Baruch ben Neriah בָּרוּךְ בֶּן נֵרִיָּה

What Scripture says, in full. In the fourth year of Jehoiakim (3320 AM) Jeremiah dictates and Baruch writes "all the words of the LORD" on a scroll (Jer 36:4). The prophet is barred from the Temple, so Baruch reads the scroll aloud in the chamber of Gemariah son of Shaphan, on a fast day in the ninth month of the fifth year. The princes summon him and ask how he wrote it—"he dictated to me all these words, and I wrote them with ink" (36:18)—and advise both men to hide. Jehudi reads the scroll to the king, who cuts it column by column with a scribe's knife and throws it into the brazier; he orders Baruch and Jeremiah seized, "but the LORD hid them" (36:26). Jeremiah dictates a second scroll, "and there were added to it many like words" (36:32).

To Baruch, too, Jeremiah entrusts the sealed and the open deed for Hanamel's field at Anathoth, to be put in an earthen vessel "that they may last many days"—the sign that "houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land" (32:12–16). This is Zedekiah's tenth year, 3337 AM, one year before the destruction.

After Gedaliah's murder the captains reject the oracle and blame Baruch by name: "Baruch son of Neriah is inciting you against us" (43:3), and they carry Jeremiah and Baruch down to Egypt, to Tahpanhes. That is the last narrative datum about him.

And there is a chapter addressed to him alone—the forty-fifth. Baruch says: "Woe is me, for the LORD has added grief to my pain; I am weary with my groaning and find no rest." The answer is short and hard: "Behold, what I have built I am tearing down… and you—seek not great things; and I will give you your life as spoil in all the places where you go." Not greatness: survival.

His brother. "The word that Jeremiah commanded Seraiah son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, when he went with Zedekiah to Babylon" (51:59–64): Seraiah, the sar menuchah or chief chamberlain, carries the scroll of doom against Babylon, reads it, ties a stone to it and casts it into the Euphrates. Same father, same grandfather—so Baruch and Seraiah are brothers; Josephus (Ant. X.9.1) calls the family a very distinguished one. The two are constantly confused: different mission, different scroll.

What the sages made of him. Megillah 14b: "Eight prophets who were also priests descended from Rahab the harlot, and these are they: Neriah, Baruch, Seraiah, Mahseiah, Jeremiah, Hilkiah, Hanamel and Shallum." One line asserts three things—that Baruch was a prophet, a priest and a descendant of Rahab—and the list contains his father, his brother, his grandfather and the cousin of chapter 32. Seder Olam Rabbah 20 likewise counts him a prophet: "Baruch son of Neriah and Seraiah son of Mahseiah and Daniel the man greatly beloved all prophesied in the days of Nebuchadnezzar."

Against this, the same forty-fifth chapter was read as a refusal of the prophetic gift—"seek not great things." The Mekhilta (Pisha 1) preserves Baruch's own complaint—"why am I different from all the other disciples of prophets?"—and the consolation that prophecy is not given outside the Land. The Netziv holds both together: the spirit of holiness rested on him at the hour of need, when he read the scroll, but he had no standing gift.

Ezra's teacher—and why it matters. Megillah 16b: "Greater is the study of Torah than the building of the Temple, for as long as Baruch son of Neriah was alive, Ezra did not leave him and go up." Song of Songs Rabbah 5 is more explicit: Ezra stayed "to clarify his learning before Baruch son of Neriah"; and why did Baruch not go up?—"Baruch son of Neriah was a great man and very aged, and could not even be carried in a litter." On these two passages the whole line "Jeremiah → Baruch → Ezra" rests: it is not Maimonides' guess but the Talmud's reading.

A contradiction worth naming. Scripture takes him to Egypt, while the Talmud and midrash have him teaching Ezra in Babylonia. The sages presuppose that Nebuchadnezzar, invading Egypt, deported the Judeans there to Babylon—the same campaign Josephus describes (Ant. X.9.7). Jerome, by contrast, reports that Baruch died soon afterwards in Egypt, which cannot be squared with the Ezra tradition.

No source gives his years—neither Scripture nor the sages. The attested window: the scroll in 3320, the deed in 3337, the descent to Egypt about 3339, his death before Ezra's ascent. Everything else is arithmetic, not testimony.

The tomb. Gelilot Eretz Yisrael, as relayed by Seder ha-Dorot (Vilna ed., I, 127–128), and the Sibbuv of Pethahiah of Regensburg place it a mile from Ezekiel's tomb in Iraq—that is, beside al-Kifl on the Euphrates. Then comes the medieval legend: an Arab king tried to open the tomb and all who touched it died; the Jews opened it safely after a three-day fast; the body lay in a marble coffin as though newly dead; neither horses nor camels could move the coffin, so the king built a house of study on the spot. This is hagiography, not a datum—and it is a separate tomb from Ezekiel's, with which it is habitually confused.

What is not in this article, and why. The Book of Baruch in the Septuagint, the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (2 Baruch) and the Paraleipomena Jeremiou (4 Baruch) are post-biblical pseudepigrapha; they are not in the Jewish canon and they stand nowhere in the chain of transmission. A Western reader meets the name "Baruch" there first, so this has to be said plainly. From the same quarter come the Christian-Arabic legends identifying Baruch with Zoroaster.

And on the archaeology. Two clay bullae reading "belonging to Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe" were published by Nahman Avigad in 1978 and long presented as seal impressions of Baruch himself. Yuval Goren and Eran Arie (2014) concluded on laboratory grounds that both are modern forgeries. The matter is contested; the bullae cannot be treated as proof that he existed.