Jeremiah1chapter 1

Anathoth was a village set aside for priests. Generations earlier Solomon had banished the priest Abiathar to his family land there, and the descendants of that line lived on in the village without ever serving at the altar in Jerusalem. Jeremiah grew up inside the priesthood and outside its power at the same time.

Josiah was on the throne, and his thirteenth year fell about five years before the discovery of the book of the Law in the temple that set off the great national cleanup. Assyria, the empire that had crushed the northern kingdom a century before, was collapsing. Everyone could feel that something was about to move; nobody yet knew which way.

Two small pictures carry the chapter. The first is an almond branch — the almond is the first tree in that country to wake up, blooming in late winter before anything else, and the Hebrew word for almond sounds almost exactly like the word for watching. The second is a cooking pot tilting away from the north, because armies never came from the east; the desert blocked that road, so invaders always swung up the Euphrates and came down on Judah from above.

God's answer to Jeremiah's protest that he is only a boy is military: a fortified city, an iron pillar, a bronze wall. Those were the three things a besieged town wanted most.