Jeremiahchapter 45
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Speaks with:Jeremiah 36×22 Corinthians 4×2Jeremiah 32×1Mark 16×12 Corinthians 1×12 Corinthians 7×1
Summary
Chapter summary
A short private word, dated back to the year Baruch wrote the first scroll, and placed here like a postscript to a scribe's whole career. Baruch had said, Woe is me now, for Jehovah hath added sorrow to my pain; I am weary with my groaning and find no rest. God answers first with his own grief (what I have built I am breaking down, what I have planted I am plucking up, this whole land) and then with a question that has steadied ambitious servants ever since: 'Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not.' Evil is coming upon all flesh; but in every place Baruch goes, his life will be given him for a prey.
Context
Prophecy · Jeremiah — Jeremiah overview
- A. 1–3 Baruch's Complaint: Woe Is Me Now, I Find No Rest
- B. 4–5 Seek Not Great Things for Thyself: Thy Life as a Prize
The outline
A.Baruch's Complaint: Woe Is Me Now, I Find No Restvv. 1 to 3
Read vv. 1 to 3 →B.Seek Not Great Things for Thyself: Thy Life as a Prizevv. 4 to 5
Read vv. 4 to 5 →
The world behind this chapter
Jeremiah 45The history
This is the shortest chapter in the book and it is addressed to one person. Baruch son of Neriah has just written a scroll from dictation covering twenty-three years of preaching, and the year is the year of Carchemish, when Babylon became the power that would end his country.
Baruch came from a family of standing. His brother Seraiah served as a senior officer in Zedekiah's court, which suggests a scribal family close to government — and makes his choice of employer look like a career thrown away.
His complaint is quoted: woe is me, for the LORD has added sorrow to my pain; I am weary with my groaning and I find no rest. That is a man who has spent weeks writing out the destruction of everything he knows.
The answer is bracing rather than soothing. What I have built I am breaking down, and what I have planted I am plucking up — that is, the whole land — and do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them. The one promise given is that his life will be given to him as a prize of war, the phrase used for what a soldier walks away with when everything else is lost.
What it meant to them
The first readers of this chapter had it placed here, at the close of the Jeremiah narrative, as a kind of signature. The assistant gets his own oracle in the book he wrote.
The word to him is the one every ordinary person in a collapsing country needed. In a season when God is pulling down what he built, ambition is the wrong instrument. Your life, kept, is the whole of the promise — and it is enough.
Sources cited
- John Bright, Jeremiah (Anchor Bible)
- Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: Jeremiah
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Jeremiah 45. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.