FROM THE ADVENT of Amos and up to point we have reached in our story (the last decades of the seventh century B.C.E.), it is the classical prophets who have been charged with conducting the war against idolatry, and with doing so by means of words rather than through the sword. But with the accession of Josiah to the throne of Judah in 640 B.C.E., a large share of the responsibility for carrying on this war shifts for the moment from the prophets to a king. In that shift, the sword does not replace the word altogether, but it inevitably comes to play a greater part than it has since the days of Elijah.
Josiah is only a child of eight when he becomes the king. It is now over fifty years since his grandfather Manasseh introduced, encouraged, and supported the idolatrous “abominations” within Judah, and even within the Temple itself, that Josiah will dedicate himself to extirpating. In the version of the story based upon the Second Book of Kings that we have already glanced at briefly, it is not until 622 B.C.E. that Josiah—by then in his twenties—embarks on his great campaign of religious reform. To recapitulate: during repairs to the Temple, the Book of Deuteronomy (either in part or some sections of it) is discovered and brought to the king. Josiah, upon reading it, tears his clothes as a sign of grief and penitence. He then sends inquiries to the prophetess Hulda, who authenticates the scroll, but informs him that the doom of the nation has already been sealed by the unforgivable sins of Manasseh (though Josiah himself will be spared the sight of the disaster to come).
In spite of Hulda’s prophecy, the king orders that the scroll be read to the people, who are as deeply impressed—and presumably as frightened—as he has been. And so he and all the people
. . .made a covenant before the LORD, to walk after the LORD, and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book.
Now, no one in Judah really needs Deuteronomy to learn that idolatry is the most grievous of all violations of God’s “commandments and his testimonies and his statutes.” But some people have either forgotten or have never understood that putting other gods beside God is as bad as putting other gods before Him. That is, “syncretism,” which has been prevalent in Judah, and which, it would appear, has been naively or ignorantly practiced with a good conscience by many, also runs counter to the First of the Ten Commandments. Those Commandments, originally promulgated in Exodus, are repeated in Deuteronomy with a few variations, and the First in particular serves as a potent reminder that syncretism is no better than outright apostasy.
Deuteronomy also goes over much else that in the future will be (or conceivably to some extent already has been) written down in the four books that will eventually be placed before it to make up the Pentateuch. But Deuteronomy also contains several new things. The most disturbing of these to Josiah and his audience is this series of verses:
Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place . . . . But unto the place which the LORD your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto his habitation shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt come: And thither ye shall bring your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, and your tithes, and heave offerings of your hand, and your vows, and your freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and of your flocks . . . . Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.
Reading or hearing these verses, Josiah and the people can only conclude that “the place” where God has chosen to put His name is the Temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem, and that they are forbidden to offer sacrifices anywhere else.
The reason this comes as so great a shock is that nowhere is there even the remotest hint of such a prohibition either in the traditions out of which the stories and the laws in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers will come (assuming they still have not been written down), or in the sermons and oracles of the prophets, or in the living religious culture of the children of Israel. On the contrary: the people of Judah are aware that their ancestors from Abraham on down built altars and shrines in many places to which no objection has ever before been raised—not by God Himself nor by any of His appointed spokesmen.
For all that, Josiah is convinced by Deuteronomy that even the altars and the shrines that have been dedicated to the God of Israel—including the most ancient—but that stand outside the Temple in Jerusalem must be destroyed along with all those serving other gods. But putting first things first, the king begins by ridding the Temple itself—where God has chosen “to put His name”—of the Assyrian cultic objects brought or erected there by Manasseh. Only then does he institute a purge of all altars and sanctuaries of every kind outside the Temple itself.
Fortunately, this is a period when the Assyrian empire, in an early sign of its impending decline, is too preoccupied with challenges from the newly rising power of the Babylonians and the ever-troublesome Egyptians to pay much attention to tiny Judah. Testing the waters by daring to desecrate what is sacred to the Assyrians and getting away with it, Josiah is emboldened to retake large swatches of territory that had been lost to the pagan empire.
Among the territories he reclaims is a segment of the old Northern Kingdom. This gives him an opportunity to extend his purge even unto the ancient altar dedicated to the God of Israel at Beth-el, as well as the “high places” scattered throughout the North where pagan rituals have been enacted; in the process—unsheathing the sword—he massacres many of the priests who have presided over these shrines. From hereon in, there will be no sacrificing and no celebration of such festivals as Passover anywhere except in the Temple in Jerusalem—now, thanks to Josiah’s irredentist conquests, the capital of a kingdom almost as large as the one that existed before the death of Solomon and the subsequent secession of the North more than three centuries earlier.
In general, this picture of Josiah’s program still holds among the historians, except that most of them have come to reject the idea that his religious reforms began only with the discovery in 622 B.C.E. of Deuteronomy. The prevailing view now is that Josiah, young as he was but guided by older advisers, initiated this campaign long before that date. Indeed, the repairs to the Temple fabric during which the scroll was presumably discovered are themselves now thought to have been a stage in the already ongoing job of cleaning up after Manasseh.
