Jerry Hwang
Jeremiah
Overview
The book of Jeremiah is simultaneously perhaps the most compelling and the most confusing book of the OT. Contrary as these traits might seem, they reinforce one another in this book due to a marvelous combination of historical sweep, literary intensity, and theological surprises. The book’s unparalleled breadth comes not only from sheer length, though Jeremiah is indeed the longest book in Bible by word count.1 More than this, it is a “book of books” (cf. 25:13; 29:1; 30:2; 36:2; 45:1; 51:60, 63) that speaks to a series of different situations in the course of Judah’s last days. Covering a period of about fifty years, the prophet and his book move from the best days of the southern kingdom under King Josiah to its quick decline through several rounds of exile and finally the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. The book of Jeremiah also addresses the Jewish diaspora community’s struggle for survival as well as its return from exile, an event foreshadowed in the book’s final paragraph and its unexpected release of King Jehoiachin from a Babylonian prison (52:31–34). All told, the words of Jeremiah as a “prophet to the nations” (1:5; cf. 1:10) literally traverse the entire ancient Near East, from Babylon to Egypt and almost everywhere in between.
The many intricacies of Jeremiah’s message can often be oversimplified in efforts to make it more understandable and palatable, whether by scholars in the academy or by the person in the pew. For scholars, the standard view has been that Judah’s exile was a legal matter of punishment to fulfill the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 27–28. True as that may be, the book of Jeremiah subordinates such judicial facts to the relational pain of God in the agony of loving and hating his people at the same time (e.g., Jer. 3:1; 12:8; 31:3; 44:4). It is not merely the prophet who grieves deeply, as the famous paintings of Jeremiah by Michelangelo and Rembrandt might suggest. It is the God of Israel himself who also cries out in anguish,
Oh that my head were waters,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
that I might weep day and night
for the slain of the daughter of my people. (9:1)2
David Bosworth observes rightly, “Indeed, Yhwh weeps more often than Jeremiah does, and even Jeremiah’s tears embody the tears of Yhwh.”3
Similarly for the layman, the most familiar part of Jeremiah is undoubtedly Yahweh’s statement, “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (29:11). As of the end of 2018, Bible Gateway identified this verse as the year’s most frequently read on its website. Moreover, as Christianity Today observed,
Not only was Jeremiah 29:11 the most popular verse of the year [2018] on Bible Gateway, it also claimed the YouVersion top spot in countries in the developed West (Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom) and the Global South (Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates), spanning demographics in a way that other verses didn’t.4
It is unfortunate, though, that the common understanding of this verse as God’s promise to bring prosperity and blessing is nearly the opposite of what it meant for despondent Judean refugees in Babylon. The prophet who was the most strident in criticizing the prosperity theology of his time has ironically become its most vocal advocate in the hands of some modern interpreters!
By contrast to these tame and tamed readings, the book of Jeremiah is bracing in the best sense of the word. The fall of tiny Judah to mighty Babylon was not the demotion of Yahweh from a national deity to a regional deity, as those versed in that world of power politics might have thought. The book of Jeremiah declares instead that the defeat of Yahweh’s people demonstrates that he is, in fact, the incomparable King over all peoples:
There is none like you, O Lord;
you are great, and your name is great in might.
Who would not fear you, O King of the nations?
For this is your due;
for among all the wise ones of the nations
and in all their kingdoms
there is none like you. (10:6–7)
Not only does Yahweh rule the nations; he stands supreme over their gods and all their supposed domains as well:
But the Lord is the true God;
he is the living God and the everlasting King.
At his wrath the earth quakes,
and the nations cannot endure his indignation.
Thus you shall say to them: “The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.”
It is he who made the earth by his power,
who established the world by his wisdom,
and by his understanding stretched out the heavens. (10:10–12)
The fact that the verdict of verse 11 against other gods comes in the lingua franca of Aramaic, rather than Judah’s own language of Hebrew, ensures that the nations and their deities hear Yahweh’s claim to sovereignty over the whole world, even as his people lose their foothold in their own land. Such a daring assertion would have been unthinkably insulting to powerful empires and their patron deities. And it should have been welcome news to Judah, but the recalcitrant people of Yahweh responded by opposing the prophet Jeremiah rather than embracing him.
Title and Author
How did such an amazing book of the OT come to be? And who was Jeremiah? For the uniqueness of this prophetic word to speak on its own terms, we must reexamine the numerous traditions concerning the book of Jeremiah that can pose both a help and a hindrance to proper interpretation. Most readers approach Jeremiah not as a blank slate but with certain assumptions already formed about the prophet, which in turn inform their understanding of the book. The figure of “Jeremiah” has paradoxically become both larger and smaller than the prophet and the book bearing his name.
