Jeremiah

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The Book of Jeremiah is one of the major prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, named for a prophet held to have been 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. It tells of a young man drafted unwilling into prophecy, sent to warn Judah that its faithlessness and injustice would bring catastrophe down upon it, and forced to watch that catastrophe arrive. Within it stand passages, long called the “confessions,” in which the prophet turns on the God who summoned him — accusing, pleading, wishing he had never been born. That voice, raw and unresolved, is part of what has made the book so persistently read.

How much of the text goes back to a historical Jeremiah is among the harder questions in biblical scholarship. The book reached its present form over a long period of editing; the prose narratives, which speak of the prophet in the third person and are often associated with a scribe named Baruch, differ in idiom and outlook from the poetic oracles. A still sharper problem is textual: the book survives in two substantially different editions. The Greek of the Septuagint is roughly an eighth shorter than the traditional Hebrew, and orders its material differently, and fragments from Qumran attest to both forms — so that “the Book of Jeremiah” was, for a time, not one book but two in circulation at once.

Within the traditions that hold it as scripture the book has carried distinct weights. Judaism reads it among the Latter Prophets and assigns Jeremiah, by tradition, the Book of Lamentations over fallen Jerusalem. Christianity drew on it heavily: its promise of a “new covenant” written on the heart was taken up in the New Testament and became one of the texts on which the early church built its self-understanding, and the suffering, rejected prophet was read as a figure foreshadowing Christ. In both, Jeremiah stands as the type of the man who tells an unwelcome truth and is hated for it.

What gives the book its later reach is less any single doctrine than its subject. It is a sustained account of a religion confronting the destruction of everything that had anchored it — temple, city, monarchy, land — and asking whether faith can survive the loss of its institutions. That question outlived its occasion, and the book has been returned to whenever the question has recurred.

→ Related: Isaiah · Ezekiel · Amos · Book Of Joel · Book Of Malachi