Lending credibility to this new version is the fact that (as we have already seen) Hezekiah, the great-grandfather of Josiah, preceded him in a campaign to centralize all worship in the Temple. From which it can be deduced that Deuteronomy itself, or the traditions out of which it was compiled, must already have been familiar for a long time (even if, as some scholars think, Hezekiah’s motives were more political than religious in wishing to assert his power over the cult and the priesthood). But more telling evidence that Deuteronomy was not suddenly unearthed in 622 B.C.E., or newly composed out of whole cloth, is the thorough familiarity with the book shown by the young Jeremiah.
ALTHOUGH WRITING A proper “Life and Times of Jeremiah” would no more be possible than doing a similar job on Isaiah, the scholars, mercifully, have left us with only one Jeremiah. What plagues them—and us—here is the authenticity or the authorship of this or that chapter of the text.I Still, Jeremiah differs in one important respect from Isaiah or the other books of the classical prophets who came before him. Whereas they are all very stingy with biographical information, Jeremiah’s is full of details about him and his life, and many of his oracles are precisely dated as well. Much of the biographical and autobiographical material is scattered and out of chronological order, but it can be sorted out with the help of sources outside the Hebrew Bible. Yet even on its own, this material supplies us with a fairly good basis for sketching a fuller portrait of this most human of the prophets than we can of any other.
We know, to begin with, that Jeremiah was born in the village of Anathoth near Jerusalem around 640 B.C.E. (making him about eight years younger than Josiah). We know that he came from a relatively prosperous priestly family whose ancestral roots were in the North (where the traditions underlying the book of Deuteronomy, or the book itself, may very well have originated and then been brought South by refugees after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C.E.). We know that (like Samuel) Jeremiah was called to be a prophet while still a boy of twelve or thirteen. We know that he later acquired a secretary or amanuensis, Baruch the son of Neriah, to whom he would dictate many of his prophecies and who would write them down.
As to his familiarity with Deuteronomy, we know—or can confidently infer—something about that, too. This was still a period when priests were not only cultic functionaries, but were also trained to be custodians and teachers of the law (in Hosea’s phrase, “the knowledge of God”). Judging from his earliest prophecies, the young Jeremiah was already steeped in Deuteronomy by the time he began preaching, and it continued to be the major influence on his thinking, as witness the more than two hundred citations from it in his own book. Yehezkel Kaufmann:
The inaugural vision of the young Jeremiah [in 627 B.C.E.] antedates the discovery of the book in the Temple, yet it is pervaded by the figures and language of Deuteronomy. The book must have been an element in Jeremiah’s education; he studied it in his youth in the priestly school of Anathoth and absorbed its language and spirit. To him the book was “the Torah of God,” and he regarded it thus to the end of his days.
There has been much dispute over Jeremiah’s attitude toward the Josianic reforms. This is another issue on which I am disinclined to swell an already overcrowded field of speculations. To me, however, it seems almost inconceivable in the light of his relation to Deuteronomy that Jeremiah can have been anything less than enthusiastic about Josiah’s efforts to do what “the Torah of God” commanded.
But then how do we explain Jeremiah’s relentless denunciations of the results of these efforts? Or the position he takes on the political crises into which, he prophesies, his nation is shortly to be plunged as a punishment for sins that seem more characteristic of Manasseh’s than Josiah’s reign?
One much-favored theory is that Jeremiah is responding to a post-Josianic regression. Yet as will soon become clear, even during Josiah’s lifetime the prophet is already out there warning about an unnamed menace from the north that will sweep all before it in a rampage of destruction. However, not until some five years after the death of Josiah at the Battle of Megiddo in 609 B.C.E. does the menace acquire a local habitation and a name in Jeremiah’s prophecies.
The threat that worried Josiah was an Egypt bent on exploiting the weakening condition of Assyria (thanks to which condition Judah was enjoying a brief period of independence). This is probably why—at the cost of his life—he went to fight at Megiddo on the side of Assyria against Egypt. All in vain: the Egyptians won, and just as Josiah had feared, Judah became its vassal. But only for a short while. By 605 B.C.E., when the dust had settled over these imperial rivalries, the Babylonians replaced the Egyptians as the dominant power of the region—and as the masters of Judah.
Unlike Nahum, Jeremiah takes no delight in the fall of Assyria, and unlike Habakkuk, he does not regard the Babylonians as an even worse alternative. Jeremiah even goes around proclaiming to all and sundry—including Josiah’s two main successors on the throne of Judah, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah—that they should submit without resistance to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Otherwise they will bring destruction on their heads. And when Jeremiah speaks of destruction, he does not, in contrast to the First Isaiah, spare Jerusalem, or even the Temple, “the house of God.” Neither of these, he says (just as Micah did before him in relation to Assyria a century before), is inviolate: if Judah provokes Nebuchadnezzar, both the city and the Temple will be set ablaze and the people will be exiled to a foreign land.
There are two major political crises during which Jeremiah spreads this message around—a message that is understandably condemned as seditious by elements of the population who, together with many prophets and priests, believe that under the right circumstances Judah can regain full independence. Worse yet, Jeremiah’s prophecies are considered blasphemous because they call into question the still regnant belief that God’s covenants both with the children of Israel and with the Davidic dynasty are unconditional and irrevocable.
