Of all the prophets, Jeremiah is the one who conveys to us the most vivid sense of the man behind the words. For other prophets, we get at best a minimal notation of vocation (arborist, priest) and town of origin. However, Jeremiah, a priest from the town of Anathoth near Jerusalem who was active from the 620s B.C.E. until after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586, tells us a good deal about himself because of his continual anguish over his prophetic calling. Many episodes of his life, moreover, are reported in narrative detail, for the most part probably by his amanuensis Baruch son of Neriah.
This was a trying moment for anyone to bring what he imperatively felt was God’s word to the people of Israel. A century before the beginning of Jeremiah’s mission, the northern kingdom of Israel had been overwhelmed by Assyrian invaders. A large part of the population was deported to sundry locations elsewhere in the Assyrian empire—this was when the so-called ten lost tribes were “lost”—and all vestiges of national sovereignty in the area once governed by the northern kingdom were eradicated. The extirpation of the northern kingdom was a national catastrophe that haunted its southern counterpart throughout the century and more that followed, since—given powerful military threats from foreign powers (for the first part of this period, the principal threat continued to be Assyria, then superseded by Babylonia)—the fate that had overtaken Israel could easily overtake Judah as well. In some of his prophecies, Jeremiah harbors the hope of a restored Israel reunited with a restored Judah, but one may justly describe this as a utopian fantasy, because by the late seventh century B.C.E. and early in the next century there were no visible remnants of the kingdom of Israel that could serve as the ground for such a restoration.
The other major event that stamped a strong mark on Jeremiah’s prophecies was the sweeping religious reforms instigated by King Josiah beginning around 622 B.C.E. The playbook for these reforms was the text purportedly discovered during Josiah’s renovation of the Temple and referred to in the account of its discovery in Kings as “the book of teaching [torah],” which is to say, the Book of Deuteronomy. The virtually unanimous scholarly consensus is that the book in question, or at least its core, was actually composed at this time to provide a textual warrant for the Josianic reforms. Its agenda incorporated two main points, one cultic and the other a theologically driven theory of historical causation. The previous four Books of Moses had assumed the legitimacy of the worship of God of Israel throughout the land; Deuteronomy now insisted that the cult could be practiced only “in the place that I will choose,” which clearly meant Jerusalem. Sacrifice to YHWH on the “high places,” the rural shrines, was excoriated as sheer paganism. The exclusive centralization of the cult was thus associated with Deuteronomy’s persistent preoccupation with backsliding into paganism and with the notion that the worship of strange gods would lead directly to national disaster and exile as punishment for the people’s failure to honor the covenant with its God.
All this is translated into Jeremiah’s central message. While, like the other prophets, he on occasion castigates his audiences for egregious acts of social injustice and perversion of the legal system, his most repeated concern is with Judah’s whoring after strange gods (the sexual metaphor is often flaunted) and the devastation of the nation that it will inevitably bring about. The English language aptly coined the noun “jeremiad”—a “complaining tirade,” in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary—because so often Jeremiah’s prophecies are bitter denunciations of the people’s wayward behavior accompanied by dire predictions that this will lead to scorched earth for the kingdom of Judah and exile for its inhabitants.
This sort of message, delivered at a time when Babylonian forces (597 B.C.E. and again in 587–586) were besieging Jerusalem, could not have made Jeremiah a very popular figure. The priests of his hometown of Anathoth, according to his own account, threatened to kill him. Zedekiah, the reigning monarch, had the scroll of his prophecies burned. (Jeremiah would promptly direct Baruch to make another copy.) Jeremiah was imprisoned more than once; in Jerusalem, his captors cast him into a deep, dried-up cistern with muck at the bottom, in the clear intention of leaving him there to die.
Against this background, one readily understands that Jeremiah saw his prophetic mission as a source of unending personal torment. Several of the prophets, beginning with Moses himself, express a sense of unworthiness to take up the prophetic calling. Thus Jeremiah: “Alas, O Master, LORD, / for, look, I know not how to speak, / for I am but a lad.” (1:6). The reasonable inference is that Jeremiah was quite young when he first received the call, but in contrast to other prophets, tormented reluctance persists throughout his career. If at first he felt unworthy for the task, as he goes on to carry it out, subjected to vilification, death threats, and imprisonment, he repeatedly wishes he could free himself from the burden of prophecy; nevertheless, the searing consciousness that God demands it of him will not allow him to relinquish the prophetic role. The most striking expression of this dilemma is the great poem in chapter 20 that begins, “You have enticed me, O LORD, and I was enticed. / You are stronger than I, and You prevailed,” and goes on to say, memorably, “I thought, ‘I will not recall Him, / nor will I speak anymore in His name.’ / But it was in my heart like burning fire / shut up in my bones.” Jeremiah figures as a kind of prisoner of conscience: he is acutely aware that conveying his message of scathing castigation and impending doom at the very moment the Babylonian army is descending on Jerusalem will bring him nothing but humiliation and angry rejection, yet he feels he has no alternative other than to tell his people the bitter truth.
The lines in chapter 20 evoking Jeremiah’s anguish over his prophetic calling are great poetry, and there are other strong and moving poems in the book. It must be said, however, that as a poet he does not exhibit a great deal of either the verbal virtuosity of Isaiah son of Amoz or the metaphoric brilliance of Second Isaiah. He is so intently focused on the message that artful articulation of the medium often seems less of a concern for him. Many of the poems use stereotypical phrases, and a considerable portion of the prophecies is delivered in prose. The prose seems especially prone to formulaic wording and to repetition, both within a single prophecy and between one prophecy and another. Jeremiah, like the other prophets, certainly exhibits a gift for elevated speech: it is the case for all the prophets that rhetorical power is inescapably part of effectively reporting the words of God to their audiences. But, by and large, one comes away from the collection of Jeremiah’s prophecies not with a sense of deftly wrought verbal artifacts but rather with the existential and historical urgency of this particular prophet. Dark clouds of disaster lower over the kingdom of Judah. In Jeremiah’s understanding, the disaster cannot be averted, for it is the ineluctable consequence of the people’s violation of its covenant with God, its reckless infatuation with the gods and goddesses of a pagan cult, and the commission of acts of promiscuity and even human sacrifice entailed by that cult.
Politics is deeply implicated in this prophetic stance. The idea that Judah can parry the Babylonian threat by an alliance with Egypt is, in Jeremiah’s eyes, a hopeless delusion. (This would prove to be an accurate political judgment.) The devastation of its towns, the exile of many of its inhabitants—the grim message that Jeremiah’s countrymen did not want to hear—will surely come, and very soon. As a counterpoint, Jeremiah is also able to envisage a time when Babylonia itself will be destroyed and the people of Judah once more settled in peace and prosperity in its land. God would establish, in Jeremiah’s pregnant phrase, a “new covenant” with His people. That upbeat message was dictated by an underlying theological assumption on the part of this harbinger of doom that, although God chastises Israel, His commitment to His people is for all time. But the vision of a radiant future remains a secondary emphasis in the somber prophecies of Jeremiah. The grand expression of such a vision would come a few decades after Jeremiah’s lifetime in the poetry of the anonymous poet of the Babylonian exile whom scholars call Second Isaiah.