To begin with, modern people are accustomed to speaking of the “book of Jeremiah,” as if the prophet himself were responsible for the finished literary product in our hands. The book instead introduces itself as the “words of Jeremiah” (1:1). This is an allusion to the farewell orations of Moses that the opening verse of Deuteronomy summarizes as the “words that Moses spoke to all Israel” (Deut. 1:1). The book of Jeremiah does contain acts of writing, but it is usually Baruch, the friend of Jeremiah, who engages in these activities (Jer. 36:2–6, 17–18, 27–29; 45:1). Jeremiah is one who receives Yahweh’s speech or who himself speaks (e.g., 1:11; 7:1; 21:1; 25:1–2; 26:7) more than being one who writes (cf. 30:2). The description in chapter 51 of Seriah’s (brother of Baruch) participating in the process of transmitting Jeremiah’s words suggests that these two sons from the scribal family of Neriah play a significant role in preserving oral traditions on behalf of a prophet first imprisoned in Jerusalem and then taken to Egypt. Thus it is important for readers to think of Jeremiah more as a speaker of God’s words than as an author or writer. This reorientation is particularly necessary for hearing Jeremiah’s poetry as oral proclamations for the ear rather than literary compositions for the eye. That is, the book of Jeremiah is more oral and aural than written in nature, as is the Bible generally.5
Another tradition about Jeremiah to reconsider is the book’s position in English Bibles, which, following the Greek manuscript tradition, places Jeremiah between Isaiah and Lamentations. This canonical ordering means that Jeremiah is grouped with Isaiah, even though Isaiah dates from nearly a century prior, while being detached from Ezekiel, Jeremiah’s contemporary during the last days of Judah (though Ezekiel was in Babylon rather than Jerusalem). It is certainly not incorrect to read Isaiah and Jeremiah together as a historical progression, for these two prophets ministered in Jerusalem about a century apart. However, a closer look at Jeremiah will reveal that his prophecy is largely a response to misunderstandings of Isaiah that led to the presumption of God’s favor upon the Davidic monarchy and its chosen city of Zion. It is therefore crucial to recognize that Jeremiah is closer in its theological emphases to 1–2 Kings, Hosea, and Deuteronomy, even though these books are farther away in the Protestant canon than is Isaiah.
What, then, of Lamentations, the other book in the OT traditionally associated with Jeremiah? Although some English Bibles go as far as titling this book “Lamentations of Jeremiah” (e.g., NASB), it is an anonymous work that never mentions any prophet by name. This may be one reason the Hebrew Bible places Lamentations among the Writings (i.e., its third section) rather than among the Prophets (i.e., its second section). A connection between Jeremiah and Lamentations remains plausible, though, since one Jewish tradition (Talmud; Bava Batra 14b) also attributes Lamentations and 1–2 Kings to Jeremiah.
Coming closer to the book called Jeremiah, it is deeply ironic that the meaning of this name is at such odds with the downward trajectory of the prophet’s life. The Hebrew name literally means “May Yahweh exalt,” but no biblical figure other than Jesus himself in his earthly ministry was ever asked to stoop as low and suffer as much as was Jeremiah. The identification of Jeremiah as the “weeping prophet” whose characteristic lament is the jeremiad has a long and honored history in Christian interpretation. Even so, the first-person sections for which the prophet is best known (such as his “Confessions”; chs. 11–20) are distinctly in the minority. Third-person narratives about Jeremiah (such as those of chs. 7; 26; 36) are more common. This is not to say that the historical person of Jeremiah lies at an unbridgeable distance from the literary work called Jeremiah (as critical scholars often argue), only that the book as we now have it is an anthology of various oral and literary traditions connected to Jeremiah that Baruch and other scribes have compiled.
Indeed, the tendency to read Jeremiah as a flat text stands most at odds with the multitude of textures within the book. Such literary complexity is not only a challenge within the canonical form of Jeremiah, for the book itself is attested in multiple Hebrew and Greek versions that differ somewhat from one another. Each manuscript tradition was nevertheless authoritative for the Jewish communities in Palestine, Egypt, and Babylon that preserved the words of the prophet as sacred Scripture. Jeremiah diverges notably in this respect from other OT books for which scholarly speculation about the presence of literary layers or conflicting versions has no basis in actual manuscripts. Following the Reformers’ emphasis on the original languages of Scripture, the book of Jeremiah has been translated in the Protestant tradition from the ben Asher family of manuscripts that became the standard within Palestinian Judaism (known collectively as the MT). The present commentary on Jeremiah follows in these venerable footsteps since the ESV also derives from the same Hebrew manuscripts. It is significant, however, that the Greek manuscript tradition of Jeremiah (which the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses today) comes from a different stream of Judaism.
Below we will explore the theological implications of Jeremiah as a combination of multiple literary traditions. It is first necessary to trace the historical roots of such complexity as a response to the chaotic times in which the prophet Jeremiah ministered. Compellingly, the modern reader’s inclination to wonder about the nature of prophetic authority and the apparently conflicting traditions that originate with Jeremiah mirror closely the issues in the sixth-century-BC transition from the fall of Jerusalem to the rise of diaspora Judaism. The numerous “Jeremiahs” of tradition express the massive historical shifts at a most important crossroads of Israelite history.
Date and Occasion
The dynamism of Jeremiah’s prophetic word and ministry begins at a rather modest point in the history of Judah. The superscription to this book identifies Jeremiah’s first instance of receiving divine revelation as occurring during the “days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign” (1:2; cf. 25:3). This would have been 627 BC, about five years before the epoch-making revival that King Josiah initiated in Jerusalem when the priest Hilkiah rediscovered the Deuteronomic “Book of the Law” in the temple (2 Kings 22:8–20). Beginning around 622 BC, Josiah led Judah to put away pagan idols, priests, and customs while restoring the neglected observance of Passover (2 Kings 23:4–24). The reforms instituted by Josiah earned him great commendation: “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him” (2 Kings 23:25; cf. Deut. 6:5; 2 Kings 23:3). Josiah was truly the pinnacle of Israelite kingship, for David and Solomon were never described in such glowing spiritual terms even though Yahweh had blessed their physical kingdom to extend from the Euphrates to the edge of Egypt (1 Kings 4:21–24).