The first of these two crises occurs during Jehoiakim’s reign. When we come to Ezekiel in the next chapter of our story, it will be necessary to go into Jehoiakim’s policies in more detail. But for the present, we can skip over the dynastic and other complications, and merely record that Jehoiakim was originally put on the throne in 608 B.C.E. as a vassal of Egypt during its brief rule over Judah following the death of Josiah. However, Jehoiakim then became a vassal of Babylon after its ascendancy over Egypt in 605 B.C.E. Subsequently—and again I am deferring the details until we reach Ezekiel—around 600 B.C.E., Jehoiakim decided to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar, and after some hesitation, the Babylonian king responded by sending in overwhelming force against Judah.
Before the conclusion of this episode, Jehoiakim died and was replaced by his son Jehoiachin. But the new king held out for only three months before surrendering to Nebuchadnezzar. Acting with greater leniency than Jeremiah had expected, Nebuchadnezzar did not destroy the city. Instead (in 598 B.C.E.), he contented himself with carting off the sacred vessels of the Temple and the treasures of the royal palace. He also deported King Jehoiachin and most of Judah’s leading citizens to Babylon. But he did not depopulate Judah, which he left to be ruled by Zedekiah, another of Josiah’s sons.
EVEN BEFORE THIS relatively mild preview of what twelve years later, in 586 B.C.E., will be the complete fulfillment of his most dire and violent prophecies, Jeremiah suffers harassment and persecution to a much greater extent than any of the classical prophets before him. He is arrested; he is flogged; he is made to spend a night in the stocks; he is mocked; he is put on trial for his life. Even members of his own family join in conspiracies hatched by residents of his birthplace of Anathoth not only to silence but to kill him.
Driven to despair, and complaining all the while to God, Jeremiah is still incapable of desisting from speaking the words he is commanded to speak. On orders from God, he even writes to the deportees in Babylon after 598 B.C.E. telling them not to listen to those who promise a speedy return to Judah. They are to strike roots in exile, to marry and make lives for themselves there, and even to “. . . seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.” News of this letter reaches Jerusalem, and the exiles demand that the “madman” who wrote it be imprisoned or executed.
On another occasion—during a conference hosted by Jehoiachin’s successor, King Zedekiah, of several fellow vassal states of Babylon to plot a joint effort to achieve independence—Jeremiah parades the streets of Jerusalem with an oxyoke on his neck (much as the First Isaiah went around naked and barefoot) to symbolize the only course of action that can save them all from utter destruction. And in yet one more mimetic act, he refrains from marrying as a sign of what is in store for the country:
The word of the LORD came also unto me, saying, Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. For thus saith the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land; They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine; and their carcases shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth.
Around 589 B.C.E., Zedekiah, responding to the hopes aroused by the prophets whom Jeremiah has all along denounced as false, and relying on the prospect of support from Egypt (which will prove to be the same “broken reed” it was in the time of the First Isaiah), makes a bid for independence from Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar dispatches his troops to put the rebellion down, but— again for complicated reasons that need not detain us here—there is a short respite of a year or two from the siege of Jerusalem.
During that interval, Jeremiah, accused of collaboration with the enemy and of subverting the morale of the people, is flung into a dungeon, and then transferred to a prison cell, after which he is thrown down a deep muddy pit where he is left to die until an Ethiopian court eunuch (with the complicity of the king) rescues him. Kept under guard in the palace compound, the prophet is secretly consulted again and again by Zedekiah, who hopes against hope that Jeremiah will bring him the same assurances from God about the inviolability of Jerusalem that the First Isaiah gave to Hezekiah. But no such luck. Although Jeremiah, at God’s command, has just purchased a field in Anathoth from his cousin as a sign that the time will come when the land will again be restored to His people, it must first be conquered and made desolate. And so all the king can wring out of the prophet is the same old advice to surrender.
Finally, in 586 B.C.E., the long-besieged Jerusalem is taken by Babylonian forces, and this time there is no leniency. Zedekiah is brought to Nebuchadnezzar’s encampment, where he is made to witness the execution of two of his sons, after which his own eyes are gouged out and he is dragged in chains to Babylon to die an ignominious death. Jerusalem is set to the torch, the Temple goes down in flames, and the contingent of Judahites deported to Babylon is much larger than it was twelve years before. Jeremiah, considered a friend by Nebuchadnezzar, is offered the choice of staying home or going to Babylon where, he is promised, he will be well treated. But he decides to stay. Two months later, however, Gedaliah, the puppet governor Nebuchadnezzar has left behind in Jerusalem, is assassinated along with many Babylonian retainers. Fearing reprisals, Jeremiah’s sympathizers drag him with them against his will to Egypt.
Like the Book of the First Isaiah, the Book of Jeremiah ends with an appendix—a story drawn, with some additions but otherwise almost verbatim, from the Second Book of Kings (and a section of which also appears earlier in the Book of Jeremiah itself). In the First Isaiah the appendix is the story of how Jerusalem is saved from the Assyrians and how King Hezekiah is granted a reprieve from death; in Jeremiah, it is the opposite story of how Jerusalem is taken and destroyed by the Babylonians and how King Zedekiah is put to death.
But preceding the final chapter of Jeremiah is another appendix. It consists of a series of Oracles to the Nations, similar in kind to those we have come across in Amos and Isaiah and will meet with again in Ezekiel. The longest of the series in Jeremiah is a diatribe against Babylon, and though a few of the others seem to have been written at a later date by someone other than Jeremiah himself, a good part of the anti-Babylon tirade has his stylistic mark on it. And so vehemently vengeful are these sentiments that they should silence any and all doubts about whether Jeremiah is at all sympathetic to the imperial power whose strictly political interests he willy-nilly serves in demanding submission to it.
