Jeremiah

Jeremiah was from Anathoth, a village a few miles north of Jerusalem, and from a priestly family. His call is dated to the thirteenth year of Josiah, 627 BC, and he was still speaking after Jerusalem fell in 587, ending up in Egypt against his will. That is roughly forty years of announcing a catastrophe, watching it arrive exactly as announced, and being blamed for it throughout.

The sermon in Jeremiah 7 is the hinge of his public life, and the same episode is told again as narrative in chapter 26, which dates it to the start of Jehoiakim's reign, around 609. He is told to stand in the gate of the temple and say this: 'Do not trust in deceptive words, saying: "This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD."' Then the argument. Correct your ways. Do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Do not shed innocent blood. Then, in verses 9 to 11, the charge that the house which bears God's name has become a den of robbers, the line Jesus quotes when he clears the temple courts.

The killing blow is the comparison with Shiloh. Shiloh had been the sanctuary where the ark rested for generations, and Shiloh was a ruin; excavation at the site has found a destruction layer from around the middle of the eleventh century, which fits. God's argument is that he had done it before to his own address, and would do it again: 'what I did to Shiloh I will now do to the house that bears My Name, the house in which you trust, the place that I gave to you and your fathers.'

You cannot feel the force of this without lesson two. In 701 Sennacherib had surrounded Jerusalem and gone home, and Isaiah had said he would not enter the city. Within a century that deliverance had hardened into a doctrine: the temple stands here, therefore we are safe, whatever else is true of us. Jeremiah's target is not the temple, which he assumes to be God's house. His target is the use of the temple as an insurance policy against the covenant's own sanctions. That is false security in its precise form, and it is the most common religious sin of people who have inherited a genuinely good thing.

Chapter 26 shows what it cost. Priests and prophets seize him and demand a death sentence. Officials convene something like a trial. Jeremiah's defence is simply that he was sent. Then elders of the land intervene with a precedent: Micah of Moresheth said Zion would be plowed like a field and Jerusalem become a heap of rubble, and Hezekiah did not put him to death. Ahikam son of Shaphan shields him. The chapter then adds, without softening it, that Uriah son of Shemaiah had prophesied the same things, fled to Egypt, been extradited, and been killed by Jehoiakim. Jeremiah lived; a man who said what he said did not. The narrative refuses to let the survival look like a rule.

In the middle of the book sits a short section, chapters 30 to 33, usually called the Book of Consolation, and inside it the four verses that have done more theological work than anything else in Jeremiah. 'Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt - a covenant they broke, though I was a husband to them.' (The BSB footnote at the end of that sentence records that the Septuagint reads differently: "for they did not abide in My covenant, and I disregarded them.") Then the substance: the torah put within them and written on their hearts, no longer needing to be taught neighbour to neighbour because 'they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest,' and the ground of it all in verse 34, 'For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more.' One small point on verse 33: the BSB says God will put His law 'in their minds,' where the Hebrew word means more literally within them, in their inward parts, so the English narrows slightly what the Hebrew leaves open.

The phrase berith hadashah occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. Notice first what the passage does not say. It does not say a new law. The content is the same torah, relocated. The problem being solved is not that the covenant's terms were wrong but that its terms sat on tablets outside people who broke them, and the promised remedy is interior: an internalised obligation and a forgiven past. Notice also who the parties are, named explicitly: the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

Jewish reading takes the passage as renewal rather than replacement. Hebrew hadash means new, and its verb form can mean to renew, which supports reading the covenant as renewed; the noun torah is right there in the verse, and the parties named are Israel and Judah, so the natural sense is that the Sinai covenant will at last be kept because God will change the people rather than the terms. It is worth knowing that a pre-Christian Jewish group made this text its own: the Damascus Document from the Qumran library speaks repeatedly of those who entered the new covenant, meaning the community itself.

