Letter of Jeremiah

← Encyclopedia

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. It is the briefest sustained polemic of its kind to survive from the Greek-speaking diaspora, and one of the most single-minded — a work that turns its entire force on one proposition and refuses to let it go.

A letter with a frame and almost no narrative

The opening verse supplies the fiction that holds the whole together. Jeremiah, it announces, writes to those about to be led captive into Babylon, to tell them what they will see there and how they are to bear it. The horizon set is the deportation of Judah after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE — the catastrophe that frames the prophetic book named for Jeremiah and the larger book of Baruch to which this Letter is appended. A second figure is named in the frame as well: the exile is said to last a great span of years, given in the text as seven generations, after which God will bring the people home. That number is the Letter’s one gesture toward the chronology of the exile, and it governs nothing that follows. Once the captives have been told why they will see gods of silver and gold and wood carried on shoulders through the streets of Babylon, the frame falls away and the argument begins. There is no story, no journey, no second scene. What follows is a wall of denunciation, returning again and again to a single refrain.

The argument: a catalog of helplessness

The case the Letter builds is not abstract. It is a forensic inventory of the cult statue, taken apart piece by piece, and its method is to describe the idol so exactly that the description becomes the refutation.

The idols of Babylon are wood overlaid with silver and gold, the work of carpenters and goldsmiths — fashioned, the Letter insists, by the same hands that could as easily have made something else. They are dressed like men, robed in purple, crowned, given scepters as a human judge is given a staff; and yet they cannot hold what is put in their hands. Their tongues are smoothed by the craftsman, but they do not speak. Set in their shrines, they cannot move: when they are carried in procession they must be carried, because their feet do not walk, and if one falls it cannot right itself. Food is set before them and they do not eat; the smoke of the temple lamps blackens their faces; bats, swallows, and birds settle on their heads and bodies, and cats walk over them. They cannot see a thief who strips the gold and silver from them, nor feel the wound when their ornaments are taken. They cannot set up or depose a king, cannot give riches or copper coin, cannot bless a marriage or hear a vow, cannot deliver anyone from death or rescue the weak from the strong, cannot restore sight to the blind or aid anyone in distress. They cannot even save themselves: rust and corrosion eat the metal, fire consumes the wood beneath the plating, and the priests who tend them must guard the shrines against thieves who would rob the gods themselves.

The priests come in for their own indictment. They steal from the offerings and spend what is dedicated; their wives salt away portions of the sacrifice while giving nothing to the poor or the helpless; women in ritual states forbidden to touch the holy nonetheless handle the gods without consequence, because there is nothing holy to defile. Through the whole catalog runs the recurring refrain — that such things are no gods, and are not to be feared. The verse divisions vary across the manuscript tradition, but the refrain is the structural spine of the piece, dividing the inventory into a series of movements, each one returning to the same verdict by a slightly different road: since they cannot do this, do not call them gods; since they cannot do that, do not fear them. The rhetorical force lies in the accumulation — image after image of the helplessness of objects asked to act like deities, until the conclusion seems less argued than simply exposed.

The Letter sharpens the point with a series of comparisons drawn from ordinary life. A scarecrow in a cucumber field guards nothing, and the gods of Babylon are like it. A broken pot is more useful than they are; a door that keeps what is behind it safe does more than they do; a king who shows his power is better than a false god who cannot. Even the sun, the moon, and the stars are obedient and shine when they are sent, and fire and wind and cloud do the work assigned them — all of which makes the dumb, immobile idol look the more absurd by contrast with a created order that at least performs its task. The closing comparison is the bluntest: a person of integrity who owns no idol stands beyond the reach of disgrace, where the worshipper of made gods will be put to shame.

Canon: one text, four placements

The Letter survives in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, and its place in the Old Testament has been settled differently by the communities that received it. In the Greek manuscript tradition it stands as an independent book, transmitted among the works associated with Jeremiah and his circle — typically near Lamentations and Baruch but not joined to them. When the Latin Bible took shape, the Letter was attached to Baruch as a sixth and final chapter, and in that form — Baruch chapter 6 — it entered the Latin Vulgate and the later Catholic Bible. The two great branches of historic Christianity hold it canonical: it is among the deuterocanonical books of the Catholic Church, affirmed at the Council of Trent in 1546, and it is canonical for the Eastern Orthodox churches, where it is counted among the anagignoskomena, the books appointed to be read.

The Jewish canon, fixed in Hebrew, does not include it; it was never part of the Tanakh. Most Protestant traditions, following the Reformers’ decision to limit the Old Testament to the books of the Hebrew canon, place it among the apocrypha — printed, in many older Bibles, in a section between the Testaments under the heading “The Epistle of Jeremiah” or “The Epistle of Jeremy,” read for instruction but not received as scripture proper. So a single short text occupies four positions at once: scripture as Baruch 6 for Catholics, scripture as a separate book for the Orthodox, apocrypha for most Protestants, and outside the canon entirely for Judaism. None of these placements turns on a different text; they turn on different rules for what a canon is and where its boundary falls.