I come back, then, to the problem of how we are to account for the counsel of submission to Nebuchadnezzar that gives Jeremiah so much grief practically from the beginning of his long prophetic career to its very end.
In quest of a solution to this problem, we can turn for guidance to a precedent in the First Isaiah. Just as to Isaiah Assyria was the “rod” God was using to punish Judah, so to Jeremiah Nebuchadnezzar is God’s “servant” who is being sent on the same mission. And as Isaiah declared that the Assyrians would later be punished both for the evil they had done and for their arrogance in thinking that it was through their own power and cunning that their victories had been achieved, so Jeremiah predicts a similar fate for Babylon. Jeremiah himself draws the parallel: “Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will punish the king of Babylon and his land, as I have punished the king of Assyria.”
Nor is this the only indication of an equivalence in Jeremiah’s mind between Assyria then and Babylon now. For one thing, there is a verse earlier in the book in which God promises Jeremiah that He “. . . will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, . . . for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans, and will make it perpetual desolations.” For another thing, at the conclusion of the oracle against Babylon, there is a third-person narrative telling how in 593–94 B.C.E. King Zedekiah goes to Babylon accompanied by an entourage that includes Seraiah, the brother of Jeremiah’s amanuensis Baruch. Before they leave, Jeremiah
. . .wrote in a book all the evil that should come upon Babylon, even all these words that are written against Babylon. And Jeremiah said to Seraiah, When thou comest to Babylon, . . . and shalt read all these words; Then shalt thou say, O LORD, thou has spoken against this place, to cut it off, that none shall remain in it, neither man nor beast, but that it shall be desolate for ever. And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates: And thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her . . . .
According to The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Seraiah (as evidenced by an archaeo-logical find) makes a duplicate copy before throwing the scroll into the river.
In short, even if all the words of the anti-Babylon diatribe are not the words of Jeremiah, we are entitled to postulate (along with John Bright in his edition of the book) that some of them are, and that all the sentiments they express are his.
YET ANOTHER PUZZLE remains: if Jerusalem under a virtuous king like Hezekiah was spared from the Assyrian “rod,” why should Jeremiah proclaim that God will now permit the city and the Temple to be destroyed by Babylon when Josiah, an even more virtuous king, has rededicated himself and his people to His laws and his commandments? The only persuasive solution to this puzzle is that Jeremiah believes Josiah’s purge has failed so dismally that Judah is worse than the Northern Kingdom was in its time.
True, Josiah has undone many of his grandfather’s worst abominations, and he has faithfully executed the commandment of Deuteronomy to destroy both the shrines to idolatry all over the land and those dedicated to God outside the precincts of the Temple in Jerusalem. But even during Josiah’s own lifetime, idolatry either has been proving impossible to uproot or is insidiously seeping back in. This is what Jeremiah declares in a passage that harmonizes strains of Hosea with allusions to Deuteronomy:
The LORD said also unto me in the days of Josiah the king, Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? she is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot. And I said after she had done all these things, Turn thou unto me. But she returned not. And her treacherous sister Judah saw it. And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also. And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that she defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and with stocks. And yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah hath not turned unto me with her whole heart, but feignedly, saith the LORD. And the LORD said unto me, The backsliding Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous Judah.
A host of commentators, mainly Protestant, but also Jewish, have read this grave charge as an indication that Jeremiah, like the prophets of the eighth century B.C.E. before him, is opposed to ritual and sacrifice. That is, they interpret Jeremiah as saying that the Josianic reform has involved only the “cult” and has not been accompanied by the sincere repentance that would show itself in the moral sphere rather than only in the realm of ritual.
In support of this interpretation, the phrase “her whole heart” is cited as well as other verses that denigrate sacrifice, such as: “To what purpose cometh there incense to me from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto me.” Or, more radically: “For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices.” But I agree entirely with Kaufmann that when Jeremiah
says that God did not command them on the day of the Exodus concerning sacrifices . . . , he does not intend thereby to deny the divine origin of the sacrificial laws, but, like Amos, he wishes only to emphasize that the cult has no absolute value.
An additional, and more serious, objection to the notion that Jeremiah wants to eliminate the sacrificial cult, however, is that it ignores the passages in which the prophet himself says exactly the opposite:
And it shall come to pass, if ye diligently hearken unto me, saith the LORD, to . . . hallow the sabbath day, to do no work therein;Then shall there . . . come [people] from the cities of Judah, and from the places about Jerusalem, and from the land of Benjamin, and from the plain, and from the mountains, and from the south, bringing burnt offerings, and sacrifices, and meat offerings, and incense, and bringing sacrifices of praise, unto the house of the LORD.
Then, too, in another of his prophecies of consolation (about which more later), where he envisages an ingathering of the exiles and the return of righteousness and joy to Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, Jeremiah includes two promises: that there will never be an end to the Davidic dynasty, and that there will never be lacking descendants of the priests and levites “. . . to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually.”
All this makes nonsense of the notion that Jeremiah is in favor of the abolition of sacrifice and other ritual observances.
