Jeremiah — who's who

Born around 645 BCE into a priestly family in Anathoth, three miles north-east of Jerusalem. Called to prophecy as a young man — perhaps still a teenager — around 627 BCE. Preached for forty years through five kings and three Babylonian invasions. The most psychologically interior prophet in the Hebrew Bible: beaten, stocked, imprisoned, lowered into a cistern, forbidden to marry, and finally dragged into Egyptian exile against his will. His confessions in chapters 11–20 are the most personal passages in any prophetic book. He was still speaking when the book ends; the circumstances of his death are not recorded in scripture.

A scribe from a prominent Jerusalem family — his brother Seraiah served as quartermaster to King Zedekiah. First appears by name in chapter 32, witnessing the purchase of the field at Anathoth during the siege. Central to chapter 36, where he reads Jeremiah's scroll in the temple, the scroll is then burned by King Jehoiakim, and he helps dictate the whole thing again, longer. Chapter 45 contains a personal oracle addressed to Baruch alone — the only such oracle to a prophet's scribe in the Hebrew Bible. A clay seal bearing his name, discovered in 1975, is one of the strongest archaeological confirmations of a named biblical figure outside the royal line.

The king of Judah in whose thirteenth year Jeremiah was called to prophecy, around 627 BCE. The book of Kings records Josiah as the greatest reforming king since David — the man who rediscovered the law book in the temple, destroyed the high places, and reinstated the Passover. He is killed at Megiddo in 609 BCE by Pharaoh Necho of Egypt, an event the book of Lamentations mourns and which Jeremiah himself lamented in a dirge preserved in 2 Chronicles 35. Josiah is barely a character in Jeremiah; he is the context — the best king under whom the worst oracles began.

Son of Josiah, placed on the throne by Pharaoh Necho in 609 BCE and reigning for eleven years until 598. The most dramatically hostile figure toward Jeremiah in the book. After hearing Jeremiah's temple sermon (chapter 26), his officials seek the prophet's death. In chapter 36, when Baruch reads Jeremiah's scroll to the king in the winter palace, Jehoiakim cuts the columns with a penknife as they are read and burns them in the brazier — the only scene in the Hebrew Bible of a king deliberately destroying a prophetic text. Jeremiah responds by dictating the scroll again, longer, with an added oracle that Jehoiakim's body will not be mourned and will be thrown outside the gates of Jerusalem.

The last king of Judah, installed as a Babylonian vassal by Nebuchadnezzar after the deportation of his nephew Jehoiachin in 597 BCE. Reigned eleven years until the destruction of Jerusalem in 587. A weak man, terrified of his own officials, drawn repeatedly into secret conferences with Jeremiah in which he receives the same word — surrender to Babylon and live; resist and die — and cannot act on it. Rebels against Babylon, brings the final siege on the city, flees by night when the walls are breached, is captured on the plains of Jericho. His sons are killed before his eyes; his eyes are then put out. He dies in Babylon. He is the figure on whom Jeremiah's pleas for surrender continually break.

The prophet from Gibeon who confronts Jeremiah in chapter 28 in one of the most carefully drawn scenes of prophetic conflict in the Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah has been walking around Jerusalem with a wooden yoke, counselling submission to Babylon. Hananiah prophesies the opposite: within two years God will break Babylon's power, return the temple vessels, and bring King Jehoiachin home. He takes the wooden yoke off Jeremiah's neck and breaks it. Jeremiah returns later with a word from the Lord: you have broken the yoke of wood; in its place you shall have a yoke of iron. Because you have made this people trust in a lie, you will die this very year. Hananiah dies within two months. The chapter has been read ever since as the canonical case study of how true and false prophets are distinguished — and the book's answer is that they cannot be, in advance, by hearers.

A priest and chief officer in the temple who strikes Jeremiah and puts him in stocks overnight after Jeremiah smashes an earthen flask in the valley of Hinnom and proclaims the destruction of Jerusalem (chapters 19–20). When Jeremiah is released the next day, he delivers one of his most bitter oracles against Pashhur — renaming him Magor-missabib (terror on every side) and prophesying that he, his household, and all his friends will be taken into Babylonian captivity. The episode is the first physical violence against Jeremiah recorded in the book, and it immediately precedes the deepest of his confessions — the cursing of the day he was born.

Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 BCE. Defeats Egypt at Carchemish in 605, invades Judah three times, and destroys Jerusalem and the temple in 587. Jeremiah's oracles consistently identify him as the instrument of God's judgment — the foe from the north whose armies are the answer to Judah's apostasy. After the conquest he treats Jeremiah well, ordering his commanders to look after the prophet and giving him the choice of going to Babylon or remaining in the land. Appears throughout the book as a geopolitical force whose movements Jeremiah tracks with the detachment of a man who has always known the outcome.

A small clan descended from Jehonadab the son of Recab, who had commanded his descendants never to drink wine, never to build houses, never to plant vineyards, but to live in tents. In chapter 35 Jeremiah brings them into a chamber of the temple and offers them wine. They refuse — they have kept the command of their ancestor for generations and will not break it. Jeremiah uses them as a living indictment of Israel: a small clan has kept the command of a human ancestor for centuries; the people of Judah have not kept the command of their God for a single generation. The clan is honoured with the promise that their line will not lack a man to stand before the Lord forever.

A Cushite eunuch in the household of King Zedekiah who rescues Jeremiah from the muddy cistern into which he had been lowered by the princes in chapter 38. Ebed-melech goes to the king, reports that Jeremiah will die of hunger in the cistern, and is given thirty men and permission to pull the prophet out — which he does with old rags and worn-out clothes to protect the prophet's arms from the ropes. In chapter 39, after the fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah delivers an oracle specifically to Ebed-melech: because you have trusted in me, I will save you in that day, you shall not fall by the sword, but your life shall be as a prize of war.