Book of Jeremiah

The Book of Jeremiah (Hebrew: ספר יִרְמְיָהוּ) is the second of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and the second of the Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. The superscription at chapter Jeremiah 1:1–3 identifies the book as "the words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah". Of all the prophets, Jeremiah comes through most clearly as a person, ruminating to his scribe Baruch about his role as a servant of God with little good news for his audience.

His book is intended as a message to the Jews during the Babylonian exile, explaining the disaster of exile as God's response to Israel's pagan worship: the people, says Jeremiah, are like an unfaithful wife and rebellious children, their infidelity and rebelliousness made judgment inevitable, although restoration and a new covenant are foreshadowed. Authentic oracles of Jeremiah are probably to be found in the poetic sections of chapters 1 through 25, but the book as a whole has been heavily edited and added to by the prophet's followers (including, perhaps, his companion, the scribe Baruch) and later generations of Deuteronomists.

It has come down in two distinct though related versions, one in Hebrew, the other known from the Septuagint Greek translation. The dates of the two (Greek and Hebrew) can be suggested by the fact that the Greek shows concerns typical of the early Persian period, while the Masoretic (i.e., Hebrew) shows perspectives which, although known in the Persian period, did not reach their realisation until the 2nd century BCE.

Structure

(Taken from Michael D. Coogan's A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament; other sources will give slightly different divisions)

It is difficult to discern any structure in Jeremiah, probably because the book had such a long and complex composition history. It can be divided into roughly six sections:

Chapters 1–25 (The earliest and main core of Jeremiah's message)

Chapters 26–29 (Biographic material and interaction with other prophets)

Chapters 30–33 (God's promise of restoration including Jeremiah's "new covenant" which is interpreted differently in Judaism than it is in Christianity)

Chapters 34–45 (Mostly interaction with Zedekiah and the fall of Jerusalem)

Chapters 46–51 (Divine punishment to the nations surrounding Israel)

Chapter 52 (Appendix that retells 2 Kings)

Summary

Historical background

The background to Jeremiah is briefly described in the superscription to the book: Jeremiah began his prophetic mission in the thirteenth year of king Josiah (about 627 BCE) and continued after the eleventh year of King Zedekiah (586 BCE), "when Jerusalem went into exile in the fifth month". During this period, Josiah instituted religious reforms; Babylon destroyed Assyria; Egypt briefly imposed vassal status on Judah; Babylon defeated Egypt and made Judah a Babylonian vassal (605 BCE); Judah revolted but was subjugated again by Babylon (597 BCE); and Judah revolted once more.

The latter revolt was the final one: Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple and exiled its king and many of the leading citizens in 586 BCE, ending Judah's existence as an independent or quasi-independent kingdom and inaugurating the Babylonian exile.