Jeremiah

Biography

Jeremiah was called in the thirteenth year of Josiah (627 BCE). He protested that he was "only a youth" but was sent to "pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant" (Jer 1:10). His forty-year ministry spanned the reigns of Josiah (the great reforming king), Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah. Jeremiah's central message was that Judah's covenant infidelity would lead to Babylonian conquest, exile, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. This message was politically treasonous and religiously heretical to his contemporaries, who held the temple's inviolability as axiomatic. Jeremiah was placed in the stocks, thrown into a cistern to die, imprisoned repeatedly, and finally taken against his will to Egypt after Jerusalem's fall. The book preserves Jeremiah's "confessions" — raw laments complaining to YHWH about the cost of prophetic calling, including the wish he had never been born. Yet he also delivers the most hopeful prophecy in the Old Testament: the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31:31-34, in which God will write his law on the heart, forgive sin, and establish intimate covenantal knowledge. This is the text Jesus invokes at the Last Supper (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25). Jeremiah also prophesied the seventy-year exile (Jer 25:11; 29:10) — the timeline Daniel later meditated on (Dan 9:2). His bought field at Anathoth (Jer 32) during the siege was a prophetic act of hope: houses and fields will again be bought in this land.