Christian reading takes it as fulfilled in Jesus, on the strength of the cup saying at the Last Supper and, above all, of Hebrews. Hebrews 8:8 to 12 quotes all four verses, one of the longest Old Testament citations in the New Testament, and then draws the conclusion in verse 13 that in speaking of a new covenant God has made the first one obsolete. That conclusion has carried a great deal of freight, some of it ugly, and honesty requires naming both sides of the Christian discussion. The supersessionist reading takes Hebrews at its word and holds that the older covenant has been superseded as a whole. The other reading, now widely held across Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant scholarship, argues that Hebrews is addressing the sacrificial mechanism rather than God's relationship with the Jewish people, and appeals to Paul in Romans 11, who says the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

One thing keeps this from floating off into abstraction. In chapter 32, with the Babylonian army camped outside and Jeremiah under arrest in the palace guardhouse, God tells him to buy a field in Anathoth from his cousin, weigh out the silver, sign the deed before witnesses and have it sealed in a jar. It is the least sensible property purchase in scripture. The point is in verse 15: 'Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land.' The man who told them the city would fall put money into the ground of the country that was falling.

Scattered through chapters 11 to 20 are six passages, conventionally the confessions, in which Jeremiah speaks to God in his own voice about his own situation. They are 11:18 to 23, 12:1 to 6, 15:10 to 21, 17:14 to 18, 18:18 to 23 and 20:7 to 18. Nothing quite like them exists elsewhere in the prophetic books, and they are the reason Jeremiah is the prophet whose interior life readers think they know.

The tone is not devotional. In 12:1 he opens a case: 'Righteous are You, O LORD, when I plead before You. Yet about Your judgments I wish to contend with You: Why does the way of the wicked prosper?' The verb behind plead is rib, the courtroom verb from lesson one (contend renders a different phrase, literally I would speak judgments with you). The covenant lawsuit has been turned around and the prosecutor is now suing the client. In 15:18 he tells God, 'You have indeed become like a mirage to me - water that is not there,' which is to accuse God of being the one thing in a desert you cannot afford to trust. In 20:7 he says, in the BSB's rendering, 'You have deceived me, O LORD, and I was deceived.' The Hebrew verb is patah, and its other uses include the seduction of a young woman in Exodus 22:16, where the BSB itself writes 'seduces'; a good many translators and commentators have felt the word in Jeremiah is stronger than deceived and closer to enticed or seduced. Then 20:14, 'Cursed be the day I was born!' which is close enough to Job 3 that the two passages are usually read together.

Two features stop this being simply admirable. The first is 18:21 to 23, where he asks God to give his opponents' children over to famine and their wives to widowhood and not to wipe out their guilt or blot out their sin. It is an imprecation, and it belongs to the same literature as the harsher psalms. The second is God's reply at 15:19 to 21, which is not comfort. It is a condition and a rebuke: if you return, I will restore you; they must turn to you, but you must not turn to them. The man is recommissioned rather than consoled.

There is a genuine scholarly disagreement about what these texts are, and a student should hear both cases. The autobiographical reading, associated with Walther Baumgartner's early study and taken up strongly by Gerhard von Rad, treats them as the prophet's own laments, evidence of a vocation experienced as personal ruin, and von Rad spoke of Jeremiah's suffering as itself part of his message. The liturgical reading, argued in detail by Henning Graf Reventlow, notes how closely they follow the fixed form of the individual lament psalms, and concludes that the prophet is speaking representatively, in a stylised cultic voice, for the community rather than reporting his own diary. Later literary studies have tended to say that the distinction is less sharp than either side assumed: conventional forms are exactly what people in real distress reach for.

Whichever way you come down, the pastoral use is available on both readings, and it is this. Scripture contains, at length and without apology, a man doing his God-given work faithfully and hating it, telling God so in language that would get a modern minister quietly removed from a pulpit. It was preserved. Nobody edited it out. A student who does not know these chapters exist will assume, the first time faithfulness turns bitter, that something has gone wrong with him.

Here is a fact that surprises most students and ought to be taught early rather than discovered awkwardly later. The Jeremiah in a Hebrew Bible and the Jeremiah in the ancient Greek translation are not the same length or the same order. The Greek is shorter by something in the region of one seventh to one eighth of the whole, commonly reckoned at around 2,700 words, and it arranges the material differently: the oracles against the nations, which stand at chapters 46 to 51 near the end in Hebrew, sit in the middle of the Greek book, and in a different internal sequence. Whole passages in the Hebrew are simply absent from the Greek, including 33:14 to 26 and most of 39:4 to 13, and many repeated formulae and titles are missing.

