them aloud in the Temple court, and watches a king of Judah cut the roll column by column with a scribe’s knife and feed it to the brazier — after which the words are written out again, with more added. He buys a field on Jeremiah’s instruction and seals the deed against a future return. He is the one who, in the prophet’s circle, holds the document; and when Jerusalem falls he is carried down into Egypt with the surviving prophet rather than to Babylon. None of this is the setting of the book that bears his name. To put words into the mouth of such a figure — the keeper of the prophetic word, present at the catastrophe — is to claim for them the standing of the prophet he served. The name is the book’s first argument.

Four movements under one name

The book is not one composition but a small anthology under a single name, and the seams between its parts are plain. It falls into four movements that differ in voice, in language, and almost certainly in date.

It opens in prose (1:1–14), with a scene by the river in Babylon. Baruch reads the book aloud to the exiled king Jehoiachin and the people; they weep, fast, and take up a collection of silver, which they send back to Jerusalem with instructions: buy the offerings, restore the altar, and pray for the life of Nebuchadnezzar and his son — that the exiles may live quietly under their shadow — and read this confession in the house of the Lord on the feast days. The scene is unusual. It imagines the deported community and the surviving remnant in Jerusalem still bound by a single liturgy, the money and the words traveling the road the captives traveled, in reverse. It is also, on its surface, a precise historical tableau: a date in the fifth year after the city was burned, the exiled house of David in Babylon, the sacred vessels Nebuchadnezzar carried off being sent home to be remade. Yet the chronology will not quite hold — the prayer for Nebuchadnezzar and his son Belshazzar names them as contemporaries when the throne in fact passed through other hands, and the notion of regular offerings on a ruined altar sits awkwardly with the years when the Temple lay in ashes. The frame is built less to record the exile than to evoke it: a stage on which a later community could speak its own contrition in the costume of the first deportation.

There follows a long penitential prayer (1:15–3:8), the confession the exiles asked to have read aloud. Its argument is unrelenting and turned inward: the catastrophe was deserved. Righteousness belongs to the Lord; shame of face, to Israel — kings, priests, prophets, and people, in the land and in exile alike. The disaster fulfilled exactly what Moses had warned, down to the curse that a man would eat the flesh of his own children in the siege. Only at the end does the prayer turn from confession to petition, asking that the God who brought the evil might now hear and restore. The prayer is built almost stone for stone out of older scripture; its closest kin is the confession in Daniel 9, with which it shares whole turns of phrase, and behind both stand the great communal confessions of the return.

The mood then changes entirely. A poem in praise of Wisdom (3:9–4:4) asks where wisdom is to be found, and answers that Israel forsook the fountain of wisdom and so was handed over to exile. Wisdom is not in the land of the merchants of Teman, not with the giants of old, not bought with the gold of Ophir; no one has gone up to heaven and brought her down, no one crossed the sea and found her. Only God knows the way to her — and God has given her to Israel, for she is the book of the commandments, the Law that endures forever. The poem makes the identification flat and total: Wisdom is the Torah. To turn from the Law is to turn from understanding itself; and the path to understanding was entrusted to one people and not found by the nations or their sages. The move is the one drawn also in Sirach and in the Book of Wisdom — the great theme of second-temple thought by which the cosmic Wisdom of the wisdom literature is folded into the covenant and given a national home. The poem’s reach is deliberately vast before it narrows: it sweeps across the merchant princes of the east, the legendary giants who perished for want of understanding, the unsearchable depths and the far stars that God numbers and calls each by name. All of that immensity is gathered and set down in a single book carried by a single people. The question it opens — where shall wisdom be found, and the place of understanding — is the question of Job’s hymn to wisdom; the answer it gives is the one Sirach gives, that Wisdom pitched her tent in Jacob and took root in an honored people. To know the cosmos, on this reading, is to keep the commandments; the largest thing in the world is the smallest scroll.

The closing section is a poem of consolation (4:5–5:9), addressed to Jerusalem herself, personified as a bereaved mother. She watches her sons and daughters led off in chains and cries out to the neighboring cities; she puts off the garment of her mourning and is told to look east and see her children gathered, coming home rejoicing, carried as on a royal throne, while God levels every high mountain and fills the valleys to make the road smooth for their return. The imagery is that of the great consolations of the exile, the mountains brought low and the long homeward road; the figure of the widowed city, bereft and then restored, is the same figure the Psalms of Solomon would later set over Jerusalem.

Greek text and the marks of a Hebrew original

The book reaches the modern reader in Greek, in the Septuagint, and its Greek is not uniform. The opening prose and the penitential prayer (1:1–3:8) read like a translation from a Hebrew that has left its grain in the Greek — its idioms, its constructions, even its missteps, of the kind a translator makes carrying one language into another. Emanuel Tov argued that this section shares the distinctive translation character of the second half of the Greek of Jeremiah, chapters 29–52: the same reviser’s hand, working over the Old Greek toward the Hebrew, seems to have produced both. On that reading the Greek of Baruch is bound at the root to the Greek of the book it stands beside. The Wisdom poem and the consolation (3:9–5:9) likewise carry the texture of Hebrew verse beneath the Greek; David G. Burke reconstructed a plausible underlying Hebrew of these chapters line by line, recovering the parallelism the translation had flattened. No Hebrew manuscript of Baruch survives — the reconstructions are scholarly recoveries, not finds — but the weight of the evidence is that the book was composed in Hebrew and read by the Hellenistic world in Greek.

