Jeremiah

← Encyclopedia

The Book of Jeremiah is one of the major prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, fifty-two chapters named for a prophet active in the kingdom of Judah from the late seventh century BCE through the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and its aftermath. It is the longest book in the prophetic canon, and the most internally various — poetry and prose, oracle and biography, public preaching and private complaint, bound together under a single name.

The book presents itself as the record of a man caught between his city and his calling. A priest’s son from Anathoth, a village in the territory of Benjamin a short walk north of the capital, he is drafted unwilling into prophecy — the opening chapter dates the summons to the thirteenth year of King Josiah, around 627 BCE — and protests that he is too young, only to be told the word is already in his mouth. He is sent to deliver prophecy of the bleakest kind — to warn Judah that its faithlessness and injustice would bring catastrophe down upon it, and forced across four decades to watch that catastrophe arrive: the first deportation of 597, the siege and burning of the city and its sanctuary in 587, and, after the murder of the governor Gedaliah whom Babylon had set over the remnant, forcible exile with the survivors who fled to Egypt rather than to Babylon, where the narrative leaves him.

Within the book stand passages, long called the confessions, in which the prophet turns on the God who summoned him — accusing, pleading, cursing the day of his birth, charging that he has been seduced and overpowered. Clustered in chapters eleven through twenty, these are nearer in form to the laments of the Psalter than to the confessions of any later devotional sense, the speech of a man who cannot stop speaking the word he was given and cannot bear what it costs him. That voice, raw and unresolved, is part of what has made the book so persistently read.

The vise of empires

The book is anchored to one of the most exactly datable disasters in the ancient record, and its oracles cannot be read apart from it. Jeremiah’s lifetime spans the collapse of one empire and the rise of another. He is called in the years when Assyria, which had held the region for a century, is failing; the young King Josiah uses the opening to push a sweeping religious reform and to recover a measure of independence for Judah. When Josiah dies at Megiddo confronting an Egyptian army marching to prop up the Assyrian remnant, the reform’s momentum dies with him, and Judah is left a small kingdom pinned between Egypt to the southwest and the new Babylonian power to the northeast. The remaining decades are a sequence of bets on the wrong patron. Jehoiakim, installed by Egypt, shifts allegiance to Babylon and then rebels; Nebuchadnezzar’s response brings the deportation of 597 and the carrying off of the young king Jehoiachin. Zedekiah, the last king, set on the throne as a Babylonian client, is pushed by a pro-Egyptian faction into a final, fatal revolt. Through all of it Jeremiah preaches a single, unwelcome line: that Babylon is the instrument of judgment, that resistance is futile and submission the only path to survival, and that the true betrayal is not surrender to Nebuchadnezzar but the long faithlessness that made the catastrophe deserved. To a court staking everything on Egyptian arms, this was sedition, and the book’s scenes of imprisonment and near-execution follow from it.

The man inside the book

The Jeremiah of the narrative is the most fully drawn of the prophets — not a voice only but a biography of opposition. He buys a field in his besieged hometown as a wager that life will return to the land; he wears a yoke through the streets to mime the submission he counsels; he is beaten and put in the stocks, thrown into a muddy cistern and left to sink, hauled before kings and mobs, accused of treason for telling a doomed city to surrender. The collision with royal power is staged most sharply in the thirty-sixth chapter, where the prophet dictates a scroll of his oracles to his scribe, and King Jehoiakim, hearing it read column by column, cuts each piece away with a penknife and feeds it to the brazier until the whole is burned — whereupon the words are simply written out again, with more added. The episode reads as the book’s own account of how it came to be: a text that survives its own destruction by being rewritten, the burned scroll standing for everything in Judah that fire could not finally cancel.