For centuries there were two ways to explain that, and only one of them could be tested. Either the Greek translator worked from a Hebrew text like ours and abbreviated it, or he worked faithfully from a shorter Hebrew text that once existed. Since the shorter Hebrew text was hypothetical, the argument was stuck.

Then Cave 4 at Qumran. Among the Jeremiah fragments there, two manuscripts usually labelled 4QJeremiah b and 4QJeremiah d preserve a short Hebrew text agreeing with the Greek at exactly the points where the Greek is short, including the abbreviated form of the passage about idols in chapter 10 and its ordering. Two other manuscripts from the same cave, 4QJeremiah a and 4QJeremiah c, carry the long text that stands behind the Masoretic Hebrew. So both editions existed in Hebrew, in the same collection, before the Common Era. The fragments are small, and honesty requires saying so, but the point they settle is not small: the Greek translator was not inventing a short Jeremiah. He had one.

What follows from that is still argued. Emanuel Tov's widely accepted reconstruction is that there were two successive Hebrew editions, a shorter earlier one lying behind the Greek and the short scrolls, and a later expanded one that became the Masoretic text; J. Gerald Janzen's 1973 study had argued for the priority of the short text on textual grounds before the scrolls were fully published. Against this, Georg Fischer and Jack Lundbom have defended the Masoretic text as primary in substance, Lundbom arguing that a significant number of the Greek's shorter readings are explicable as haplography, the ordinary scribal accident of an eye skipping from one similar word to the next, rather than as evidence of a different edition. The majority view today accepts two editions; the direction of growth and the value of the Masoretic additions are not settled.

Draw the right conclusion and not a panicked one. Jeremiah 36 already told you that the book was dictated, destroyed, dictated again and expanded with many similar words. A book that describes its own second edition is not embarrassed by the discovery of one. What this does mean is that the question what did the original text of Jeremiah say is, for this book, probably the wrong question, and that a teacher should be able to say so without flinching. Jewish and Protestant Bibles follow the long Hebrew edition; the shorter Greek edition was the scripture most of the early church actually read.

Five poems about the fall of the city, and they are the most tightly engineered verse in the Bible. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 are acrostics of twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter of the alphabet in order. Chapter 3 runs the alphabet again with three lines to each letter, sixty-six verses. Chapter 5 has twenty-two verses and abandons the acrostic. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 put the letter pe before ayin, an order also attested in some early Hebrew alphabetic exercises, so the sequence is a variant rather than an error. Much of the book uses the uneven limping rhythm associated with the funeral dirge, the qinah.

The engineering is the point. A man grieving is being made to walk the whole alphabet, twice, in order. Whether you read that as the discipline that keeps grief from becoming formless, or as the completeness of the sorrow, from A to Z with nothing left out, both readings have been offered and both are worth teaching.

The traditional attribution to Jeremiah comes from the Greek superscription, from rabbinic tradition, and from 2 Chronicles 35:25, which says Jeremiah uttered a lament for Josiah. Most modern scholarship doubts it, and for stated reasons rather than reflex: Lamentations 4:17 describes watching in vain for help from a nation, which Jeremiah spent his life opposing, and Lamentations 4:20 speaks of the LORD's anointed, the breath of our life, who was captured in their pits, which is a warmer word for Zedekiah than Jeremiah ever managed. The book itself is anonymous. In the Hebrew Bible it sits among the Writings and is read on the ninth of Av, the fast for the destruction of both temples, which is still its liturgical home in Judaism.

The theology is harder than its most famous verses suggest. Lamentations 3:22 to 23, 'Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning,' is in the middle of the most rigidly constrained chapter, and it is not the book's conclusion. Two verses of the book describe mothers eating their children during the siege, at 2:20 and 4:10. And in all five poems God never speaks in his own voice; the one divine word in the book, "Do not be afraid" at 3:57, comes only as the poet's memory of an earlier rescue. Every other book in this module contains divine speech; this one is addressed to a God who does not answer within the text.

It ends without resolution: 'Restore us to Yourself, O LORD, so we may return; renew our days as of old, unless You have utterly rejected us and remain angry with us beyond measure.' In synagogue practice verse 21 is read again after verse 22 so that the chanting does not finish on that line. That custom is itself a commentary, and a good teacher will point it out. Somebody could not bear to end there either, and did not pretend the verse was not there.