But what of the frequently quoted verses that allegedly show him at one with his predecessors of the eighth century B.C.E. in awarding “primacy” to ethics over ritual, as well as in his outrage over the rich, who are in his description of them no better than they were in the time of Amos and the First Isaiah? Does Jeremiah not exclaim: “They are waxen fat, they shine: . . . they judge not the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the needy they do not judge”? And what of a verse like this?:
Thus saith the LORD; Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place.
Finally, what of the principal exhibit usually entered into evidence on this matter—the sermon Jeremiah gives in the precincts of the Temple itself, when he denies that worshiping there can “deliver” the people from punishment for their moral “abominations”?
Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD . . . . For if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye thoroughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbor; If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place . . . . Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.
But, God goes on through the prophet’s voice, if “. . . ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely,” do you imagine that I will allow you to turn my house into “. . . a den of robbers . . . ?”
Jeremiah certainly says all these things. But the difficulty is that standing by themselves they distort and oversimplify his attitude by omitting—as, for purposes of illustration, I myself have deliberately done in quoting these very passages—his conviction that the moral sins he is condemning stem directly from idolatry and are inextricably connected with it.
This becomes especially vivid in the Temple sermon, where oppressing the powerless and shedding innocent blood are immediately associated with “walk[ing] after other gods to your hurt,” and where the violations of several of the Ten Commandments he then brings up are connected with “burn[ing] incense unto Baal, and walk[ing] after other gods whom ye know not.”
So, too, with Jeremiah’s declaration that when God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, He never commanded them to perform sacrifices. This he instantly caps (or glosses) with a suggestion (which is repeated elsewhere in the book) that the people have been misled by false prophets and lying priests to think that God actually wants them to sacrifice their own children to Him:
For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the LORD: . . . they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.II
That God finds it necessary to repudiate this unthinkable suggestion (“neither came it into my heart”) indicates that it must still be as prevalent as it was a century before in Micah’s day.
THE PLAIN TRUTH is that Jeremiah returns so often to the sin of idolatry that he deserves to be remembered as one of the most valiant warriors against it among the prophets. It is idolatry, and nothing else, that to him is the cause of the catastrophe looming ahead:
And I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons; and I will make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant. Who is the wise man, that may understand this? and who is he to whom the mouth of the LORD hath spoken, that he may declare it, for what the land perisheth and is burned up like a wilderness, that none passeth through? And the LORD saith, Because they have forsaken my law which I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, neither walked therein; But have walked after the imagination of their own heart, and after Baalim, which their fathers taught them.
The same note is struck in another great oracle:
For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes, and in your days, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride. And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin that we have committed against the LORD our God? Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law; And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil heart . . . . Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; where I will not shew you favor.
Yet, says God, it was not ever thus:
. . . I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. Israel was holiness unto the LORD, and the firstfruits of his increase: all that devour him shall offend; evil shall come upon them . . . .III
Obviously, like the idealized picture we get from Amos of the relation between God and Israel in the early days of their “marriage,” Jeremiah’s leaves out the incessant complaints of the “bride” about the hardships her “husband” forces her to undergo. We ourselves have seen how in the Pentateuch she demonstrates no “lovingkindness,” or even gratitude to her “husband” and His servant Moses for having led her out of bondage in Egypt. Whining about the food with which she is miraculously provided, she even declares that her life was better in Egypt, slavery and all, and wonders whether she ought to go back. And as for fidelity, it is she who demands that an idol—the golden calf—be fashioned out of the precious metals that her “husband” has conspired with her to steal from her former slavemasters. Therefore He loses patience with her, threatening “divorce” and worse, and the “marriage” is saved only by the pleas of His servant Moses.
Jeremiah ignores all this, and only accuses her of having recently gone astray and become a “whore.” But the poetic effect of the idealization is to highlight how disgusting this once devoted young bride has become in the present when, as Jeremiah, addressing her directly, spits out with loathing,“. . . upon every high hill and under every green tree, you bend, whore.”IV
The metaphor of the whore plying her trade in these particular haunts of nature worship and fertility cults makes for a very rich synthesis, especially pitted against the lingering memory of the faithful young bride. In one densely packed image, we get a pulsating embodiment of the idea that idolatry, being an act of infidelity to God, is both a great sin against Him and a breeder of degeneracy in the sinner.
Jeremiah is mystified. How, he asks, can such an incredible metamorphosis have been effected? How can God’s people have chosen to trade everything in exchange for nothing at all? How can they have thrown away life, and chosen sterility in its place?
Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the LORD. For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
But soon the metaphor of the whore comes back in an unstoppable rush of images of wild animals in heat:
How canst thou say, I am not polluted, I have not gone after Baalim? see thy way in the valley, know what thou hast done: thou art a swift dromedary traversing her ways; A wild ass used to the wilderness, that snuffeth up the wind at her pleasure; in her occasion who can turn her away? all that seek her will not weary themselves; in her month they shall find her.V
Thanks to such passages (and the mistaken attribution to him of the Book of Lamentations) Jeremiah’s name—like Cassandra’s to the ancient Greeks—has become a byword for gloom and forebodings of disaster. Moreover, he has even been accused by some critics of lacking love for his own people. Here is a man, they charge, who never stops preaching submission by God’s chosen people to a pagan enemy, and who seems to take a positive relish in using his literary powers to describe the horrors that will befall them if—as he fully expects—they should fail to adopt so repugnant a course.