Authorship, dating, and the language question

The internal claim of authorship is to Jeremiah himself. Scholarship reads the work instead as a later composition standing in his name — pseudonymity of a kind common in Jewish writing of the Hellenistic period, when attaching new material to a revered ancient figure was an accepted way of claiming a tradition rather than an attempt to deceive. The fiction had a scriptural warrant ready to hand: the prophetic book of Jeremiah records that the prophet actually did send a letter to the exiles in Babylon, telling them how to live in a foreign land, and the Letter borrows that established gesture and fills it with a different content.

Dating is uncertain and argued from indirect evidence, since the text mentions no datable event after the exile it pretends to address. The seven-generations span named in the opening has been read by some as a clue, since a similar figure appears in connection with the Babylonian and Persian periods, but the inference is loose. The firmest external fixed point is physical: a small Greek fragment of the Letter was recovered among the manuscripts found at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, in a copy datable on paleographic grounds to roughly the turn of the first century BCE. That fragment shows the work already in circulation, in Greek, by then, which sets a lower limit; many scholars place the composition itself appreciably earlier, in the third or second century BCE, on grounds of language and the kind of diaspora setting the polemic presupposes.

Whether the Greek translates a lost Semitic original or was composed in Greek from the start remains an open question. Some have argued from awkward turns in the Greek and from suspected mistranslations that a Hebrew or Aramaic original once stood behind it; others read the Greek as competent in its own right and find no need for a Semitic source. The evidence does not force the case either way, and the Letter is sometimes cited as the clearest small example of how hard it can be, for a short Hellenistic-Jewish text, to tell a translation from an original.

The polemic and its inheritance

The argument 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 fell a tree, burn half of it for warmth, cook a meal over the coals, and then bow down to the carved remainder and call it a god — the absurdity, made plain, of praying to what one’s own hands have shaped. That polemic against the made god is older still than the prophets who sharpened it; it belongs to the long quarrel that monotheism carried into a world of image-cult, and it found in Babylon — with its great processional statues, its animal-worship and astral cult, its priesthoods serving Marduk and the gods of Babylonia — its most concentrated target. The Letter gathers the prophetic material into a single sustained form and applies it to a community living among the shrines of a foreign power, for whom the splendor of the Babylonian cult was a concrete temptation rather than an abstraction. On that reading it is less a treatise than a piece of pastoral reinforcement — a reminder, addressed to exiles, of what the surrounding magnificence was and was not. It belongs with the other works of the exile and diaspora that wrestle the same problem of how to live faithfully under foreign gods: the diaspora narrative of Tobit and the post-exilic retelling in 1 Esdras among them, all of it Second Temple literature.

Its later readers extended the same logic. Early Christian writers reused the anti-idol argument against the pagan cult statues of the Greco-Roman world, turning a Jewish polemic written against Babylonia into a weapon against the temples of the Mediterranean; the same catalog of senseless wood and unfeeling metal reappears in the Christian apologists who argued that the divine cannot be housed in something human hands have made. The Letter sits within a wider second- century body of anti-idol and figural argument that the early church absorbed, alongside such texts as the Epistle of Barnabas, and it became one of the standard ancient sources for the claim. The same suspicion of the carved divine image runs through the deuterocanonical and pseudepigraphic literature more broadly — the ordered, image-free reading of history in the Book of Jubilees belongs to the same world of concern — and it never left the tradition that produced it.

Texts and scholarship

The Letter has no separate critical tradition of its own; it travels in the editions of Baruch, the Septuagint apocrypha, and the deuterocanonical corpus.

The foundational English apparatus remains R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), where the Letter appears under the title “The Epistle of Jeremy,” translated and introduced by C. J. Ball; the two-volume work is in the public domain and is hosted in the library. A digital text of Charles’s edition is maintained at Wikisource. The Greek text is established in the Göttingen Septuaginta series, in Joseph Ziegler’s volume covering Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, and the Letter (Jeremias, Baruch, Threni, Epistula Jeremiae, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, first published 1957). The standard modern English commentary is Carey A. Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions, in the Anchor Bible series (Doubleday, 1977), which treats the Letter at length and surveys the dating and language debates. Bruce M. Metzger’s An Introduction to the Apocrypha (Oxford University Press, 1957) gives the most-cited short orientation to the work’s place among the deuterocanonical books; the relevant primary witnesses, including the Greek manuscript tradition and the Qumran fragment, are cataloged in the digital overview maintained by the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha.

The text says little of God directly; its whole weight falls on what the gods of the nations are not.

→ In the library: Charles (ed.) — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)

→ Related: 1 Esdras · Book Of Jubilees · Pentateuch · Animal Worship · Epistle Of Barnabas · Jeremiah · Book Of Baruch · Babylon · Babylonia · Hellenistic Period · Idolatry · Apocrypha · Deuterocanonical Books · Second Temple Judaism · Old Testament · Book Of Tobit