Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah: Gods That Cannot Help the Widow

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Not Baruch, the scribe who wrote down Jeremiah’s words, and not Jeremiah. Baruch is at least two or three pieces by unknown writers, joined together. The Letter of Jeremiah is by another unknown writer.

When: Baruch probably in the 100s BC. The Letter perhaps as early as the 300s BC, and in any case before about 100 BC, the date of a Greek fragment of it found at Qumran.

Where it fits: Set in Babylon after Jerusalem burned in 586 BC (2 Kings 25), among the exiles Jeremiah wrote to (Jeremiah 29). Written for Jews living, centuries later, under foreign kings and among foreign gods.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Catholic Bibles and the 1611 King James print the Letter as chapter 6 of Baruch; Orthodox Bibles print it as a separate book. Protestant Bibles moved both to the Apocrypha.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Baruch’s long confession is close to Daniel’s prayer (Daniel 9). Its mountains made low come from Isaiah 40, as in Luke 3:5. The Letter’s mockery of idols grows out of Jeremiah 10.

How close it stays to me: Close in praying for the enemy king. Far in hoping to tread on his neck.

If you only read three chapters: Baruch 1, Baruch 3 and Baruch 6 (the Letter of Jeremiah).

Words to Know

Baruch — Jeremiah’s scribe and friend, the son of Neriah, who wrote Jeremiah’s words on a scroll (Jeremiah 36:4).

Exile — the years after 586 BC, when the people of Judah were carried off to Babylon.

Idol — a statue worshipped as a god, or as the home of one.

Confession — in this book, a prayer that names the sins of a whole people and asks God for mercy.

The Book in Brief

Baruch opens with Baruch, in Babylon, reading his book to the exiled king and the people. They weep, fast and pray, collect money, and send it to Jerusalem with a letter. The letter asks the people there to offer sacrifices, to pray for the life of Nebuchadnezzar and his son so that the exiles may live in peace under them, and to read aloud a confession that follows.

The confession, in chapters 1 to 3, admits that the people of Judah, their kings, priests and prophets have sinned and deserved their ruin, and begs God to remember his name and bring them home.

Chapters 3 and 4 hold a poem about wisdom. Where are the princes and the rich of the nations? Gone to the grave. No one could find wisdom by searching. God found it and gave it to Israel, and it is the book of God’s commandments, the law.

Chapters 4 and 5 are poems of comfort. Jerusalem speaks as a widowed mother who has lost her children, and then is told to take heart, take off her mourning, and watch her children come home from east and west.

The Letter of Jeremiah, chapter 6, claims to be a letter Jeremiah sent to the exiles before they left. It warns them that in Babylon they will see gods of silver, gold and wood carried in procession, and must not fear them. Over and over it shows that idols cannot speak, move, protect themselves, judge, or help anyone, and ends each section with the refrain that they are no gods.

They can save no man from death, neither deliver the weak from the mighty. They can’t restore a blind man to his sight, nor deliver any that is in distress. They can show no mercy to the widow, nor do good to the fatherless (Letter of Jeremiah 6:36–38).

That is the test. Not whether a god is made of gold, or whether its temple is grand, or how many people follow it in procession. Whether it delivers the weak from the mighty. Whether it shows mercy to the widow.

I gave sight to the blind. I stopped a funeral to give a widow back her son. When John’s disciples asked if I was the one, I told them to look: the blind receive their sight … the poor have good news preached to them (Matthew 11:5). It is the same test, and it is the right one.

This chapter is about two short books that were bound together: Baruch, and the Letter of Jeremiah.

A letter from the exiles

Baruch opens in Babylon, in the fifth year after the city burned (Baruch 1:2). The exiles hear Baruch’s book read, weep, and send money back to Jerusalem, with instructions.

One of them may surprise you. Pray for the life of Nabuchodonosor king of Babylon, and for the life of Baltasar his son (Baruch 1:11). Pray for the king who burned your Temple, so that we shall live under the shadow of Nabuchodonosor king of Babylon … and find favor in their sight (Baruch 1:12).