Dating: a borrowed century

The traditional ascription places these words in the sixth century BCE, in the generation of the exile — the lifetime of Baruch ben Neriah. Scholarship reads the attribution as pseudonymous; writing under the name of a revered ancient figure was an accepted practice in the literature of the apocrypha and the pseudepigrapha, a way of placing new words within an old and authoritative voice rather than a forgery in the modern sense. On internal grounds the book is dated considerably later. Its language is assembled out of the prophets and the wisdom literature; the penitential prayer leans on Daniel 9, itself a work of the second century; the consolation echoes the late prophetic consolations. The several parts need not be of one date — the prose and prayer may be older than the poems, or the reverse — but the gathered book is generally set in the Hellenistic period, with much scholarship placing its composition or final assembly in the second century BCE. Odil Hannes Steck read the whole as a single late, deliberate work of citation: a book that says almost nothing new because saying nothing new is its method, a concentration of canonical scripture turned back on a community that needed to hear its own tradition rehearsed. On that view Baruch is less a report from Babylon than a meditation assembled out of older scriptural phrases, written for a much later exile under a much later empire and dressed in the costume of the first.

Transmission and the canon

From the Greek Bible the book passed into the Latin. The Old Testament of the Western church carried it among the prophets, set after Jeremiah and Lamentations, and in the Vulgate the Letter of Jeremiah — a separate composition, an anti-idol polemic in epistolary form — was appended as Baruch’s sixth chapter, where it has been printed ever since. In the Greek manuscripts the two remain distinct books, transmitted near one another but not merged. The attachment is a fact of the Latin tradition, not of the texts themselves; the Letter is its own work.

The differing judgments on the book’s status are old, and they sort along a line drawn before Baruch was itself a matter of dispute. The Greek-using fathers, Origen and Clement of Alexandria among them, read the books of the Greek Bible — Baruch with the rest — as scripture and cited them as such. Teachers formed in the Hebrew canon and familiar with its limits, from Julius Africanus to Jerome, set everything outside that canon to one side; Jerome called such books apocryphal even as he translated the Bible. A third, middle judgment held that the books were not of the first rank yet were worth reading in the church for the instruction of life and manners — the designation “ecclesiastical,” recorded first in Rufinus around the turn of the fifth century. The Latin West, following Augustine and the councils at which he sat — Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397 — treated the books as scripture, and the Council of Trent in 1546 fixed that treatment as dogma, declaring the books canonical “with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate.” The Eastern churches keep Baruch in the Greek Bible they inherited. The Protestant reformers held to the Hebrew canon and gathered Baruch with the other excluded books into a separate Apocrypha — read, in the words of the Church of England’s Sixth Article, for example of life and instruction of manners, but not for the establishing of doctrine. Judaism, holding the Hebrew Bible’s count of books, never received it. Each tradition’s verdict follows from where it draws the canon’s edge; the book’s place is not one thing but several, fixed differently in each communion that handles it.

Scholarship and editions

The standard older English edition is the one prepared under R. H. Charles in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913), where O. C. Whitehouse translated and annotated “1 Baruch” with a full critical introduction; the volume is in the public domain, and the hosted text carries Charles’s general introduction to the Apocrypha — its account of the Trent canon, the Hippo and Carthage precedents, and the Africanus–Origen controversy over the Hebrew limit of scripture. The Greek text is edited in the Göttingen Septuagint; for English readers the New English Translation of the Septuagint renders Barouch with a scholarly introduction (NETS). The two textual problems that have drawn the most work are the Hebrew behind the Greek and the relation of the Greek to that of Jeremiah: Emanuel Tov’s The Septuagint Translation of Jeremiah and Baruch (1976) argued that Baruch 1:1–3:8 shares the revising hand of the Greek of Jeremiah 29–52, and David G. Burke’s The Poetry of Baruch (1982) reconstructed the lost Hebrew of 3:9–5:9. Odil Hannes Steck’s Das apokryphe Baruchbuch (1993) reframed the whole as a unified late composition built by the deliberate concentration of canonical tradition. The article in the Jewish Encyclopedia gives the view from the tradition that set the book outside its canon, and the catholic-resources overview of the deuterocanon gives the view from the tradition that kept it within.

What the book holds

What the differing judgments on the book amount to is a question about where its authority lies. For the communities that received it as canonical, Baruch extends the prophetic record of the exile and carries its lesson: that the disaster fell justly, that Wisdom and the Law are one, and that the same God who scattered Israel would gather her again. For the traditions that set it aside, its late and derivative character was reason enough to leave it outside the fixed canon while still valuing it. The text itself makes no large claim for its own status. It speaks in a borrowed voice, from a fixed disaster, toward a promised return.

→ In the library: Charles (ed.) — Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Sirach · Book Of Tobit · Book Of Haggai · Book Of Habakkuk · Letter Of Jeremiah · Jeremiah · Daniel · Apocrypha · Second Temple Judaism · Book Of Wisdom · Hellenistic Period · Babylon · Old Testament · Psalms Of Solomon