Who was Jeremiah?

The book opens with a call that precedes birth: before being formed in the womb he was already destined to be a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah’s response is immediate and negative — he objects that he does not know how to speak, because he is a boy.

The refusal is not accepted, and the reply is short: he will go to whoever he is sent to and say whatever he is told. What the text adds next is not generic encouragement but a specific promise of rescue, which already implies that there will be something to be rescued from.

The programme is announced a moment later in six verbs, four of which are destructive: uprooting, pulling down, destroying, scattering — and only then the two constructive ones. It is an honest description of what his career is going to be.

Jeremiah receives an order with no parallel among the prophets: not to marry and not to have children in that place. The prohibition is itself the message — the text explains that children born there will die of disease and hunger, and his lack of a family anticipates what is coming for everyone.

The same logic governs other episodes: a waistcloth hidden by the Euphrates until it rots, a jar smashed in public before witnesses, bands and chains worn on his neck in the middle of a diplomatic crisis. He acts out what he announces, and he pays for it.

It is worth saying what that costs in concrete terms. In a society where descendants meant security in old age and the continuation of a name, the order in chapter 16 is a sentence of lifelong solitude.

Scattered through the book are passages scholars usually call Jeremiah’s confessions: first-person stretches in which he speaks to God without any ceremony at all. They contain complaint, accusation and sarcasm.

The strongest is in chapter 20. He says he was led away and gave in, that he became a laughing stock all day long, and that he decided to stop speaking in God’s name — and could not, because it turned into a fire shut up inside his bones. Few verses in the Bible describe so well a vocation somebody neither wants nor can drop.

It is because of passages like these that the image of the weeping prophet falls short. What is in the text is not sad resignation: it is protest, addressed to God, out loud and in writing.

Chapter 36 is one of the few places in the Bible that describes from the inside how a biblical book was produced. Jeremiah dictates to Baruch everything he has said over more than twenty years, and the scroll is read in public, then before officials, and finally before the king.

The scene of the reading to the king is cold and memorable. He is in his winter house, with a hearth of burning coals in front of him. Every three or four columns read, he cuts the piece off with a small knife and throws it into the fire, until the whole scroll is gone. The text adds that nobody in the room tore their garments — the gesture expected of anyone hearing such words.

Jeremiah’s response is to dictate the whole thing again, with additions. The book read today is, according to the book itself, the second version of a text that was destroyed.

During the Babylonian siege, Jeremiah’s message is politically untenable: he says the city will fall and that resisting is pointless. The officials accuse him of demoralising the defenders, and the king hands the prophet over to them.

He is lowered by ropes into a pit that had no water but did have mud, and he sinks into it. The man who saves him is a foreign official of the palace, who takes the matter up with the king and obtains permission to pull him out.

And it is in that period — city besieged, he himself held at the prison — that the strangest and most coherent gesture of the book takes place. A cousin offers him a plot of land at Anathoth, and Jeremiah buys it. He weighs out the silver, signs the deed before witnesses, and has the documents stored in an earthen vessel so they will last a long time.

Buying land in a country about to be occupied is throwing money away — unless one is making a sign. And the text says what it means: in that place there will again be buying of houses, of fields and of vineyards. The prophet who announced the catastrophe signs a contract betting on what comes after it.

Chapter 29 is a letter, written from Jerusalem to the Jews already deported to Babylon. The advice it gives is the opposite of what the deportees wanted to hear: build houses, plant gardens, marry off your children, multiply, and seek the good of the city you were carried into — because your peace lies in its peace.

He is writing against other prophets. Some were announcing a quick return, and the letter contradicts them with a term: seventy years. Only after that does the famous promise come.

That is the setting of Jeremiah’s most quoted verse, and it is the setting that almost never accompanies the quotation. It is not spoken to an individual looking for a career plan: it is spoken to a defeated people, for a time beyond a whole lifetime of exile, alongside an order to do good to the city that deported them.

One more thing worth checking in your own Bible: editions differ sharply on what is promised in that verse. The one displayed on this page speaks of thoughts of peace, and what it offers is patience and a term. Others speak of a future and a hope. The verse is the same; the promise, as worded, is not.