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 book is not one composition but a small anthology under a single name. It opens in prose, with a scene by the river in Babylon: the exiles, having heard Baruch read, send money and a confession back to Jerusalem and ask that prayers be made for them. There follows a long penitential prayer admitting that the catastrophe was deserved. The mood then changes. A poem in praise of Wisdom identifies her with the Law given to Israel, declaring that the path to understanding was entrusted to one people and not found by the nations or their sages. The closing section is a poem of consolation addressed to Jerusalem herself, personified as a bereaved mother promised the return of her scattered children.

The traditional ascription places these words in the sixth century BCE, in the generation of the exile. Scholarship reads the attribution as pseudonymous — writing under the name of a revered ancient figure was an accepted practice — and dates the material considerably later, with most placing its composition in the Hellenistic period, perhaps the second century BCE. The book’s Greek bears marks of translation from Hebrew, at least in its earlier parts, and its language draws heavily on Jeremiah, Daniel, and the wisdom literature; it reads, in part, as a meditation assembled out of older scriptural phrases rather than a fresh report from Babylon.

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