It is not surprising, then, that Jeremiah excites the wrath of the leaders of Judah—from kings to priests and other prophets: not prophets of Baal, but prophets like Hananiah speaking in the name of God of Israel. It is not surprising that they look upon Jeremiah as a traitor to their country and a blasphemer against their God. It is not surprising that they keep asking what they have done to bring the wrath of God down upon them, even to the unimaginable extent of withdrawing protection from His own “house,” and from the city in which He has placed His name, and consigning them to the flames of a marauding pagan empire. They themselves might have agreed that the royally sanctioned idolatry and the pollution of the Temple under Manasseh would merit such a fate. But why now, when all that has been abolished, and the only idolatry left in the land is being practiced in private?
Yet (as Jeremiah well knows) Deuteronomy is no less harsh on private than on public idolatry:
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods . . . . Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God . . . .
Even with this passage from Deuteronomy ringing (as we may suppose) in his ears, Jeremiah does not call for the people of Judah to kill the sinners in their midst. What he keeps insisting is that God has appointed Nebuchadnezzar to administer the punishment, and that subjection to Babylon is His will. Hence, refusing to submit will only make the punishment worse. It is this lesson that his direst prophecies are intended to teach.
YET TO LEAVE it at that is to do a great injustice to Jeremiah. It requires turning a blind eye to his reluctance to deliver such a message—a reluctance so great that it sometimes spills over into outright rebellion against God. From the very beginning, when he is just a boy and God announces that he is destined to be a prophet, he protests:
Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. Then said I, Ah, LORD God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.
As the example of Moses himself demonstrates, there is nothing new or unusual in this effort to avoid the burdens of prophecy. But compare the First Isaiah. When he sees God sitting on His throne surrounded by six angels crying to one another: “. . . Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory,” his first response is to moan,“. . . Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips . . . .” But after one of the angels puts a burning coal from the altar on his lips and tells him that his sin is now purged, he immediately responds to God’s question, “. . . Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?,” with an eager “. . . Here am I; send me.” God then informs the First Isaiah that his mission will be thankless. He is even instructed to ensure that it will be thankless:
Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed. Then said I, LORD, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, And the LORD have removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.
This mission would seem to be the very opposite of what a prophet is supposed to do—namely, to urge repentance—and yet the staunch and somewhat aloof First Isaiah does not shrink from it, not now and not ever. His question “how long?” is a sign of anguish and perhaps even a plea that God have mercy on His people. Yet he accepts without demurring that it is too late for repentance and that extreme punishment has become the only way back to forgiveness.
God does not make this as clear to Jeremiah as He did to the First Isaiah, but Jeremiah senses that his mission will be no less thankless than Isaiah’s was. Though there is no burning coal in the scene of Jeremiah’s consecration, God Himself, touching the boy’s lips, puts His words into his mouth. And the first two visions given to the newly commissioned prophet are not only similar in content to God’s revelation to the First Isaiah but almost as inexorable:
For, lo, I will call all the families of the kingdoms of the north, saith the LORD; and they shall come, and they shall set every one his throne at the entering gates of Jerusalem, and against the walls thereof round about, and against all the cities of Judah. And I will utter my judgments against them touching all their wickedness, who have forsaken me, and have burned incense unto other gods, and worshipped the work of their own hands.
There is nothing here about getting the people of Judah to repent as a means of escaping these judgments. There is only God’s assurance that Jeremiah will prevail “. . . against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land,” who will fight him tooth and nail.
Still, like the First Isaiah before him, Jeremiah is promised by God that His people will never be utterly destroyed, and that there will be a remnant out of which a new and purified nation will arise. In common with the First Isaiah before him, Jeremiah, too, cannot resist calling repeatedly for repentance. But even less than the First Isaiah does he truly expect it (“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopards his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil”), and if he ever does begin to entertain hopes, they are immediately dashed. Only a few years after God has spoken to him for the first time, Jeremiah concludes that the Josianic reform is failing to accomplish all that he once expected. Nothing is now left but the chastisement of which Nebuchadnezzar has been nominated by God to be the instrument.
FAR FROM TAKING satisfaction in what God forces him to see and preach, it breaks Jeremiah’s heart:
My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction upon destruction is cried; for the whole land is spoiled . . . . How long shall I see the standard, and hear the sound of the trumpet?VI
There are many other instances of a like tenor, of which the following is only one:
When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in me . . . . For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered? Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!
Feeling as he does, he tries to pray for the people, and is repeatedly forbidden by God to continue, on the ground that it will do no good. To which he retorts on one such occasion with an astonishingly brazen accusation: the people are not at fault, since the prophets who come to them with oracles of reassurance speak in the name of God: “Then said I, Ah, LORD God! behold, the prophets say unto them, Ye shall not see the sword, neither shall ye have famine; but I will give you assured peace in this place.” But it is cold comfort to Jeremiah when God answers that He has not sent those prophets, that they are liars, and that they will perish by famine and the sword along with the people to whom they are prophesying falsely.
Hence the case or lawsuit against God that Jeremiah brings. I alluded to this passage in connection with Habakkuk, but here, in its local setting, it applies not to life in general, but to Jeremiah’s own situation as against that of his enemies: “. . . Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal treacherously? . . . But thou, O LORD, knowest me: thou has seen me, and tried mine heart toward thee . . . .” Cold comfort, too, is God’s answer, which amounts to asking Jeremiah how he will be able to cope with worse in the future when he is having so much difficulty with relatively little trouble in the present.
