The Prophet Jeremiah and His Warnings
For forty years he repeated one message: change, or the city burns. He was beaten, thrown into a pit, his scroll was burned—and then he wrote Lamentations.
Jeremiah son of Hilkiah was a priest from Anathoth; the word came to him in the thirteenth year of Josiah. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." He refused: "I am a boy." He was shown an almond branch—shaked—"I am watching (shoked) over My word"—and a boiling pot tipping from the north.
For forty years he spoke to kings, priests and crowds. He stood in the Temple gate and said: do not trust the words "the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord"—if you steal and murder and then come here saying "we are saved," this house will become like Shiloh. They nearly killed him for it. He walked with a wooden yoke on his neck: submit to Babylon, this is a verdict, not politics.
When Baruch son of Neriah read out the dictated scroll, King Jehoiakim cut off column after column with a scribe's knife and burned it; Jeremiah dictated another. He was thrown into a muddy cistern and sank; Ebed-Melech the Cushite hauled him out with ropes. To those already deported he wrote the charter of exile life: build houses, plant gardens, marry—"and seek the peace of the city where I have exiled you."
How we know
On the chronology
Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.
Sources
Tanakh
- Yirmiyahu 1; 7; 27–29; 36; 38 — the calling, the address at the Temple gate, the yoke, the letter to the exiles, the burnt scroll, the pit
- Eichah — the lament for the city, written by him after the catastrophe
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Bava Batra 15a — Yirmiyahu as the author of his own book, of Melachim and of Eichah
- Megillah 14b — the prophetess Chuldah and her kinship with Yirmiyahu
- Eichah Rabbah — Yirmiyahu among the ruins — the midrash of consolation
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.
People and places
Josiah · Jeremiah · Jeremiah · Baruch ben Neriah · Huldah the Prophetess · Micah the Morashtite · Zephaniah son of Cushi · Jehoiakim