Jeremiah

Judaean prophet

• Born: c. 645 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Anathoth, Judaea (now in Palestine)
• Died: After 587 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Egypt

Though the people of Judaea failed to repent their ways despite Jeremiah’s warnings until catastrophe overwhelmed them, his prophecies remained to comfort later generations of the people of Judah and to stand as a symbol of renewal for all people.

Early Life

If Jeremiah (jehr-uh-MI-uh) was born about 645 (some authorities place the date later), he was born into a troubled world. Israel, the northern Jewish kingdom, had been utterly crushed by Assyria (though some of the people must have remained, for Jeremiah denounced their religious laxness), and Judah itself, under Manasseh, had accepted Assyrian overlordship. Perhaps with Assyrian encouragement, pagan cults had flourished alongside the worship of Yahweh—cults devoted to Baal and the “queen of heaven,” involving temple prostitution and even human sacrifice.

With the decay of Assyrian power, however, King Josiah (r. c. 639-c. 609) was able to institute drastic reforms, which were encouraged by the finding in 622 of the book of the law (some version of Deuteronomy). The reforms involved not only the suppression of the cults but also the centralization of the Lord’s worship in Jerusalem at the expense of local shrines, even those dedicated to the Lord. Presumably, Jeremiah supported these reforms, even though they meant the decline of the shrine of Anathoth, where he had been born into a priestly family, possibly descendants of Abiathar, a high priest who had been exiled from Jerusalem for an intrigue against Solomon. Jeremiah’s support of Josiah would explain the plots that the men of Anathoth directed against him. The gloomy tone of his prophecies even after the reforms could have been justified by the lingering existence of the cults, but he was also saddened by the empty ritualism that he observed and by the failure of the revival to promote social justice.

It was in this atmosphere, at any rate, that Jeremiah grew up. Some authorities date his appearance as a prophet in 627, amid an impending invasion by Scythian barbarians, which Jeremiah prophesied. Had no invasion taken place, his powers of prediction could have been called into question. Jeremiah, however, was no mere fortune-teller: He was a preacher calling his people to abandon paganism, to worship only the Lord, and to practice social justice. Though sometimes a prophecy of disaster was unconditional, it was often a threat of a punishment that could be averted by repentance, and sometimes it was a promise of restoration, however far in the future.

As for the prophet, his was a heavy burden, for he was commanded by the Lord to deliver a message that was usually unwelcome. It was perhaps for this reason that Jeremiah never married and that his prophecies express a troubled relationship to the Lord and to his fellow Judaeans: “Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? Wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail?”

Life’s Work

In about 609, Josiah died in battle against the Egyptians, and Jehoiakim succeeded him as an Egyptian vassal. Jeremiah found little reason to be satisfied with the new king, who allowed the cults to return and, at a time when his subjects had to pay onerous tribute to Egypt, built a new palace with forced labor: “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.” Jeremiah’s repeated denunciations of the social order (he prophesied that the king would be “buried with the burial of an ass”) once brought him in danger of his life, and on another occasion he was beaten and put into the stocks overnight.

Nevertheless, in 604, as the Babylonians were becoming an increasing menace to Judah, Jeremiah dictated to his disciple Baruch a kind of final warning, a scroll that Baruch read aloud in the Temple. When some of the king’s advisers had it read to him, Jehoiakim took a knife and hacked off bits as it was read and burned them. Jehoiakim temporarily accepted the overlordship of Babylon, but three years later, under his son Jehoiachin, Judah rebelled. After the fall of Jerusalem in 597, King Nebuchadnezzar II carried off an immense booty and a considerable number of the most prominent inhabitants. Zedekiah (r. 597-587) was permitted to take over the throne as a Babylonian vassal. Jeremiah, who had come to regard Nebuchadnezzar as the Lord’s instrument of punishment, persistently urged Judah to submit quietly to Babylonian rule. Zedekiah may have been inclined to accept Jeremiah’s advice, but he could not control his ministers, and a rival prophet, Hananiah, promised the downfall of Babylon and the return of the captives. In 589, revolt broke out, and by 588 Jerusalem was under siege.