But what Jeremiah wants is revenge (“. . . pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter”). He wants revenge for his people (“Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not, and upon the families that call not on thy name: for they have eaten up Jacob, and devoured him, and consumed him, and have made his habitation desolate”); and he wants revenge, along with vindication, for himself:
Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved . . . . Behold, they say unto me, Where is the word of the LORD? let it come now. As for me, I have not . . . desired the woeful day; thou knowest: that which came out of my lips was right before thee. Be not a terror unto me: thou art my hope in the day of evil. Let them be confounded that persecute me, but let not me be confounded: let them be dismayed, but let not me be dismayed: bring upon them the day of evil, and destroy them with double destruction.
God, Jeremiah insists, owes him this, having seduced or enticed him into this predicament:
O LORD, . . . thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me. For since I spake, I cried out, I cried violence and spoil; because the word of the LORD was made a reproach unto me, and a derision, daily. Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forebearing, and I could not stay.VII
There is even a moment when Jeremiah seems to tell God that he is resigning:
O LORD, thou knowest: remember me, and visit me, and revenge me of my persecutors; take me not away in thy longsuffering: know that for thy sake I have suffered rebuke. Thy words were found, and I did eat them . . . . I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat alone because of thy hand: for thou hast filled me with indignation. Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail?
God forgives him for this fantastic outburst (he calls God a “liar” and will later exclaim: “Oh LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived . . .”!) and lures him back into prophetic service (“. . . If thou return, then will I bring thee again . . .”). He also promises Jeremiah that he will be saved from his enemies. Yet Jeremiah still fails to get the revenge he so desperately craves, and falls into utter despair:
Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born unto thee; making him very glad. And let that man be as the cities which the LORD overthrew, and repented not: and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noontide; Because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labor and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?
Reading this passage—the dimensions of whose anguish may even exceed a similar outcry in the Book of Job—we cannot help remembering that it was precisely in the womb and before he was born that God chose Jeremiah to be a prophet; and this is what makes his repudiation of his prophetic vocation all the more daring and all the more shattering in its violence. When we come to the Second Isaiah, we will meet the mysterious “Suffering Servant” who is “. . . a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief . . . .” But the description fits Jeremiah to perfection.
NEVERTHELESS, and in spite of everything, Jeremiah persists with a courage that is all the greater for being wrested from so stubbornly powerful an inner resistance. For this God rewards him with the dream of a glorious future when, after seventy years of captivity, all will be forgiven, and the children of Israel, both North and South, will be brought home to live together under a righteous monarch descended from the line of David. No doubt because of his own ancestral connections with the old Northern Kingdom, he experiences a special joy in the prospect of the return of “Ephraim” to the fold, and contemplating this eventuality elicits some of his most beautiful verses:
The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee . . . . Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travaileth with child together: a great company shall return thither.
And it keeps getting better:
. . .for I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn. Hear the word of the LORD, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him . . . . Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, both young men and old together: for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow.
And better:
Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. Thus saith the LORD; Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the LORD; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy.
Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the LORD.VIII
The consolations of Jeremiah are all summed up in the two declarations by God that He would as soon abrogate the laws governing the physical world He created as He would permit the children of Israel to disappear altogether:
Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar;The LORD of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel shall cease from being a nation before me for ever.
In the second such declaration, an even more explicit identification is made between the laws of nature and God’s covenant with the house of David (and in the reference to priests and Levites, incidentally, we hit upon another bit of evidence that Jeremiah is not an opponent of the Temple cult):
Thus saith the LORD; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season;Then may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the priests, my ministers . . . . Thus saith the LORD; If my covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth;Then will I cast away the seed of Jacob, and David my servant, so that I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: for I will cause their captivity to return, and have mercy on them.
But even as the old laws of the covenant will always remain in force, God is preparing a new form of this covenant that will be written not on tablets or in books but in the hearts of a reunited people:
Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah . . . . After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts . . . .
As a result, no longer will any need exist for people to teach one another to “. . . Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them . . . .” This is the ultimate promise made in Jeremiah by God, but it is made to Israel and to Israel alone: “. . . [I] will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
Does Jeremiah, then, have nothing to say to the other peoples of the earth? He most emphatically does. Appointed by God from the outset to be “a prophet unto the nations,” and not just to Israel, he is true to this mission—and never more so than in the new attitude he adopts toward idolatry.
Here it is necessary to remind ourselves yet again that idolatry is still regarded as a sin only among the children of Israel. Other nations are not a party to the covenant forbidding the worship of other gods, and therefore cannot be held accountable for it. At the End of Days—so the First Isaiah and Micah have prophesied—they will come to see the error of their ways and submit to the God of Israel. But until that time, they are under no requirement to abandon their idols and they will not be punished for idolatry itself (though they will be accountable for their crimes and cruelties).
Habakkuk has already moved toward a different position, but Jeremiah pushes the envelope:
Thus saith the LORD against all mine evil neighbors . . . . Behold, I will pluck them out of their land . . . . And it shall come to pass, if they will diligently learn the ways of my people, to swear by my name, The LORD liveth; as they taught my people to swear by Baal; then shall they be built in the midst of my people. But if they will not obey, I will utterly pluck up and destroy that nation, saith the LORD.
