The Letter of Jeremiah is a short work, cast as a letter from the prophet Jeremiah to the Jews about to be carried into exile in Babylon, warning them against the idolatry they will encounter there. Taking as its pretext Jeremiah's counsel to the exiles, it is in fact a sustained polemical sermon ridiculing the worship of manufactured gods.
In a series of repeated arguments, each rounded off with a refrain to the effect that these things "are not gods, so do not fear them," it mocks idols as powerless objects of wood, silver and gold: they cannot see, speak, save themselves from rust and rot, or protect themselves from thieves and fire; their priests pilfer their finery, and animals are better off than they. The style, with its hammering repetition, is that of a rhetorical exercise on a single theme. Though ascribed to Jeremiah, the work is generally dated much later, to the Hellenistic period (perhaps the fourth to second century BCE), and survives in Greek, though a Hebrew or Aramaic original is possible.