Jeremiah: The Prophet They Thought I Was

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Jeremiah, a priest’s son from the village of Anathoth, dictated much of it to his scribe Baruch. Later editors arranged and expanded it.

When: Jeremiah prophesied from about 627 BC until after Jerusalem fell in 586 BC. The book was edited during and after the exile.

Where it fits: Jeremiah lived through the last forty years of the kingdom of Judah, the years told in 2 Kings 22 to 25, and saw Jerusalem fall in 586 BC.

Where I quote it: “A den of robbers” (Mark 11:17; Jeremiah 7:11). The new covenant (Luke 22:20; Jeremiah 31:31). When I asked who people said I was, some said Jeremiah (Matthew 16:14).

If you only read three chapters: Jeremiah 7, Jeremiah 22 and Jeremiah 31.

Words to Know

Temple sermon — the speech Jeremiah gave at the Temple gate, in chapter 7, that nearly got him killed.

Baruch — Jeremiah’s scribe, who wrote his words down, twice.

Yoke — the wooden bar on an ox’s neck. Jeremiah wore one through the streets.

New covenant — the promise in chapter 31 that God would write the law on people’s hearts.

The Book in Brief

Jeremiah gathers sermons, poems and stories from Jeremiah’s forty years as a prophet, from the reign of King Josiah until after Jerusalem fell. The chapters are not in time order.

In chapter 1, God calls Jeremiah, a priest’s son from the village of Anathoth. He says he is only a child and cannot speak. God touches his mouth and sends him anyway, with a warning of disaster coming from the north.

Chapters 2 to 20 are mostly sermons to Judah. God charges the people with leaving him for idols, like a wife who has gone off with other men, and warns that an enemy army is coming. In the Temple sermon of chapter 7, Jeremiah says the Temple will not save people who rob the poor. He is told never to marry. He watches a potter reshape spoiled clay, and he smashes a clay jar to show what will happen to Jerusalem. The priest Pashhur has him beaten and locked in the stocks, and the men of his own town plot to kill him. He complains to God, but he cannot stop speaking.

Chapters 21 to 29 are aimed at Judah’s kings and false prophets. Jeremiah condemns King Jehoiakim for building a palace with forced labor, and promises a righteous king to come. He wears a wooden yoke to tell the nations to serve Babylon, and the prophet Hananiah breaks it. After the first Judeans are marched off to Babylon, Jeremiah writes to them to build houses, plant gardens and seek the city’s peace.

Chapters 30 to 33 are full of hope. The exiles will come home, and God will make a new covenant and write his law on their hearts. Jeremiah, in prison while the Babylonians besiege Jerusalem, buys a field to show that people will again buy fields in the land.

Chapters 34 to 45 go back over the last years. The people free their slaves during the siege, then take them back. King Jehoiakim burns Jeremiah’s scroll, and Jeremiah has his scribe Baruch write it again. King Zedekiah asks Jeremiah’s advice in secret but will not follow it. Officials throw Jeremiah into a muddy cistern, and Ebed-melech, a court official from Ethiopia, pulls him out. In chapter 39, Jerusalem falls, and the Babylonians set Jeremiah free. The governor they appoint is murdered, and the survivors flee to Egypt, taking Jeremiah with them, though he told them not to go.

Chapters 46 to 51 are messages against foreign nations, from Egypt to Babylon, whose fall is foretold last. Chapter 52 ends the book by retelling the fall of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple, and the release of Judah’s exiled king from prison in Babylon.

When I asked my friends who people said I was, they told me: some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets (Matthew 16:14).

I understand why. Jeremiah stood in the Temple and told the people it would be destroyed. He wept over Jerusalem. He was arrested, beaten, and called a traitor. I did all of those things, and I quoted him while I did them.

The Temple sermon

In Jeremiah 7, God tells Jeremiah to stand at the gate of the Temple and speak to everyone coming in to worship.

Don’t trust in lying words, saying, ‘The LORD’s temple, the LORD’s temple, the LORD’s temple, are these.’ (Jeremiah 7:4).