In light of such praise for Josiah in 2 Kings, it is surprising that the book of Jeremiah scarcely mentions him beyond the superscription, and always in retrospect from a time when Josiah was no longer king (e.g., Jer. 3:6; 22:11, 18; 25:1; 36:2). This silence about Josiah’s revival is especially puzzling given that Jeremiah’s oracles would clearly have supported Josiah’s agenda to turn an apostate people back to Yahweh. Although any solution to this riddle will be tentative,6 the balance of evidence indicates that the prophet remained mostly in the background while Josiah carried out his reforms (3:6; 25:3) but emerged reluctantly from obscurity (1:6; 20:18) when Jehoiakim quickly undid his father’s life work. The themes of Jeremiah’s preaching echo the measures taken in Josiah’s reformation, but the prophet was probably seeking to reinforce the spiritual lessons of the recent past that Judah had already forgotten. If, however, the Hilkiah named in the superscription as Jeremiah’s father or ancestor (1:1) is the same Hilkiah who discovered the “Book of the Law” (2 Kings 22:8–10), then Jeremiah’s main connection to Josiah would have been the ongoing support his Benjamite priestly family offered to this boy-king (2 Kings 22:1–2) as he grew into a reformer-king.
The exact manner of Jeremiah’s involvement in these reforms is ultimately moot, however. Josiah passed from the scene as suddenly as he had risen to Judah’s throne at the age of eight. In 609 BC Josiah suffered an untimely death when he foolishly and mortally joined a battle between Egypt and Assyria in which he had no personal stake (2 Kings 23:29–30). With this tragedy began the final days of Judah that saw not one but three exiles by the hand of Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar. Following his decisive victory over Assyria at the 605 BC Battle of Carchemish, Nebuchadnezzar turned to lay siege to Jerusalem. In the process he pillaged the precious vessels of the temple and deported some of the city’s nobles (such as Daniel and his friends) to Babylon (Dan. 1:2–4). These actions brought Judah into Babylon’s orbit as a vassal. King Jehoiakim (formerly known as Eliakim) found this circumstance unacceptable and sought to overturn it in a 598 BC rebellion (2 Kings 24:1).
Nebuchadnezzar responded to this treachery by deposing Jehoiakim, a king whose loyalty had been doubtful anyway because he was once a puppet ruler of Egypt (the old rival of Babylon; cf. 2 Kings 23:34–35). This cloud over Jehoiakim’s family was the likely reason Nebuchadnezzar also deported Jehoiakim’s son Jeconiah and others associated with his royal court (such as the prophet Ezekiel) in a second exile to Babylon (2 Kings 24:14–16). In place of Jeconiah (also known as Jehoiachin and Coniah) Nebuchadnezzar installed Zedekiah (also known as Mattaniah), an uncle of Jeconiah and brother of Jehoiakim, on Judah’s throne (2 Kings 24:17–18). The resulting theological crisis for the Davidic monarchy, with Jewish communities in Jerusalem and Babylon both having a legitimate heir to the chosen line of David, became a major source of controversy in Judah’s final decade as a semi-independent state. Zedekiah did turn out to be the weak ruler Nebuchadnezzar had intended. This same pliability of character nonetheless also made Zedekiah easily swayed by Jerusalem’s false prophets, who eventually impelled him to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar in 589 BC (2 Kings 24:20). The king of Babylon answered Judah’s insurrection by laying siege to the city of Jerusalem once more. Nebuchadnezzar’s third campaign against Jerusalem led to its sacking in 587 BC and the deportation of even more inhabitants to Babylon.
Such a chaotic history for Judah means that the literary complexity of the book of Jeremiah is a close reflection of the times into which it first spoke—before, during, and after three exiles to Babylon. Indeed, the demise for a nation as rebellious as Judah would not be the relatively quick death that Assyria inflicted on Israel in 721 BC. Destruction would stretch instead over two complicated decades of sieges, deportations, and exiles. Each of these traumas in 605, 598, and 587 BC left its stamp on the book.
The upheavals of 605 BC were the first events to furnish a backdrop to passages in Jeremiah. During this momentous year (the 4th year of Jehoiakim’s reign) the entire region was in transition as Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to power (Jer. 25:1; cf. Dan. 1:1) and consolidated his rule over the entire ancient Near East by defeating an Egyptian-led coalition (Jer. 46:2). The rise of Babylon coincided with the reign of Jehoiakim and his open resistance to Jeremiah’s message of submission to the empire, as when the king burned a scroll of prophetic oracles that Baruch brought to him (ch. 36). The destruction of this first version of Jeremiah’s prophecy (perhaps some form of chs. 1–25) gave rise to a second version, both of which are included in the canonical form of the book (cf. 36:32). The motif of Jehoiakim’s disobedience to Yahweh then became a recurring feature of the reconstituted book as the “Jehoiakim Frame,”7 which lends structure to its entire second section (i.e., chs. 26–45).
The messy aftermath of 598 BC also corresponds to several passages in Jeremiah. Following this second round of exile to Babylon, the prophetic ministry of Jeremiah shifted its emphasis to the rather different Jewish communities residing in Jerusalem and Babylon. On the one hand, those remaining in Jerusalem grew increasingly convinced that they were the true Israel and that Zedekiah was the true Davidic king (e.g., chs. 22–24). On the other hand, exiles in Babylon were disconsolate over the triumph of their enemies as a result of Yahweh’s apparent abandonment (chs. 28–29). Yet the latter group persisted in viewing Jehoiachin as the worthy successor to David’s kingship, as when Ezekiel dates the beginning of his prophetic ministry to the beginning of Jehoiachin’s captivity rather than Zedekiah’s reign (Ezek. 1:2). All these viewpoints found supposed support from prophets of one kind or another, so narratives about prophetic conflict are prominent during this period (e.g., Jeremiah 20; 28).
