Introducing Jeremiah

Jeremiah 1-2

            Jeremiah is a whole other kind of prophet from Isaiah. For one thing, Jeremiah ministered about a century later than Isaiah (626 BC to 586 BC), and the crisis was at hand. Babylon was ascendant on the world stage, and they were, if anything, more powerful than the Assyrians had been. Jeremiah saw the kings of Judah trying to protect their little country by forging alliances here and there and he saw the disaster that that political dabbling was going to cause for Judah. While from one point of view it looked like a wise way to insulate a weak nation, Jeremiah saw it as just one more example of refusing to trust the Lord for their deliverance.

            Jeremiah himself was from a priestly family. Although the temple doesn’t figure overly much in Jeremiah’s prophecy, it is certainly a present concern. More than that, Jeremiah had access to the royal palace, and we will read about him in controversy with kings and royal advisers.

            Jeremiah has sometimes been called the weeping prophet. He had a hard road. His message—largely a message of doom—stirred up powerful opposition, and he was often persecuted because of it. Jeremiah has in common with Moses a raw honesty with the Lord: he doesn’t always love his work and he blames the Lord for saddling him with it.

            Next, a word of preparation. On the basis of number of words, Jeremiah is the longest book in the Old Testament (well, in the whole Bible, really), nudging Genesis by about a thousand words and the book of Psalms by some 3,000. Not only is Jeremiah long, it is also gloomy. Isaiah had his soaring promises of restoration; Jeremiah noticeably less.

            As you read, listen for resonances and echoes from the book of Deuteronomy. Scholars use a word, Deuteronomistic, to describe parts of the Bible that focus on covenant faithfulness and covenant unfaithfulness. I myself find Jeremiah very much in this train. Maybe at some point down the road, I’ll have a chance to talk about how Jeremiah turns up in Jesus’ ministry, too. While the influence of Isaiah and Daniel is obvious in Jesus’ ministry, Jeremiah’s is more subtle, assumed, especially when Jesus is criticizing Israel.

 

            I will be away the next week, so no new posts until February 13.