The people believed that as long as the Temple stood, they were safe. Jeremiah told them the Temple would not save them. Then he told them what would:

If you thoroughly execute justice between a man and his neighbor; if you don’t oppress the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow, and don’t shed innocent blood in this place … then I will cause you to dwell in this place (Jeremiah 7:5–7).

And then: Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely … then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered,’ … Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? (Jeremiah 7:9–11).

Think about what a robbers’ den is. It is not where robbers rob. It is where they hide afterward, safe, before they go out and do it again. Jeremiah was saying that people were robbing the poor all week and then hiding in the Temple on the holy day.

When I overturned the tables in the Temple courts, I said, You have made it a den of robbers (Mark 11:17). Everyone who knew Jeremiah knew what came next in his sermon. God had destroyed the old shrine at Shiloh, and would do the same to this house (Jeremiah 7:12–14).

What it cost him

Jeremiah 26 tells what happened after that sermon. The priests and prophets seized him and said, You shall surely die! They brought him before the officials: This man is worthy of death; for he has prophesied against this city (Jeremiah 26:8, 11).

The officials refused to condemn him, and some of the elders spoke up for him. They remembered that a hundred years earlier, the prophet Micah had said the same thing about Jerusalem, and the king had listened instead of killing him (Jeremiah 26:17–19).

But the same chapter tells of another prophet, Uriah, who preached the same message. He fled to Egypt. The king sent men after him, brought him back and killed him with the sword (Jeremiah 26:20–23).

I preached in the Temple that week, and by the end of the week I was dead. Jeremiah lived. Uriah did not. Both stories were in my scriptures, and I knew them.

To know God

Jeremiah 22 has the clearest definition of knowing God that I know of.

Jeremiah attacks King Jehoiakim for building himself a grand palace with forced labor: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness … who uses his neighbor’s service without wages, and doesn’t give him his hire (Jeremiah 22:13).

Then he compares him to his father, the good king Josiah: Didn’t your father eat and drink, and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; so it was well, then. Wasn’t this to know me? says the LORD (Jeremiah 22:15–16).

To know God is to judge the cause of the poor. That is not my idea. It is Jeremiah’s.

The slaves who were freed and taken back

Jeremiah 34 is one of the bitterest stories in the scriptures.

While the Babylonians are besieging Jerusalem, King Zedekiah and the rich make a covenant to free their Hebrew slaves, as the Law required. They proclaim liberty, the Jubilee word. The slaves go free.

Then the Babylonian army pulls back for a while. And the owners take the slaves back (Jeremiah 34:8–11, 21–22; 37:5).

God’s answer through Jeremiah: You have not listened to me, to proclaim liberty, every man to his brother, and every man to his neighbor. Behold, I proclaim to you a liberty … to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine (Jeremiah 34:17).

They freed the slaves when they were frightened and took them back when they felt safe. The liberty they would not give, they received.

Go deeperThe Lachish letters

In 1935 diggers at Lachish, a Judean fortress southwest of Jerusalem, found pieces of broken pottery with writing in ink among the ashes of the city gate. Most were letters, written in Hebrew in the old Hebrew alphabet, to and from officers of Judah’s army. They date to about 590 BC, shortly before the Babylonians took the city.¹

The letters are short and often hard to read. One of them is from an officer at an outpost to his commander. He writes that they are watching for the fire signals of Lachish, as the commander ordered, because they cannot see the next town. The town is Azekah.¹

Compare Jeremiah 34:7. It says that while Babylon’s army was fighting against Jerusalem, it was also fighting against Lachish and against Azekah; for these alone remained of the cities of Judah as fortified cities (Jeremiah 34:7). Some scholars read the letter as a glimpse of that very moment, when a signal post could no longer see its neighbor’s fires. Others think the writer simply had no line of sight to Azekah.

These are not sacred writings. They are army mail, and they show how ordinary the world of the prophet was. The people in Jeremiah’s book could read and write, send orders, and wait anxiously for news.

