Jeremiah — themes & analysis

Jeremiah is the prophet who did not want to be one. The call narrative in chapter 1 is the most explicit refusal of a prophetic vocation in the Hebrew Bible. God tells the young man from Anathoth that he had known him before he formed him in the womb, that he had set him apart before he was born, that he had appointed him a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah answers: ah Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am a child. The protest is not formal humility; it runs through the whole book.

Forty years later, in the despairing confession of chapter 20, the prophet says: cursed be the day in which I was born; let not the day in which my mother bore me be blessed. Why came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame? In between these passages, in the so-called confessions scattered through chapters 11–20, the prophet returns again and again to the same complaint — that the calling has destroyed his life, that his message is hated, that he has tried to stop speaking it and cannot, that the word is in his bones like a fire and he is weary with holding it in.

Jeremiah is also the prophet most clearly hated by his own people. He is forbidden to marry — a sign that there will be no future in the land. He is beaten and put in stocks by the priest Pashhur (chapter 20). He is nearly killed by a mob after the temple sermon (chapter 26). He is accused of treason during the siege, lowered into a muddy cistern, rescued by a foreign eunuch (chapter 38). He is dragged into Egyptian exile against his will (chapter 43). The personal cost of the prophetic vocation is shown in Jeremiah more fully than in any other prophet.

The book is also the place in scripture where the question of whether a true prophet might genuinely curse his calling is taken absolutely seriously. The answer the book gives is that he might, and that the curse is part of what genuine prophecy under impossible conditions sounds like. The confessions preserve the experience of being a prophet from the inside, as the prophet himself felt it, in moments when no other prophet's voice reaches the page.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (the call and refusal), Chapter 11 (first confession), Chapter 15 (the recommissioning), Chapter 20 (cursed be the day).

Chapter 7 contains one of the most controversial sermons in the Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah is told to stand in the gate of the Lord's house and address the worshippers entering it. The message he delivers is shocking. The people, he says, have made the temple a kind of magic charm. They believe that because the temple is there, and because they offer sacrifices, the city is safe — that the holy place itself guarantees God's protection regardless of how they live. It does not. The temple is the temple of the Lord only if its worshippers are honest in business, kind to the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, and faithful in covenant.

If they are not — if they steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, walk after other gods — then the temple will not save them. God can do to this house, Jeremiah says, what he did to Shiloh, the old central sanctuary of the northern tribes that had been destroyed centuries before. The reaction is violent. Chapter 26 — the narrative complement to the sermon — describes the priests, the prophets, and the people seizing Jeremiah after the sermon and calling for his death. It is only the intervention of certain elders that saves him.

The temple sermon is one of the most theologically consequential prophetic acts in the Hebrew Bible. Jesus later cites it directly. In Mark 11:17, when Jesus drives the moneychangers from the temple in Jerusalem, the line he quotes — my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers — is from Jeremiah 7:11. The structural argument behind the citation is the same: the temple as institution does not guarantee God's presence; the people's covenant fidelity does.

The sermon was delivered probably in 609 BCE, near the start of Jehoiakim's reign. Twenty-two years later, the temple Jeremiah had stood in was burned to the ground by the Babylonians. The book treats the burning, with bitter restraint, as the long-deferred answer to the sermon.

Where to follow it: Chapter 7 (the sermon), Chapter 19 (the broken flask), Chapter 26 (the aftermath; near execution), Chapter 39 (the fall of Jerusalem).

In the middle of the book, in chapter 31, set against the backdrop of the coming exile, Jeremiah delivers one of the most theologically influential oracles in the Hebrew Bible. Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt — which my covenant they brake, although I was a husband unto them.

But this shall be the covenant that I will make: I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. They shall teach no more every man his neighbour, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. The oracle is the source of the phrase the new covenant — in Greek, kaine diatheke, in Latin, novum testamentum — from which the New Testament takes its name.

The Christian tradition from Jesus onward has read the oracle as the announcement of what Christ would inaugurate — the words this is my blood of the new covenant at the Last Supper quote it directly. The Jewish tradition has read it differently — as the renewed covenant that would follow the exile, in which the Torah would be internalised by the returning community. Both readings are theologically serious and both have ancient roots.