Given that the prophet Jeremiah remained in Jerusalem with Zedekiah despite his loyalties being with the exiles in Babylon, the book of Jeremiah records a similarly complex relationship between prophet and king. As the third and final exile of Judah in 587 BC drew near, Zedekiah alternated between sympathy and contempt for Jeremiah. These unpredictable attitudes also caused Jeremiah to waver at times. Like Jehoiakim before him (chs. 7; 26; 36), Zedekiah eventually rejected Jeremiah’s message of submission to Babylon (chs. 21; 25; 27; 37) and received an even harsher yoke of siege and destruction (ch. 39). Following the fall of Jerusalem, a group of Judean refugees refused to accept Babylonian rule and eventually fled to Egypt, taking Jeremiah with them (chs. 41–44).
Finally, the book of Jeremiah pushes past the historical horizons of Judah’s final exile to speak of eschatological judgment and restoration. Jeremiah’s “Book of Consolation” (chs. 30–33) redirects the attention of the exiles (whether in Egypt or Babylon) to Yahweh’s ultimate deliverance that lies beyond the Babylonian crises of the sixth century BC. The same fate for the nations, Babylon notably excepted, is prefigured in the “Oracles concerning the Nations” (chs. 46–51). Nonetheless, the book of Jeremiah returns to the historical plane with a narrative about the sacking of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the release of Jeconiah from Babylonian prison in 562 BC (ch. 52; cf. 2 Kings 24–25).
Genre and Literary Features
Readers may have noticed that the preceding overview of Jeremiah was structured in a rough historical sequence. Yet this required jumping between different sections and literary genres within the book. Most OT prophetic books unfold in a more linear way, making it possible for a commentary to treat literary issues separately from compositional issues. By contrast, the book of Jeremiah can often be elliptical in a manner that defies categorization, with some even characterizing the book as “unreadable.”8 Taking a more optimistic approach, however, this commentary will explore how the sprawling character of Jeremiah is an expression of the sovereignty of God reaching deeply into specific situations, times, and places that themselves seem impossible to reconcile. God’s speech through his prophet has a slightly different thrust to each of its various audiences in Jerusalem, Babylon, and Egypt, where the inhabitants of Judah were scattered.
The literary diversity of Jeremiah is already evident in the various Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the book. As the evangelical OT scholar J. Daniels Hays summarizes, “The Greek Septuagint translation (LXX) of Jeremiah differs significantly from the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT). The LXX is approximately 2,700 words shorter, or about one-eighth shorter, than the MT. The LXX omits numerous words, phrase, and even longer passages that the MT contains.”9 For example, the LXX relocates the entire section of the Oracles concerning the Nations (chs. 46–51 in the MT and English translations) to the middle of Jeremiah 25 and its discussion of King Nebuchadnezzar as Yahweh’s agent of judgment. The LXX also arranges Yahweh’s address to these nations in a different order than does the MT (e.g., Elam is first in the LXX, whereas the MT places Egypt first). Besides issues of literary sequence, some chapters in the MT are either shorter in the LXX (e.g., ch. 33) or in one case entirely absent (i.e., ch. 52’s narrative of the fall of Jerusalem).
These gaps are difficult to explain only as differences of translation between Hebrew (the source language) and Greek (the target language). Previous generations of scholars sometimes argued that the Greek version of the book was an abridged or faulty translation. This is unlikely, however, since the LXX’s renderings tend to be literal in the passages that overlap with the MT of Jeremiah.10 The combination of LXX Jeremiah’s generally literal approach to translation and its notable differences from the MT suggests that the translators of LXX Jeremiah were working from manuscripts that were similar, but not identical, to the Hebrew tradition underlying our English Bibles.
This proposal became a reality with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century. Beginning in 1947, numerous caves in the Judean Desert began to reveal their treasures in what the eminent biblical archaeologist William Foxwell Albright memorably called the “greatest archaeological find of the twentieth century.” The most famous of these, Cave 4 in Qumran, contained several Hebrew manuscripts with readings that supported the LXX rather than the MT. These manuscripts (which scholars have labeled 4QJerb and 4QJerd) were fragmentary rather than complete, but their discovery proved that multiple Hebrew manuscripts were associated with the Jeremianic tradition. The LXX is the heir to the earlier and shorter manuscripts of Jeremiah, while the MT is a faithful reproduction of the later and longer manuscripts. Interestingly, Cave 4 at Qumran also contained specimens of Hebrew manuscripts that support MT readings (e.g., 4QJera, 4QJerc). The Jewish community at Qumran evidently did not regard literary diversity as being at odds with theological coherence.