That scribe, Baruch son of Neriah, recurs through the prose as Jeremiah’s amanuensis and companion, and an old line of scholarship made him the author of the book’s memoirs. Two clay sealings bearing the name of a scribe Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu surfaced on the antiquities market in the twentieth century and were once hailed as his actual signature; their authenticity is now seriously contested, with detailed technical studies arguing they are modern forgeries and others defending them, so that the most concrete trace of the man named in the text rests on disputed ground. What is not disputed is the Lachish letters — ostraca written in ink on potsherds, recovered from a Judahite fortress in the 1930s and dating to the very last months before the fall, in which an officer reports that the fire-signals of the neighboring towns have gone dark one by one. They are not the book, but they are the world the book describes, written in the same Hebrew at the same hour.

How much goes back to Jeremiah

How much of the text goes back to a historical Jeremiah is among the harder questions in biblical scholarship, and the modern form of the question begins with Bernhard Duhm’s commentary of 1901. Duhm held that only the poetic oracles could be the prophet’s own; the prose, he judged, came from later hands. Sigmund Mowinckel gave the analysis its classic shape, sorting the book into three kinds of material: the poetic oracles (his source A); the prose biography that speaks of the prophet in the third person, much of it concerning Baruch (source B); and a body of prose sermons cast in a distinctive cadence (source C). That third layer shares its idiom and its theology with the book of Deuteronomy and the historical books shaped in its spirit, and most scholars read it as the work of editors who recast Jeremiah’s memory in the language of the deuteronomistic movement — the same circle that read the fall of Judah as the wages of covenant-breaking. The poetic core, on this reading, belongs with the older prophetic tradition that Jeremiah inherited from the eighth-century figures — Amos and Hosea above all, whose images of an outraged justice and a spurned marriage echo through his oracles; the prose belongs with the later effort to make sense of the disaster they had foretold.

The fault line between the poetry and the prose has organized the field ever since, though its boundaries are drawn differently by every major commentator. Robert Carroll pressed the skeptical edge, treating the book largely as a literary and theological construction of the exilic and post-exilic community, the historical prophet all but unrecoverable beneath it. William McKane proposed that the book grew by accretion around small kernels of authentic material, a process he called a rolling corpus, in which each generation of scribes glossed and extended what it received. William Holladay and Jack Lundbom argued the other way, for a substantial Jeremianic core and a real connection between the prophet and the prose. The disagreement is not idle: it decides whether the book is the deposit of one harrowed life or the accumulated self-understanding of a people writing in his name, and the text supports the argument in both directions.

Two books under one name

A still sharper problem is textual, and it has no parallel of the same scale anywhere else in the canon: the book survives in two substantially different editions. The Greek of the Septuagint is roughly an eighth shorter than the traditional Hebrew — some two thousand seven hundred words absent, the equivalent of several chapters — and it arranges the material differently, most strikingly by placing the oracles against the foreign nations in the middle of the book, after the twenty-fifth chapter, where the Hebrew gathers them at the end. For a long time this looked like the ordinary freedom of a translator. The Dead Sea Scrolls ended that reading. Among the Qumran fragments, one Jeremiah manuscript follows the short, rearranged form of the Greek in Hebrew, while others follow the long form that became the Masoretic text — proof that both editions circulated, in the original language, side by side. The Greek is not a loose rendering of the Hebrew we have; it is a faithful rendering of a different and, most scholars now hold, an earlier Hebrew, which the longer edition expanded. For a stretch of its life, then, the Book of Jeremiah was not one book but two in circulation at once, and the version printed in most Bibles is the later and fuller of the pair.

The shape of the language

What the source critics divided, a reader hears as a difference of voice. The poetry is dense, image-driven, and often violent: Judah is a faithless wife, a wild vine gone to rot, a cracked cistern that holds no water; the coming army is a boiling pot tipped from the north, a lion out of the thicket, a hot wind off the desert. The book opens its case in the rhythms of a lawsuit, summoning heaven and earth as witnesses, and turns by stretches into pure dirge. Against this the prose moves at a different temperature — measured, repetitive, sermonic, returning again and again to the conditional logic of the covenant: if the people amend their ways, the disaster will be turned aside; because they did not, it came. Holding the two together is the book’s distinctive achievement and its distinctive puzzle. The confessions sit at the seam. In them the lawsuit form turns inward and the prophet, who has spent his oracles arraigning Judah before God, arraigns God in turn — demanding to know why the way of the wicked prospers, accusing the one who called him of having played him false, and receiving in answer not consolation but a harder commission. Nothing else in the prophetic books opens the cost of the vocation so far, and later readers from the desert monks to the modern theologians of protest have gone to these chapters for a language in which faith and accusation are not opposites.

