Jeremiah

Who Was Jeremiah?

Jeremiah was the most personally anguished of the Hebrew prophets — a man called to preach a message of judgment to a people who refused to hear it, who watched the destruction of everything he loved, and who recorded his suffering in language of such raw honesty that his name has given the English language the word “jeremiad.” Born into a priestly family in Anathoth, a village near Jerusalem, he received his prophetic call as a young man during the reign of King Josiah and continued his ministry through the reigns of four subsequent kings, ending with the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC and its aftermath.

The book of Jeremiah is the longest book in the Bible and one of the most formally complex — a combination of prophetic oracles, biographical narratives, and the extraordinary “confessions” or laments in which Jeremiah addresses God with a directness and a grief that have no parallel in prophetic literature. In these confessions he curses the day of his birth, accuses God of deceiving him, and demands to know why the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper — questions that the book does not resolve so much as hold in tension with the affirmation of God’s ultimate faithfulness.

The central theological contribution of the book is the prophecy of the New Covenant in chapter 31 — the promise that God will make a new covenant with his people, writing his law on their hearts rather than on tablets of stone, forgiving their iniquity, and knowing them directly. This prophecy is quoted more extensively in the New Testament than any other Old Testament text, and it is the framework within which the Letter to the Hebrews interprets the work of Christ.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Book of Jeremiah — c. 627–587 BC and later
• The Book of Lamentations — traditionally attributed to Jeremiah
• Jeremiah 31:31–34 — The New Covenant prophecy
• The Confessions of Jeremiah — 11:18–12:6; 15:10–21; 17:14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–18