In his letter to the exiles of 598 B.C.E., Jeremiah also instructs them to teach the idolators among whom they are now living that “. . . the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation.” Then, suddenly switching from Hebrew to Aramaic (the language of Babylon), and thereby emphasizing that this message is directed straight at the idolators, Jeremiah continues: “Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.” “For the first time,” writes Kaufmann,
and not in vision but in reality, a message on idolatry is addressed “to them.” . . . Jeremiah carries the war against idolatry into its own territory . . . . Isaiah had heralded the end of idolatry in an eschatological act of God; Jeremiah charges Israel with the task of carrying this message to the nations and thus take part in bringing them back to God.
Even as he stresses the “practical universalism” of Jeremiah, however, Kaufmann rightly warns against interpreting the idea of the new covenant as awaiting its fulfillment in Christianity, since the new religion will “nullif[y] the law and commandments.” And quite apart from the error of thinking that Jeremiah or the other classical prophets are against sacrifice, there is the further consideration raised by Kaufmann that what those prophets demand is “not a particular doctrine, but a particular reality” expressing itself primarily in obedience to the law.
THIS MISUNDERSTANDING OF the new covenant as an incomplete prelude to the New Testament has made it possible for many Christian commentators to revere Jeremiah as a “great thinker” and forerunner. But otherwise he tends to be patronized. This man, who was without doubt one of the greatest poets ever to walk the earth, is even denied eminent literary standing. “While it is generally agreed that Jeremiah ranks as one of the truly great thinkers in the Old Testament,” reports Jack R. Lundbom, “his language and style have not always won high acclaim.”
Lundbom traces this lack of acclaim all the way back to one of the early Fathers of the Church, Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin in the fourth century C.E. In his Prologue to Jeremiah, Jerome remarks that “Jeremiah the prophet . . . is seen to be more rustic in language than Isaiah and Hosea and certain other prophets among the Hebrews, but equal in thought.” Since Jerome, Lundbom goes on,“it has been agreed that Jeremiah suffers when compared to Isaiah,” and he gives as an example a commentator, S. R. Driver, who, writing some fifteen centuries after Jerome, still finds Jeremiah’s style “essentially artless.” Yet even Lundbom himself, who wishes to defend Jeremiah against these philistine judgments, can come up with nothing stronger than a tepid dissent: “Upon close inspection, Jeremiah is seen to be a skillful poet, someone well trained in the rhetoric of his day . . . . His poetry is generally well balanced.”
Similarly with other of Jeremiah’s qualities. Besides being one of the greatest poets ever to walk the earth, he was one of the bravest of all men in overcoming the inner reluctance and the resentments that plagued him all his life, and in never yielding to the intolerable pressures put upon him to soften the message he had been sent by God to bring. And yet he is charged—in John Bright’s recital of the indictment—with being “a weakling, a quitter, a small-spirited man whose faith was not great enough to endure the testing that was imposed upon it.” Bright sets out to refute these preposterous slanders, and he says all the right things along the way:
[Jeremiah] was driven by his calling to exhibit a strength that was not by nature his. More than this, Jeremiah seems himself to have understood that his complaints and recriminations were unworthy of him . . . [and] he struggled to purge himself of this weakness of his character.
Yet so defensive in tone is this defense that it almost leaves the charges standing.
It is the same with Jeremiah’s prophecies of consolation. Never mind that these are among the most tender and sublime ever offered to his people: even the Talmud concurs with the reductive and simplistic view that “Jeremiah is all doom.” In fact, his consolatory oracles are thought by some modern scholars to be so alien to his true spirit that they are assigned to the Second Isaiah. Here, again, the rabbis, evidently overlooking as much of the Book of Isaiah as they do the Book of Jeremiah, concur: “Isaiah,” the same talmudic passage adds, “is all consolation.” On this issue, John Bright is less defensive in arguing that there is no good reason to rob Jeremiah of much of the soothing material that has been credited to others.
The book as we have it, however, ends with the Jeremiah who is “all doom.” In the first appendix—the Oracles Against the Nations—he is a prophet of consolation only to the extent of envisaging punishment of the pagan peoples who have oppressed the children of Israel. This is the Jeremiah we last hear (and I am continuing to assume along with Bright that at least parts of the final chapters are in his voice).
But the Jeremiah we last see (in a third-person narrative, presumably written by Baruch, about the aging prophet’s arrival in Egypt) is not in the business of consolation either. The minute he sets foot in Egypt, he discovers that the Israelites who are already living there have been practicing idolatry, and this instantly sets him to railing against them and threatening the direst of punishments. But instead of taking heed, they respond to his chastisements by attributing all their misfortunes to the very fact that for a time they had stopped sacrificing to the Queen of Heaven. And so the story ends as it began: with Jeremiah forced to sally forth yet again into the war against idolatry among his people, and yet again being repulsed and jeered at by them, even in exile.
There is no sign of what then happened to him, but chances are that he met his death in Egypt shortly thereafter, when in his sixties. With his departure, the tradition that—for all his reluctance and resistance—he so magnificently upheld and so valiantly advanced will now be passed on to and carried forward on the foreign soil of Babylon by two more of Israel’s greatest prophets: Ezekiel and the Second Isaiah.