A book held as scripture

Within the traditions that hold it as scripture the book has carried distinct weights. Judaism reads it among the Latter Prophets; the order preserved in the Babylonian Talmud places Jeremiah first among them, before Ezekiel and Isaiah, reasoning that the book of Kings ends in ruin and Jeremiah continues the theme. Rabbinic tradition also assigns him the Book of Lamentations over fallen Jerusalem, so that the prophet of the destruction becomes, by attribution, the mourner of it as well — a pairing modern scholarship treats as the work of later hands but which fixed Jeremiah in the liturgy as the voice of the ninth of Av, the fast for the burned Temple. The book also seeded a strand of hope that the later eschatology of Second Temple Judaism would develop far beyond its plain sense: the promise of seventy years for the exile, of return and replanting, of a righteous branch raised up for David, became raw material for the expectations of restoration — the book of Daniel would take Jeremiah’s seventy years and recompute them into a far longer schedule of the end that ran through the centuries after the prophet’s death and into the hopes that Christianity and rabbinic Jewish thought each inherited and recast.

Christianity drew on the book heavily, and on one passage above all. In the thirtieth through thirty-third chapters — the section called the Book of Consolation, where the threats give way to promise — stands the oracle of a new covenant: a day when the law will be written not on tablets but on the heart, when no one will need to teach his neighbor to know God, for all will know him, and their iniquity will be remembered no more. The New Testament takes this up directly; the Letter to the Hebrews quotes the passage in full, the longest single citation of the Hebrew scriptures anywhere in the Christian canon, and makes it the charter of the church’s claim to stand in a renewed relation to God. The Greek phrase for that covenant, kainē diathēkē, is the source of the name the church gave its own collection of writings — the New Testament itself is, etymologically, Jeremiah’s new covenant. Alongside the doctrine ran a figural reading of the prophet himself: the man who wept over the city, was rejected by his own, counseled a surrender that looked like betrayal, and was handed over to suffering for the word he carried, was read as a type of the suffering Christ. In both traditions Jeremiah stands as the figure of the one who tells an unwelcome truth and is hated for it.

Scholarship and the textual record

The critical study of Jeremiah is large in proportion to its difficulty. Bernhard Duhm’s Das Buch Jeremia (1901) opened the source-critical era; Sigmund Mowinckel’s Zur Komposition des Buches Jeremia (1914) gave the A–B–C analysis its lasting form. Among modern English commentaries the two fullest stand on opposite sides of the authenticity question: William L. Holladay’s two-volume Jeremiah in the Hermeneia series (1986, 1989) and Jack R. Lundbom’s three-volume Jeremiah in the Anchor Bible (1999–2004) both argue for close contact between book and prophet, while William McKane’s International Critical Commentary (1986) advances the rolling-corpus model and Robert P. Carroll’s volume in the Old Testament Library (1986) the most thoroughgoing skepticism. The textual divergence between the editions is the subject of Emanuel Tov’s work on the Greek and the Qumran witnesses, the study that did most to establish the short form as a separate and earlier edition rather than a translator’s abridgment. The primary text in Hebrew is edited in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia from the Leningrad Codex; an English rendering of the King James Version is available through the public-domain text at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, and the Greek of the Septuagint, in its shorter and rearranged form, in a bilingual edition at Septuagint Jeremiah.

What the book finally turns on is not a doctrine but a condition. It is a sustained account of a religion confronting the destruction of everything that had anchored it — temple, city, monarchy, land — and finding that the word it had been given survived the burning of all of them, written out again on a fresh scroll, promised at last to be written where no fire could reach it: on the heart.

→ Related: Isaiah · Ezekiel · Amos · Hosea · Book Of Joel · Book Of Malachi · Lamentations · Prophecy · Babylon · Second Temple Judaism