The practice of textual criticism—the study and comparison of ancient manuscripts—naturally raises theological questions about the inspiration of Scripture that must wait until the next section of this Introduction. In the meantime, it is essential to observe that the multiplicity of manuscript traditions is simply an extension of the extraordinary multiplicity of literary genres within the book. At times, the book of Jeremiah becomes an avalanche of different literary types that collide: prophetic visions to Jeremiah from Yahweh (e.g., ch. 1), third-person poetic speeches by Jeremiah (e.g., chs. 2–6), third-person prose speeches by Jeremiah (e.g., ch. 7), first-person poetic speeches by Jeremiah to Yahweh (e.g., ch. 12), letters from Jeremiah to the exiles (e.g., ch. 29), and prophetic sign-acts in which Jeremiah communicates via bodily actions or with other objects (e.g., ch. 13), to provide only a partial list. The fact that the LXX and MT arrange their material somewhat differently is an eloquent testimony to how literary disorder serves to convey the unparalleled disorder caused by Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry of the divine word, both to him and from him.11
But even as chaotic form expresses chaotic function, there remains an internal logic that the outline of Jeremiah will describe below. The coherence of this book bearing the name of a “prophet to the nations” (1:5, 10) is ultimately found in tracing the movement of the missio dei, the mission of God, from the particular horizon of Judah to the universal horizon of the nations.12 The missional power of Jeremiah’s literary traditions is also why they came to expression in both the local language of Hebrew for Jews in Palestine and Babylon as well as somewhat differently in the international language of Greek for Jews in Egypt and the rest of the Hellenistic world. It lies beyond the scope of this volume to offer commentary on the Greek version of Jeremiah, which offers an alternative contextualization of the prophet’s message for a more “Western” audience in the Hellenistic world than the more “Eastern” hearers who encountered the book in Hebrew instead.
Theology of Jeremiah and Its Relationship to the Rest of the Bible and to Christ
All the main themes of Jeremiah appear in chapter 1, a narrative about the call of the prophet. Jeremiah had been chosen before birth to serve as a “prophet to the nations” (v. 5).13 This ministry of international scope will come at great cost to Jeremiah. He immediately protests (“Ah, Lord God!”) that he lacks both the stature and the skills to serve in this way (v. 6). Objections are a typical feature of biblical call narratives, but Jeremiah’s is unique for the prolonged nature of his resistance toward God.14 The expected statement of God’s assurance (e.g., Ex. 3:16; Judg. 6:16) is delayed (cf. Jer. 1:8) by a rebuttal in which God turns Jeremiah’s lament directly against him: “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak” (v. 7).
For Jeremiah to go wherever Yahweh sends for the purpose that he may speak involves the twin elements of movement and intentionality that characterize the missio dei.15 Jeremiah’s reluctance to proceed, however, illustrates the important paradox that God’s calling to ministry and the minister’s conflicts with God are often two sides of the same coin. The rest of the book, and especially Jeremiah’s “Confessions” (chs. 11–20), shows that the pain of the prophet mirrors that of his impassioned God as they struggle together against Judah. Jeremiah has an undeniably contentious relationship with Yahweh, yet this angst pales in comparison to his identification with the divine pathos in their shared exasperation with an unresponsive nation.
On this note, chapter 1 also previews the conflicts Jeremiah will have with his own people. Yahweh urges him, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you” (v. 8), an apparent reference to his audience as a “prophet to the nations” (v. 5), making it a surprise that the rest of the book describes Jeremiah’s main opponents as his own people in Judah. Why would a “prophet to the nations” have only two sections in the book that bears his name (chs. 25; 46–51) addressing the universal horizons of the missio dei? The troubling reason is that Jeremiah’s people are the first and worst among the pagan “nations” (e.g., 2:11) whom God must act “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (1:10). As the six verbs of this verse are reused and applied to a variety of historical situations in the book, the three stages of the prophet’s international ministry come into view: First, Jeremiah will go to Judah as a pagan nation under Yahweh’s discipline by the hand of other pagan nations. Second, he will speak to those same nations who face divine judgment for their own sins, at a time coinciding with deliverance for Judah. Third and finally, he addresses all the inhabitants of the earth, both Judah and the nations, as those whom Yahweh will save.
The historical dynamism of the nations in Judah’s history— as agents of divine judgment against Judah, as witnesses of Yahweh’s acts, and in turn as objects of both judgment and deliverance by Yahweh—has major implications for Jeremiah’s theology of the divine word. Since Yahweh addresses Judah over a period of nearly five decades, the book of Jeremiah both records and participates in the lengthy process by which Judah received Yahweh’s words and rejected them and Yahweh responded by giving more of his words. This means that the canonical version of Jeremiah is a diverse work with sections that may seem at odds, as when repentance on Judah’s part seems both possible and impossible (e.g., chs. 2–10).
Although we cannot always reconstruct the precise historical circumstances behind a given prophetic oracle, it is clear that Jeremiah’s present form as a literary work postdates Jerusalem’s fall in 587 BC. The canonical book thus stands as a testimony to the epochal shifts occurring as Judah’s relationship to exile changed from threat to likelihood and finally to inevitability and finality. In other words, Jeremiah not merely is a finished product of theological reflection but also contains snapshots of how the theology of the book came to be during a time of massive upheaval in Judah. The process of canonization is part of the book itself (cf. Jeremiah 36; comments there) in a manner unique within Scripture.
Jeremiah’s distinctive way of doing theology in crisis is also evident in its relationship to the prophecy of Isaiah, the other of the major prophets who ministered in Jerusalem to the southern kingdom of Israel. In the face of the Assyrian threat, Isaiah had memorably promised “perfect peace” (Hb. shalom shalom; Isa. 26:3) for Yahweh’s people if only they would trust in him (cf. Isa. 26:12; 27:5). Along with these shalom oracles, Isaiah offered promises of deliverance for Zion/Jerusalem (e.g., Isa. 2:1–4) that would have emboldened the inhabitants of the city even as Assyria was besieging it in the last decade of the eighth century BC. Though this “Zion theology” was vindicated by Jerusalem’s miraculous deliverance in 701 BC, the faith in Yahweh that King Hezekiah had shown in Isaiah’s time eventually becomes the superstition in Jeremiah’s time that uttering shalom shalom would invoke Yahweh’s protection over Jerusalem (e.g., Jer. 6:14; 8:11).