That comes from a real letter. Jeremiah wrote to the exiles: Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the LORD for it; for in its peace you will have peace (Jeremiah 29:7).

I went further. I said pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you (Matthew 5:44). Not only for the peace of the city, so that you can live quietly. For the enemy himself.

Notice one small thing. Baruch calls Belshazzar the son of Nebuchadnezzar. So does the book of Daniel (Daniel 5:2). In fact he was the son of a later king, Nabonidus. A writer in Baruch’s own time would not have made that mistake. A writer centuries later, who knew the story from Daniel, would.¹

We have sinned

The longest part of Baruch is a confession, meant to be read aloud on holy days. To the Lord our God belongs righteousness, but to us confusion of face … to our kings, and to our princes, and to our priests, and to our prophets, and to our fathers: for that we have sinned before the Lord (Baruch 1:15–17).

If it sounds familiar, it is because it follows, almost line by line, the prayer of Daniel in your Bible (Daniel 9:4–19). One borrowed from the other, or both from an older prayer used in worship.¹

I want you to notice whom it names: kings, princes, priests and prophets. Not only the people. The ruin of Jerusalem is laid first at the feet of the men who led it. That is how the prophets always spoke. It is also how I spoke in the Temple.

Go deeperWho wrote Baruch?

The book says Baruch wrote it in Babylon. But the book of Jeremiah never puts its Baruch in Babylon. After Jerusalem fell, he and Jeremiah were taken the other way, to Egypt (Jeremiah 43:6–7), and that is the last we hear of him.

Most scholars think the book was put together in the 100s BC from two or three separate pieces. The prose opening and the confession, which follows Daniel 9, come first. The poem about wisdom in the middle is in a different style, and builds on Job 28 and on the praise of the law in Sirach 24. The closing poems of comfort have close parallels with a collection called the Psalms of Solomon, written in the century before my birth.²

The confession may first have been written in Hebrew; the poems may have been Greek from the start. No Hebrew copy survives, and none of Baruch was found at Qumran.

Christian writers loved one line of the wisdom poem. After saying that God gave wisdom to Israel, it says: Afterward did she appear upon earth, and was conversant with men (Baruch 3:37). In the Greek and Latin it can be read as he appeared, and from early times Christian writers read it as a prophecy that God would come to earth as a man. The bishop Cyprian of Carthage, around 250, quoted it in a list of proofs about me, as words of Jeremiah.² In its place, the poem means wisdom, given to Israel in the law.

Where are the princes?

The wisdom poem in chapter 3 asks a question I like.

Where are the princes of the heathen … and those who hoarded up silver and gold, wherein men trust; and of whose getting there is no end? … they are vanished and gone down to the grave, and others are come up in their steads (Baruch 3:16–19).

All the people who piled up gold with no end to their getting are gone. Others have taken their place, and they will be gone too.

That is the whole wisdom of the rich fool, said as a question. The answer the poem gives is that wisdom cannot be bought or dug up. God gives it, and he gave it to his people as the book of the commandments of God (Baruch 4:1).

Gods with dust in their eyes

Chapter 6, the Letter of Jeremiah, is the funniest thing in this volume. It is a satire. It goes after the gods of Babylon one embarrassing detail at a time.

Their priests bar the temple doors with locks lest they be carried off by robbers (Letter of Jeremiah 6:18). A god that has to be locked up so it is not stolen.

When they be set up in the temples their eyes be full of dust through the feet of those who come in (Letter of Jeremiah 6:17). Upon their bodies and heads alight bats, swallows, and birds; and in like manner the cats also (Letter of Jeremiah 6:22). If one falls over, they can’t rise up again of themselves (Letter of Jeremiah 6:27).

The prophet Jeremiah had already mocked idols as like a palm tree, of turned work that don’t speak and must be carried (Jeremiah 10:5). This letter takes that one verse and runs a whole chapter with it.