The yoke

Jeremiah told Judah to submit to Babylon. To prove his point, he made a wooden yoke and wore it on his neck through the streets (Jeremiah 27:2). Another prophet, Hananiah, snatched it off and broke it, and prophesied that Babylon would fall within two years. Jeremiah came back with God’s answer: Hananiah had broken a wooden yoke only to forge an iron one in its place (Jeremiah 28:12–14).

He was called a traitor for this. He was beaten, put in the stocks, and thrown into a muddy cistern to die (Jeremiah 20:2; 38:6).

And the man who pulled him out of the cistern was Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian, a eunuch in the king’s house. He went to the king, pleaded for Jeremiah, and lowered old rags down so the ropes would not cut his arms (Jeremiah 38:7–13). A foreigner and a eunuch saved the prophet.

Fire in my bones

Jeremiah complains to God more than any other prophet. He tells the LORD, You have persuaded me, and I was persuaded (Jeremiah 20:7). He curses the day he was born (Jeremiah 20:14).

But he cannot stop. If I say, I will not make mention of him, or speak any more in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary with holding it in. I can’t (Jeremiah 20:9).

The scroll in the fire

In Jeremiah 36, Jeremiah dictates his prophecies to Baruch, and Baruch reads them aloud in the Temple. The scroll is brought to King Jehoiakim, who is sitting by a fire in his winter house.

As each few columns are read, the king cuts them off with a knife and throws them into the fire, until the whole scroll is gone (Jeremiah 36:23).

So Jeremiah dictates it all again, and many similar words were added to them (Jeremiah 36:32).

That tells you something about how my scriptures were made. Prophecy was spoken, written down, burned, rewritten and added to.

Go deeperBaruch the scribe, and the seals of a burnt archive

In Jeremiah’s day, a rolled document was tied with string and closed with a lump of clay pressed with the owner’s stone seal. When the document rotted or burned, the clay stayed behind, and fire baked it hard. Such lumps are called bullae.

In 1982 a team led by Yigal Shiloh, digging in the City of David, the oldest part of Jerusalem, found fifty-one of them in a building burned when the Babylonians destroyed the city in 586 BC. One reads, “Belonging to Gemaryahu son of Shaphan.”² In Jeremiah 36, Baruch reads the scroll aloud in the room of Gemariah the son of Shaphan, the scribe (Jeremiah 36:10). Both names were common, so no one can be sure it is the same man. But the seal comes from the last years of Judah, and from the fire that ended them.

Two more seals came from the antiquities market, so nobody knows exactly where they were found. One reads, “Belonging to Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe.” That is Baruch son of Neriah in the longer Hebrew form of his name. The other reads, “Belonging to Yerahme’el son of the king.” Jeremiah 36:26 names Jerahmeel the king’s son, whom the king sent to arrest Baruch and Jeremiah. The scholar who published them, Nahman Avigad, judged them genuine, partly because they are burned like the ones that were dug up. Some scholars stay cautious about any seal that was bought and not excavated.²

Whether or not these are the very men, the seals show the world the book describes: scribes, sealed papers, and a royal archive that burned with the city.

Two Jeremiahs

In fact, my people had two versions of this book. The Greek translation is about one-seventh shorter than the Hebrew, and its chapters are in a different order. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, both forms were found, in the same caves.³

In my lifetime, both versions were being read. Nobody thought the word of God had been lost because there were two.

Go deeperWhy the Greek Jeremiah is shorter

The Greek translation of Jeremiah was made by Jewish scholars in Egypt, in the last centuries before my day. Laid beside the Hebrew text we read now, it differs in three main ways.³

Order. In the Hebrew, the messages against foreign nations stand at the end of the book, in chapters 46 to 51. In the Greek they stand in the middle, after Jeremiah 25:13, and in a different order.

Length. Many small phrases are missing from the Greek. Where the Hebrew says “Jeremiah the prophet,” the Greek often says only “Jeremiah.” A larger piece is missing too: Jeremiah 33:14–26, with its promise that David’s family and the Levite priests would never come to an end.