The false prophets who make such claims have conflated Yahweh’s power with Yahweh’s will—what he could do in delivering Jerusalem from Babylon has become what he must do. As “Zion theology” is distorted into “prosperity theology,” Jeremiah confronts such misunderstandings of Isaiah by asserting that the shalom of Judah’s security in the land was always predicated upon the shalom of living by Yahweh’s covenantal requirements.16 The presence of the temple in Jerusalem could never serve as a talisman to ensure that Yahweh would always protect the city. Indeed, the prophet Ezekiel was a contemporary of Jeremiah who saw visions of the divine presence dwelling in Babylon (Ezekiel 1; cf. 11:16) as well as leaving wicked Jerusalem behind (Ezekiel 10).
In the history of redemption, Jeremiah’s calling to confront the Jerusalem temple establishment in the sixth century BC leads naturally to the coming of Jesus Christ in the first century AD. The empire has changed from Babylon to Rome and the temple in Jerusalem is now the second rather than first. Yet the people of Yahweh have still refused to learn history’s lesson that a sacred place could never summon their God’s presence without his people having holy lives to match. Both Jeremiah and Jesus are prophets who speak truth to power but encounter opposition that causes them great sorrow when Israel fails to repent. Persecution leads each prophet to traverse a via dolorosa (Lat. “sorrowful way”) as he struggles with a beloved people and weeps over a doomed city.17 With the house of Yahweh having twice become a “den of robbers” (Matt. 21:13; cf. Jer. 7:11), the destruction of Jerusalem’s second temple in AD 70 tragically mirrors that of the first temple in 587 BC.
Compared to Jeremiah, however, Jesus goes further by offering himself as a substitute sanctuary for God’s people (cf. 1 Cor. 3:16–17; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21) that will ultimately overcome the failures of Jerusalem’s two temples and the spiritual corruption of the leaders associated with them (John 2:21; cf. Jer. 7:3–7). Jesus does so by willingly draining the cup of divine wrath (Matt. 26:39; Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42; cf. Jer. 25:28) and inaugurating Jeremiah’s “new covenant” (cf. Jer. 31:31–34). He is the perfect Messianic King, “the Lord is our righteousness” (Jer. 23:6), who succeeds where the Davidic line before him failed. As we encounter the book of Jeremiah with these NT horizons in mind, it becomes clear that the prophet and his ministry serve as a forerunner to the much greater Prophet whose ministry follows his.
Preaching from Jeremiah
Jeremiah is the longest book of the Bible, so it may not be practical to preach expository sermons of the conventional chapter-by-chapter variety from the book. Not only are Jeremiah’s chapters often unequal in length, but the non-chronological ordering of the book will likely be confusing to listeners if the preacher covers them in consecutive order. A better approach presents itself, however, once we recognize that the book is still composed of discrete thematic sections even though its overall literary structure is more iterative than linear (cf. Interpretive Challenges; Outline).
The book of Jeremiah is divisible into eleven main sections: (1) a prologue, which introduces the book’s main themes (ch. 1; cf. Theology of Jeremiah); (2) a series of impassioned disputations between Yahweh and his people (chs. 2–10); (3) the “Confessions,” which bring the prophet Jeremiah into the agony of the divine pathos in contending against a rebellious people (chs. 11–20); (4) a topical section on the potential and peril of Davidic kingship in Judah’s last days (chs. 21–24); (5) an interlude at the literary hinge of the book concerning judgment and deliverance for all nations, Judah first among them (ch. 25); (6) another topical section, this time about various conflicts between true and false prophets (chs. 26–29); (7) the “Book of Consolation,” which addresses Judah’s exile and restoration (chs. 30–33); (8) another interlude, which contrasts faithless and faithful responses to the Babylonian threat (chs. 34–35); (9) narratives of Jeremiah’s via dolorosa, anticipating those of Jesus Christ (chs. 36–45); (10) the “Oracles concerning the Nations,” which mirror the interlude in Jeremiah 25 (chs. 46–51); and (11) a narrative epilogue recording the fall of Jerusalem, exile to Babylon, and a fleeting hope for the Davidic royal line (ch. 52).
This summary of the book lends itself to several possibilities in designing a preaching series. The shorter sections within Jeremiah (e.g., chs. 1; 25; 34–35; 52) could each be allocated one sermon, while the longer ones are best handled by several sermons on representative passages within the section. In preaching through the “Confessions” (chs. 11–20), for example, it would be useful to trace a three-part topical progression on (1) Jeremiah’s betrayal by his family and his protest that Psalm 1 is false (Jer. 11:18–12:6), coupled with the later affirmation that Psalm 1 remains true (Jer. 17:7–8); (2) a consideration of Jeremiah’s consecutive sign-acts (chs. 18–19) that seeks to explore the curiosity and revulsion that his audience would have felt; and (3) a juxtaposition of Jeremiah’s private protest and God’s rebuke (15:15–21; 20:7–18) with the narrative of his public conflict with Pashhur the priest (20:1–6). In short, the book of Jeremiah requires a unique combination of fidelity to individual passages and a keeping in sight of the whole. The preacher will also need to recognize that paradox and misdirection are essential elements of how the book conveys its themes, instead of domesticating its message into something more uniform or acceptable to the audience (cf. Overview).
