Letter of Jeremiah

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The Letter of Jeremiah is a short deuterocanonical work, around seventy verses of Greek prose, written as a letter sent by the prophet Jeremiah to the Judeans on the eve of their deportation to Babylon. Almost the whole of it is a single sustained argument against idolatry: the gods of Babylon are made things, and a made thing cannot be a god.

The text is included in the Septuagint and stands as canonical scripture for the Catholic and Orthodox churches, where it is often printed as the sixth and final chapter of the book of Baruch; Protestant and Jewish traditions place it among the apocrypha, outside the canon proper. The internal claim of authorship is to Jeremiah himself, but the work is generally taken by scholarship as a later composition standing in his name, a common practice for Jewish writings of the Hellenistic period. Dating is uncertain and argued from indirect evidence; a small Greek fragment recovered at Qumran shows the text was in circulation by roughly the turn of the first century BCE, and many scholars set the composition appreciably earlier. Whether the Greek translates a lost Hebrew or Aramaic original, or was written in Greek from the start, remains an open question.

The argument itself is plain and relentless. The idols of Babylon are wood overlaid with silver and gold, shaped by craftsmen, dressed like men, carried because they cannot walk. They do not eat the food set before them; their faces blacken with the smoke of the temple; bats and birds settle on their heads. They cannot see a thief who strips their gold, cannot bless a king or curse an enemy, cannot save themselves from rust, fire, or rot. The priests who tend them are charged with theft and worse. A refrain returns through the whole: such things are no gods, and are not to be feared. The rhetorical force lies in the catalogue — image after image of the helplessness of objects asked to act like deities.

The polemic is not original to the work; it draws on a strand of mockery already present in the Hebrew prophets, where the same charge is laid against those who fashion an idol and then pray to what they have made. The Letter gathers that material into a concentrated form and applies it to a community living among the shrines of a foreign power, for whom the temptation was concrete rather than abstract. On that reading it is less a treatise than a piece of pastoral reinforcement — a reminder, addressed to exiles, of what the surrounding splendor was and was not.

Its later readers extended the same logic. Early Christian writers reused the argument against pagan cult statues, and the Letter became one of the standard ancient sources for the claim that the divine cannot be housed in something human hands have made. The text says little of God directly; its whole weight falls on what the gods of the nations are not.

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