Which came first? For a long time scholars supposed the Greek translator had cut the book down. Then Hebrew copies of the short form turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the translator was not cutting. He was translating a Hebrew Jeremiah that was already shorter. Most scholars now think the short form is the earlier edition, and the longer one a later expansion of it. A few still disagree.⁴

English Bibles follow the longer Hebrew. So most of them print what many scholars take to be the later edition of Jeremiah.

Seek the peace of the city

After the first deportation to Babylon, Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles.

He does not tell them to resist. He tells them to settle. Build houses and dwell in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit … 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 29:5–7).

Pray for Babylon. The city that had carried you off, and would soon burn your Temple. That was hard to hear.

You may know a verse from this letter on a graduation card: For I know the thoughts that I think toward you … thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11). It was said to a whole nation of refugees, and the verse just before it says they would wait seventy years (Jeremiah 29:10). Most of the people who first heard it would die in Babylon.

Go deeperWhat the exiles left behind in Babylon

Jeremiah told the exiles to build houses and plant gardens. Two sets of clay tablets show that they did.

The king and his sons. In the early 1900s German archaeologists digging at Babylon found nearly three hundred tablets listing rations from the royal storehouses, between about 595 and 570 BC. Four of them name “Yaukin, king of the land of Yahudu,” which is Jehoiachin, king of Judah, and his five sons.⁵ The Bible says that Jehoiachin was released from prison and given a daily allowance by the king of Babylon in the thirty-seventh year of his exile (Jeremiah 52:31–34). The tablets show him on the ration lists around 592 BC, years earlier, so many scholars think he was not in prison for his whole exile.

A town called Judah-town. In recent decades a large group of tablets has been published that came from a town called Al-Yahudu, “the town of Judah,” and villages nearby. They date from about 570 to 480 BC. They are business papers: land rentals, loans, taxes and marriage payments. Many of the people have Hebrew names that end in a form of God’s name. They show Judeans farming, renting land and paying taxes along the canals of Babylonia.⁶

The tablets tell us little about what these families believed. But they show people doing just what Jeremiah’s letter told them to do: settling in, raising families, and living in a city that was not theirs.

Buying a field in a war

While Jerusalem is under siege and Jeremiah is in prison, his cousin comes to him and offers to sell him the family field in Anathoth, which the Babylonian army is standing on.

Jeremiah buys it. He weighs out the silver, signs the deed in front of witnesses and has it sealed in a clay jar, that they may last many days (Jeremiah 32:14). Because, he says, Houses and fields and vineyards will yet again be bought in this land (Jeremiah 32:15).

That is what hope looked like for Jeremiah. Not a feeling. A deed in a jar, for land you cannot stand on.

The new covenant

Then, in Jeremiah 31, comes the promise my followers built on.

Behold, the days come … that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah … I will put my law in their inward parts, and I will write it in their heart. I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will no longer each teach his neighbor, and every man teach his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD;’ for they will all know me, from their least to their greatest (Jeremiah 31:31–34).

From their least to their greatest. No experts needed. No one standing between the people and God.

On the night before I died, I took the cup and said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you (Luke 22:20). The letter to the Hebrews later quotes Jeremiah’s whole promise, the longest quotation from my scriptures anywhere in the New Testament (Hebrews 8:8–12).

A mistaken name

One more thing, for honesty. When Matthew tells how Judas’s thirty pieces of silver were used to buy a potter’s field, he says it fulfilled that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet (Matthew 27:9). The words he quotes are mostly from Zechariah (Zechariah 11:12–13), perhaps blended with Jeremiah’s stories of the potter and the field.⁷

Check It Yourself

Look up: Jeremiah 7:1–15, then Mark 11:15–18.

You will find: the Temple sermon, and my use of it on the same Temple mount six hundred years later.

Then read Jeremiah 22:13–16. See what it means to know God.

The Short Version

• Jeremiah preached against trusting the Temple and called it a den of robbers. I said the same in the same place.
• He was nearly killed for it. Another prophet who said the same was killed.
• He said that to know God is to judge the cause of the poor.
• He told the exiles to seek the peace of Babylon, and bought a field in a war as an act of hope.
• His new covenant, written on the heart, is what I named over the cup on my last night.