On this note, the power of the book will become clearer to listeners if in his public reading the preacher intentionally highlights the plurality of competing voices present. Two examples will suffice. In chapter 10 several distinct kinds of speech can be identified: (1) Yahweh’s words to Judah (vv. 1–5, 17–18); (2) Judah’s responses of praise (vv. 6–10) and protest (vv. 19–21); (3) Judah’s pointed speech to foreign nations (v. 11); (4) a doxology on the powerful Creator vis-à-vis powerless idols (vv. 12–16); (5) a lament from an unidentified speaker about Judah’s punishment through the nations (v. 22); and (6) Jeremiah’s own lament against the nations (vv. 23–25). Ideally, the preacher’s reading of Jeremiah 10 will be sufficiently self-aware to reflect the interplay of these voices.
Or, in the rather different case of chapter 20, the voice of the prophet diverges sharply between the boldness of his challenge to Pashhur (vv. 1–6) and his near-suicidal complaint to Yahweh (vv. 7–18). Jeremiah is the main speaker throughout this chapter, unlike the array of voices in chapter 10, but a monotonic reading of his words would obscure the chasm between his public opposition toward Pashhur and private struggle with God.
Interpretive Challenges
The difficulties in interpreting Jeremiah are real but not insurmountable. As noted above, foremost among these is the fact that the book is an embodiment of literary disorder that communicates the theological disorder of Judah’s last days, when Yahweh was mightily at work “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (1:10). The opposing nature of Yahweh’s actions leads to the need to determine whether a given passage within Jeremiah belongs to the constructive or the destructive part of his purposes—or both (e.g., 4:5–31). That is, does judgment ever become so inevitable for Judah that destruction must run its course before deliverance can occur (e.g., 8:1–22)? Alternatively, is the threat of judgment presented because (1) it need not happen if Jeremiah’s audience repented (e.g., the Temple Sermon of ch. 7), or (2) because it is a foregone conclusion (e.g., the narrative in ch. 34 of Zedekiah and his futile machinations during the Babylonian siege)?
The long historical span envisioned within this “book of books” (cf. Date and Occasion) magnifies the problem, as some passages seem applicable to multiple periods of Judah’s history (e.g., 5:1–13). The comments on individual passages below will attempt to balance the time-bound and timeless aspects of Jeremiah’s judgment oracles by identifying their historical setting when such information is available, even as Jeremiah’s status as Scripture means that it is equally directed to later audiences, who must embrace the theological lessons Judah failed to learn.
The persistence of apostasy throughout the decades of Jeremiah’s ministry leads to another challenge. This prophetic book traces yet another distressing iteration through the fourfold cycle of history in which (1) God is gracious to his people, (2) God’s people become complacent and forget him, (3) God uses pagan nations to punish his people who want to be pagan, and (4) God’s people repent and turn back to him. Because repentance (stage 4) and restoration (stage 1) have so often led Israel back into forgetfulness (stage 2) and discipline (stage 3), weary readers of Jeremiah inevitably begin to wonder if there is any escape from these ever-deepening ruts in Israel’s history (e.g., Judg. 2:11–23).
But instead of being overwhelmed by the length of this book or the forcefulness of its oracles against Judah, readers must regain a sense of theological perspective. The sustained emotional intensity of the book stems directly from its participation in the pathos of an exasperated God who has exercised centuries of patience toward his apostate people. Our encounter with this lengthiest of books in the Bible must turn from resignation and exhaustion toward a fresh sense of wonder—how did Yahweh bear with his people for so long, as attested in Jeremiah’s breadth and depth, only to see his grace enlarge their sense of entitlement until they dared even to claim that he had been unfair to them? The difficulty in reading and teaching Jeremiah is but a small theological reminder of the immense long-suffering of God.
However, the bracing character of Jeremiah raises a final interpretive issue: what patterns, if any, can a book of such extremes provide for Christian theology or praxis? And most prominently among the questions we could ask, to what extent should Jeremiah’s troubled and angry prayers become a pattern for our own prayers? The comments on and Response sections to the “Confessions” (chs. 11–20) will address this issue in detail, but it is noteworthy that the inclination to soften Jeremiah’s laments reflects “the difference between this usage [of lament’s frequency in the Bible] and that of Christian tradition in the West. . . . In Western Christendom the lament has been totally excluded from man’s relationship with God, with the result that it has completely disappeared above all from prayer and worship.”18 The theological preference for piety and detachment is hardly unique to Western cultures and their influences from Greek stoicism, since many Eastern cultures have the identical trait due to Confucian ideas of “saving face” and emotional aloofness. It is possible to go too far in one’s raw emotions toward God, of course, but walking in the footsteps of Jeremiah seems a necessary risk in light of how Christians everywhere often labor under the misimpression that only praise and thanksgiving, not lament and protest, are welcome in our life with God.19 The worst thing that could result from being too honest with God would be that he rebukes us, as happened to Jeremiah (15:15–21), but hearing even this from him would be far better than suffering silently in a manner our impassioned God never intended.
