Jeremiah- Hebrew/Jewish FigureMortal"The Weeping Prophet"

Called Before Birth

Jeremiah son of Hilkiah was a priest from Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. He prophesied during the last four decades of the kingdom of Judah, from 627 BCE through the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 586 and beyond.

God's call came with startling intimacy: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." Jeremiah protested: "Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth." But God touched his mouth and said: "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."

God confirmed the calling with two visions. First, an almond branch: shaqed. God declared: "I am watching (shoqed) over my word to perform it." The pun connected the earliest-blooming tree with divine vigilance. Second, a boiling pot tilted from the north. Disaster was coming from Babylon, pouring over the land like scalding water.

The Temple Sermon

Jeremiah's most confrontational public act was his Temple sermon, delivered at the gate of the Temple itself. He attacked the popular belief that God's presence in the Temple guaranteed Jerusalem's safety: "Do not trust in these deceptive words: 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.'" The threefold repetition mocked an empty incantation.

He demanded justice as the condition of God's continued presence. If they continued to oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, if they shed innocent blood and worshipped other gods, then God would destroy this Temple as He had destroyed Shiloh. The priests and prophets seized Jeremiah and demanded his death: "You shall die! Why have you prophesied in the name of the Lord, saying, 'This house shall be like Shiloh'?" Officials from the royal court intervened and spared his life.

The Confessions

Jeremiah recorded his inner struggles with God in laments that expose the cost of his calling. He accused God of overpowering him: "O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me."

He cursed the day of his birth: "Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?" He wished he could stop prophesying, but the word burned within him like a fire shut up in his bones, and he could not hold it in. God had forbidden him to marry, to attend funerals or feasts, cutting him off from every normal human consolation.

The Symbolic Acts

Jeremiah buried a linen loincloth by the Euphrates and later retrieved it, rotted and ruined. As Judah, once bound intimately to God, had become worthless through idolatry. He smashed a potter's flask before the elders at the Potsherd Gate, declaring: "So will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter's vessel, so that it can never be mended."

He wore a wooden yoke around his neck to symbolize submission to Babylon. God's command was to serve Nebuchadnezzar, not resist him. The false prophet Hananiah broke the yoke from Jeremiah's neck, promising deliverance within two years. Jeremiah replaced it with an iron yoke. God's decree could not be broken.

The Fall of Jerusalem

In 586 BCE, after an eighteen-month siege, the Babylonians breached Jerusalem's walls. King Zedekiah fled but was captured. His sons were slaughtered before his eyes, then his eyes were put out. The Temple was burned, the walls torn down, and the population deported to Babylon.

Even as the siege tightened, Jeremiah had performed his most paradoxical act. His cousin Hanamel came to him in the court of the guard where he was imprisoned, asking him to buy a field in Anathoth. Jeremiah weighed out seventeen shekels of silver, signed and sealed the deed, and entrusted it to his scribe Baruch with instructions to store it in an earthenware vessel. Then he declared God's word: "Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land." At the moment when everything was ending, the prophet invested in Judah's future.

Nebuchadnezzar's commander released Jeremiah from prison and offered him the choice of going to Babylon with honor or staying in the land. He chose to stay with the remnant. When the appointed governor Gedaliah was assassinated, the survivors fled to Egypt, dragging Jeremiah with them against his protests. According to tradition, he continued to prophesy in Egypt and was stoned to death by his own people.

The New Covenant

Amid the judgment, Jeremiah proclaimed: "Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke."

This covenant would differ from Sinai: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest." The external law written on stone would become internal.

Among the Ruins

Lamentations Rabbah describes Jeremiah walking among the ruins of Jerusalem, weeping over the destroyed Temple, searching for survivors among the dead. He accompanied the exiles partway to Babylon before turning back to comfort those who remained in the devastated land.

A tradition preserved in 2 Maccabees records that before the destruction, Jeremiah hid the Ark of the Covenant, the tent of meeting, and the altar of incense in a cave on the mountain where Moses had viewed God's inheritance. When his companions tried to mark the path, Jeremiah rebuked them: the place would remain unknown until God gathered His people again. The Ark did not perish. It was concealed, awaiting a restoration that Jeremiah's new covenant had promised.