During the siege, Jeremiah was in considerable danger as a traitor and threat to morale. In spite of the hostility of the people of Anathoth, he had exercised a kinsman’s right to redeem a piece of family land put up for sale there and had symbolically buried the dead against the time of restoration, when once again people should “buy fields for money, and subscribe evidences, and seal them, and take witnesses in the land of Benjamin.” When, during an interlude in the siege, he tried to go into the land of Benjamin, he was arrested and beaten as a deserter. When he urged the people to surrender, he was cast into a muddy pit and might have died if he had not been rescued by an Ethiopian eunuch, and he was thereafter kept in custody, though less rigorously, throughout the siege.

After Zedekiah, in accordance with the law, had “proclaimed liberty” to all the Hebrew slaves in Jerusalem, and their masters pretended to let them go and then reenslaved them, Jeremiah made an especially bitter prophecy:

Ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbor: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

The end came in 587. The city fell; Zedekiah was blinded and his sons and many nobles executed; the city was destroyed, and its surviving inhabitants were deported to Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar took care that Jeremiah was treated kindly, offering him a special place in Babylon. Jeremiah elected, however, to cast his lot with Gedaliah, a native prince who had been appointed governor of the remnant “of the poor of the people, that had nothing, in the land of Judah,” who had been left behind and given vineyards and fields. Some remnants of the army and the court and a number of other fugitives rallied to Gedaliah, but he was assassinated by diehards who regarded him as a turncoat. The survivors sought Jeremiah’s advice, and he urged them to remain and submit themselves to Babylon, and under no circumstances to go into Egypt, where they would die “by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence.” To Egypt they went nevertheless and carried Jeremiah with them. The last words of Jeremiah in Scripture are a report of his denunciation of some women who had sacrificed to the queen of heaven, but he had lost honor as a prophet, since the Lord had failed to save his people. According to one tradition, Jeremiah was stoned by the angry refugees.

Significance

In terms of immediate results, it would be easy to term Jeremiah’s life a failure. The prophecies against foreign states, which were made without promise of renewal, did indeed come true, though it needed no prophet to foresee them; the same is true of his prophecies against the northern kingdom of Israel. The reforms of Josiah apparently gave him imperfect satisfaction, for presumably the cults revived after Josiah’s death. In any case, the issue came to be overshadowed by Judah’s suicidal foreign policy, and Jeremiah suffered persecution and derision for urging more prudent behavior toward Babylon. When the survivors of the consequent disaster elected to flee to Egypt, Jeremiah was powerless to deter them, and in Egypt he suffered a final humiliation when the Jewish women revived the worship of the queen of heaven, saying that as long as they had worshiped her in Judaea, they had been “well, and saw no evil.” It is no wonder that “jeremiad” is a modern word for a dolorous tirade.

However, these original jeremiads are eloquent and beautiful (much of the text is in the form of Hebrew poetry), and even more impressive (though less lengthy) are the promises of restoration:

After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Perhaps inspired by these words, years later some of the exiles returned and, under Persian protection, established a state that observed the Deuteronomic code and endured until its destruction by the Romans. Still later, such passages were interpreted as announcing the coming of Jesus Christ.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter R. Exile and Restoration: A Study of Hebrew Thought in the Sixth Century B.C. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968. Ackroyd’s assumptions are that Old Testament prophecy is relevant to Christian theology, that the prophetic books should be viewed as a whole, and that this whole is unique and far-reaching in its influence.

Heschel, Abraham J. The Prophets. New York: Perennial, 2001. Attempts to attain an understanding of the prophet through analysis of his consciousness. This contrasts with an approach that either emphasizes supernatural truth or uses a psychological bias.

Perdue, Leo G., and Brian W. Kovacs, eds. A Prophet to the Nations: Essays in Jeremiah Studies. Winona Lake, Wis.: Eisenbrauns, 1984. An anthology representing the best modern scholarship on Jeremiah. Among the topics discussed are the date of the prophet’s call, the identity of the enemy from the north, textual problems, and the composition and development of the book.

Rosenberg, Joel. “Jeremiah and Ezekiel.” In The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Aside from comment on purely literary topics, this piece is chiefly valuable for making sense out of the confused chronology of the Book of Jeremiah. Includes valuable notes and bibliography.