A Prophet Who Watched His Own Warnings Come True

Jeremiah gives the fullest, most personally revealing self portrait of any prophet in the Hebrew Bible, including a set of anguished first person passages scholars call his "confessions," in which he curses the day of his own birth and accuses God of having deceived him into a thankless calling that has brought him only mockery and violence, material unmatched for its raw emotional honesty anywhere else in prophetic literature. His central and deeply unpopular message across four decades was that Judah's political and religious leaders should submit to Babylon rather than resist, since resistance would only bring destruction, a position that earned him charges of treason, imprisonment in a muddy cistern, and lasting hostility from the royal court he kept warning.

The book intersperses his oracles with biography, much of it apparently supplied by his scribe Baruch, including the vivid scene of King Jehoiakim cutting Jeremiah's scroll into pieces and burning it in a brazier as it is read to him, only for Jeremiah to dictate the entire scroll again with additional material. Amid the unrelenting judgment sits one of the Hebrew Bible's most hopeful passages, the promise of a "new covenant" written not on stone but on the heart, in chapter 31, a passage of enormous later significance in both Jewish thought about covenant renewal and Christian theology of the New Testament.