Then it gets serious.

The priests who keep the offerings

The letter is not only laughing at statues. It is watching the men who serve them.

Sometimes also the priests convey from their gods gold and silver, and bestow it upon themselves (Letter of Jeremiah 6:10). The priests take the clothes off the gods and clothe their wives and children withal (Letter of Jeremiah 6:33). And this: the things that are sacrificed to them, their priests sell and spend … but to the poor and to the impotent will they give nothing thereof (Letter of Jeremiah 6:28).

That is the real target. A temple where the gifts given to God end up in the priests’ houses, and nothing reaches the poor.

The writer meant the temples of Babylon. I saw the same thing in the Temple of my own God. I watched a poor widow put in her last two coins, in a Temple run by men who, I said, devour widows’ houses (Mark 12:40). I turned over the tables of the men who sold the offerings. A temple of any god, including the true one, can become a place where the gifts of the poor feed the priests.

Go deeperA scrap of the Letter in Greek at Qumran

Cave 7 at Qumran is unusual. All of the scraps found in it are in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic. One of them, numbered 7Q2, is a small piece of papyrus with a few words on it. Scholars identified it as part of the Letter of Jeremiah, verses 43 and 44 in the numbering of the Greek.³

That matters in two ways. First, it shows that the Letter was being read in Greek by about 100 BC, the date given to the handwriting. Second, it shows that the community that kept the Dead Sea Scrolls, or someone who left books in their caves, owned this little satire on idols alongside the books of your Bible.

The Letter itself may be much older. Its descriptions of processions of gods carried on men’s shoulders, and of gods locked in their temples against robbers, fit Babylon in the 500s and 400s BC. Some scholars date it as early as 300 BC.³

Notice also how the books were bound. In the Greek Bible, the Letter of Jeremiah was a separate little book, placed after Lamentations. In the Latin Bible, it was attached to the end of Baruch as its sixth chapter. That is why Catholic Bibles and the King James Apocrypha call it Baruch 6, and Orthodox Bibles call it the Letter of Jeremiah.

Where Baruch and I part

The poems of comfort at the end of Baruch are beautiful. Jerusalem is told, Put off, O Jerusalem, the garment of your mourning (Baruch 5:1), and to watch her children carried home as on a royal throne, with every high mountain made low and every valley filled (Baruch 5:6–7). You have heard that in the preaching of John the Baptizer (Luke 3:5).

But in the middle of the comfort is this: your enemy has persecuted you; but shortly you shall see his destruction, and shall tread upon their necks (Baruch 4:25).

The same book that told the exiles to pray for the life of Nebuchadnezzar promises them they will stand on his people’s necks. I understand both feelings. People who have been dragged from their homes want to see their captors brought low.

But I did not promise my followers they would stand on anyone’s neck. I said whoever humbles himself will be exalted (Luke 14:11), and I went to my death praying for the men who killed me.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Letter of Jeremiah 6:28 and 6:36–38 (or Baruch 6 in your Bible).

You will find: priests who keep the offerings and give nothing to the poor, and gods who can show no mercy to the widow, nor do good to the fatherless.

Then read Baruch 1:11–12 beside Jeremiah 29:7 and Matthew 5:44, and Baruch 4:25.

The Short Version

• Baruch is two or three pieces written in Baruch’s name, probably in the 100s BC. The Letter of Jeremiah is a separate satire, printed as Baruch 6 in many Bibles.
• Baruch tells the exiles to pray for the life of the king who burned their Temple, as Jeremiah told them to seek the peace of the city.
• Its confession lays the ruin of Jerusalem first on kings, princes, priests and prophets.
• The Letter mocks gods with dust in their eyes and bats on their heads, and priests who keep the offerings and give nothing to the poor.
• Its test of a false god is mine: it cannot help the widow. Its hope to tread on the enemy’s neck is not.