Outline
I. Prologue: Yahweh and His Catalytic Word through a “Prophet to the Nations” (1:1–19)
A. Superscription to the Book (1:1–3)
B. The Call Narrative of Jeremiah (1:4–19)
II. Disputations between Yahweh and His People (2:1–10:25)
A. Judah’s Spiritual Adultery and the Withering of Creation (2:1–3:5)
B. Yahweh’s Shaming of a Shamelessly Pagan People (3:6–4:4)
C. The Possibility of Judah’s Repentance Becoming the Certainty of Judgment (4:5–31)
D. Babylon’s Arrival against a Spiritually Numb People (5:1–31)
E. The Exasperated Pathos of Yahweh and Jeremiah against Judah (6:1–30)
F. Jeremiah’s Temple Sermon, Version 1 (7:1–34; cf. ch. 26)
G. The Inevitability of Judgment for a Self-Deceived People (8:1–22)
H. The Grief of Yahweh and His Prophet for Judah (9:1–26)
I. A Discourse on Idolatry, Idolaters, Judah, and the Nations (10:1–25)
III. The “Confessions” of Jeremiah and the Divine Pathos with Judah (11:1–20:18)
A. Jeremiah’s Ministry of Word and Prayer, Which Meets Opposition (11:1–23)
B. Jeremiah’s Complaint, Yahweh’s Mild Rebuke of the Prophet, but Severe Rebuke of the People (12:1–17)
C. Two Sign-Acts and Two Speeches of Judah’s Coming Demise (13:1–27)
D. Three Cycles of Yahweh’s Decree of Judgment and Jeremiah’s Pained Responses (14:1–22)
E. Yahweh’s Rejection of His Intercessors and Rebuke of Jeremiah’s Complaint (15:1–21)
F. Exile to Babylon as the End of Judah’s Regular Life (16:1–21)
G. Miscellaneous Psalmic and Wisdom Traditions about Judah’s Exile (17:1–27)
H. Two Sign-Act Narratives (18:1–19:15)
1. The Potter and His Pot (18:1–23)
2. The Shattered Flask (19:1–15)
I. Jeremiah’s Confrontation with Pashhur (20:1–18)
1. Jeremiah’s Public Debate with Pashhur (20:1–6)
2. Jeremiah’s Private Anguish before God (20:7–18)
IV. The Potential and Peril of Davidic Kingship (21:1–24:10)
A. A Specific Indictment of King Zedekiah (21:1–14)
B. A General Indictment of the Davidic Line of Kings (22:1–30)
C. The Sins of Judah’s Kings, Prophets, and Priests (23:1–40)
D. Jeremiah’s Vision of Bad Figs in Jerusalem and Good Figs in Babylon (24:1–10)
V. First Interlude: Judgment and Deliverance for All Nations (25:1–38)
VI. Conflicts between True and False Prophets (26:1–29:32)
A. Jeremiah’s Temple Sermon, Version 2 (26:1–24; cf. ch. 7)
B. The Misguided Politics of False Prophets (27:1–22)
C. The Incorrect Theology of False Prophets (28:1–17)
D. Yahweh’s Letters to the Exiles on Prosperity Theology (29:1–32)
VII. The “Book of Consolation” (30:1–33:26)
A. The Historical Tensions between Judah’s Exile and Return (30:1–24)
B. The Pathos of Yahweh in Love, Wrath, and the “New Covenant” (31:1–40)
C. A Strange Real Estate Transaction and Its Aftermath (32:1–44)
D. The Need for Judah and the Nations to Respond to Yahweh’s Covenants (33:1–26)
VIII. Second Interlude: Faithless vs. Faithful Responses to the Babylonian Threat (34:1–35:19)
A. The Faithlessness of Zedekiah (34:1–22)
B. The Faithfulness of the Rechabites (35:1–19)
IX. The Via Dolorosa of the Prophet Jeremiah (36:1–45:5)
A. The Triumph of Yahweh’s Word over Its Opponents (36:1–32)
B. The Fickleness of King Zedekiah in the Face of Babylon’s Siege (37:1–21)
C. The Fear of King Zedekiah in the Face of Babylon’s Siege (38:1–28)
D. The Fall of Jerusalem and Babylon’s Arrangements with Judah (39:1–40:16)
1. The Fall of Jerusalem (39:1–10)
2. The Kindness of Babylon toward Jeremiah (39:11–40:6)
3. The Kindness of Babylon toward Judah’s Remnant (40:7–12)
4. The Conspiracy of Judah’s Remnant against Gedaliah (40:13–16)
E. Jeremiah’s Reluctant Journey to Egypt (41:1–44:30)
1. The Violent Treachery of Ishmael (41:1–18)
2. The Fear and Insincerity of the Judean Remnant (42:1–22)
3. The Remnant’s Flight to Egypt and Yahweh’s Sign-Act against Egypt (43:1–13)
4. Syncretism and Forgetfulness among the Remnant in Egypt (44:1–30)
F. Yahweh’s Rebuke and Salvation Oracle to Baruch (45:1–5)
X. Oracles concerning the Nations (46:1–51:64)
A. Superscription (46:1)
B. Concerning Egypt (46:2–26)
1. Judgment against Egypt’s Army (46:2–12)
2. Judgment against Egypt via Babylon’s Intervention (13–26a)
3. Deliverance for Egypt (46:26b)
C. Concerning Deliverance for Israel/Judah (46:27–28)
D. Concerning Judgment against Philistia (47:1–7)
E. Concerning Moab (48:1–47)
1. Judgment against Moab (48:1–46)
2. Deliverance for Moab: Yahweh’s Surprising Promise of Moab’s Restoration (48:47)
F. Concerning Ammon (49:1–6)
1. Judgment against Ammon’s Cities, People, and Gods (49:1–5)
2. Deliverance for Ammon (49:6)
G. Concerning Judgment against Edom (49:7–22)
H. Concerning Judgment against Damascus (49:23–27)
I. Concerning Judgment against Kedar and Hazor (49:28–33)
J. Concerning Elam (49:34–39)
1. Judgment against Elam (49:34–38)
2. Deliverance for Elam (49:39)
K. Concerning Judgment against Babylon, Part 1 (50:1–46)
L. Concerning Judgment against Babylon, Part 2 (51:1–64)
XI. Epilogue: The Fall of Jerusalem, Exile to Babylon, and Fleeting Hope for the Davidic Line (52:1–34)
Jeremiah 1:1–3