What is essential about the oracle on its own terms is the move from the law written on tablets to the law written on hearts. The first covenant, given at Sinai, had been external — a body of commandments transmitted through a mediator and inscribed on stone. The new covenant Jeremiah envisages is interior. The law will be in the inward parts of the people so that they will not need to teach each other to know the Lord. Whether this has happened, or is happening, or remains to come, is a question every reader has to answer with the book and the tradition open in front of him.

Where to follow it: Chapter 30 (restoration begins), Chapter 31 (the new covenant oracle), Chapter 32 (the field at Anathoth — hope enacted), Chapter 33 (the righteous branch).

Jeremiah, more than any other prophet in the Hebrew Bible, performs his message with his body and with objects. The book records a long sequence of these symbolic actions, each one a piece of street theatre carrying a specific theological argument. He buys a linen belt, wears it, hides it in a cleft of rock by the Euphrates, returns long after to find it ruined; the message is that Judah has been ruined in the same way (chapter 13). He stands in the potter's house and watches the potter remake a marred vessel, and is told that God can do the same with the people (chapter 18). He breaks an earthen flask before the priests and elders in the valley of Hinnom (chapter 19).

He puts a wooden yoke on his own neck and walks around Jerusalem wearing it, sending a message to the foreign envoys at Zedekiah's court — submit to Babylon, do not resist (chapter 27). When the false prophet Hananiah breaks the wooden yoke and prophesies a swift end to Babylonian dominance, Jeremiah replaces it with an iron one (chapter 28). He is forbidden to marry, in a culture in which not marrying is itself a public statement; the symbolism is that there will be no future in the land for the children of his generation (chapter 16).

He buys a field at Anathoth from his cousin Hanamel during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, when the field is worthless and the buyer may never live to use it; the symbolism is the opposite of the others — that there will be a future after the exile, that fields will again be bought and sold in the land (chapter 32). The symbolic actions are not illustrations of the message; they are the message, performed in a register the spoken word alone could not reach.

The act of buying the field at the bottom of the country's worst hour is one of the most quietly hopeful gestures in the Hebrew Bible — a man putting down silver for land he may never plant, because he believes the land will be planted again. It is also the answer in advance to the despair the next chapters will record.

Where to follow it: Chapter 13 (the linen belt), Chapter 19 (the broken flask), Chapter 27 (the wooden yoke), Chapter 32 (buying the field during the siege).

Scattered through chapters 11–20 of Jeremiah are six passages that have been called, since the nineteenth-century German scholar Heinrich Ewald, the confessions of Jeremiah: 11:18–12:6, 15:10–21, 17:14–18, 18:18–23, 20:7–13, and 20:14–18. They are the most personal passages in any prophetic book in the Hebrew Bible. In them Jeremiah does not simply deliver God's word; he speaks back to God, in his own voice, about what delivering that word has cost him. He complains. He accuses. He asks why the wicked prosper. He calls down curses on his enemies. He tells God that he has been seduced into prophecy, that he is mocked daily, that he has tried to stop speaking and cannot.

In the most despairing of the confessions — 20:14–18 — he curses the day he was born. The man who brought my father the news that a male child is born unto thee, making him very glad — let that man be as the cities which the Lord overthrew. Why came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame? The passage is the closest parallel in the Hebrew Bible to Job's curse of his own birth — the same despair, the same directness, from a man whose life has been consumed by a calling he did not seek.

The confessions are theologically remarkable for several reasons. They preserve, in a canonical book, a prophet's quarrel with his own calling — the conviction that what God has done to him is something close to a wrong. They preserve the prophet's prayer that his enemies be destroyed, in a register that has been called imprecation. They preserve the experience of being a prophet from the inside, in moments when no other prophet's voice reaches the page.

The confessions also raise hard questions about how to read scripture. They are in the canon. They are presented, in the book, as part of what the prophet said. The God to whom they are spoken does not always answer. When he does answer (15:19–21), the answer is not consolation but a recommissioning — turn back to me, and you will stand before me. The book preserves the prophet's quarrel as part of the prophet's witness. The reader who comes to Jeremiah expecting unbroken confidence in God will be confronted, in these passages, with a man whose confidence in God has been put through every fire and emerged not whole but real.

Where to follow it: Chapter 11 (plot against the prophet), Chapter 12 (why do the wicked prosper?), Chapter 15 (the recommissioning), Chapter 20 (cursed be the day I was born).