Old Testament · Major Prophets
יִרְמְיָהוּ
The weeping prophet, forty years of unheeded warning, and a new covenant written on hearts.
Forty years of telling people the truth and being hated for it. Jeremiah is called as a young man, forbidden to marry as a living sign, thrown into a cistern, and forced to watch everything he predicted arrive. He is the most emotionally exposed of the prophets, and the book preserves his complaints against God in language that borders on accusation. It is also not in chronological order, which trips readers up; the scroll was burned by a king and rewritten, and the arrangement is thematic. Two things stand out: the promise of a new covenant written on hearts rather than tablets, which Hebrews quotes at length, and the fact that Jeremiah's counsel, that surrender was God's will, sounded exactly like treason to everyone who heard it.
If you remember one thing
Forty years of preaching and almost nobody listened. The book is the record of a faithful failure, and the promise buried inside it, of a covenant written on hearts, is the one the New Testament claims.
“I will put my law in their inward parts, and I will write it in their heart. I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
Jeremiah 31:33
Jeremiah 20:7-18
The prophet accuses God of deceiving him and curses the day he was born. Scripture leaves the complaint standing.
Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.
Everyone here has a write-up, drawn from the same records that explain the names while you read the text.
Called as a youth under Josiah, Jeremiah spent forty tearful years warning Judah that Babylon was God's rod, and was beaten, jailed, and thrown in a cistern for it. He lived to see Jerusalem burn, and promised beyond it a new covenant written on the heart.
Set on the throne by Egypt and renamed, Jehoiakim taxed the land heavily and did evil. When Jeremiah's warnings were read to him he cut the scroll to pieces and burned it. He submitted to Babylon, then rebelled, and died as Nebuchadnezzar closed in.
The last king of Judah, installed by Babylon and forever wavering. He ignored Jeremiah and rebelled; after a long siege Jerusalem fell, the temple was burned, and Zedekiah was captured. His sons were killed before his eyes, which were then put out, and he was led to Babylon in chains.
He wrote Jeremiah's words on a scroll, read them publicly when the prophet was barred from the temple, and rewrote the whole thing after the king cut it up and burned it. He gets one short oracle of his own, telling him not to seek great things for himself.
A foreigner in the palace who heard that Jeremiah had been lowered into a muddy cistern to die, went to the king about it, and pulled him out with ropes and old rags for padding under his arms. He was promised his life for trusting God.
Laban's younger daughter, for whom Jacob worked fourteen years, and who was long childless before bearing Joseph and then Benjamin, dying in the birth. Buried on the road to Bethlehem.
The chiefs and kings descended from Esau, listed in Genesis 36 and again in 1 Chronicles 1. Teman becomes a byword for wisdom, which is why Job's friend Eliphaz is a Temanite and why Jeremiah asks whether counsel has perished from Teman.
The stewards, counselors, recorders, bodyguards, and hangers-on who fill the books of Samuel and Kings. Barzillai the Gileadite fed David's army in exile and then refused to come to the palace because at eighty he could no longer taste what he ate.
The names attached to prophets and officials to identify them: Isaiah son of Amoz, Ezekiel son of Buzi, Hosea son of Beeri, Joel son of Pethuel, Jonah son of Amittai, Zechariah son of Berechiah son of Iddo, Baruch son of Neriah, Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel.
A family that kept a vow made by their ancestor Jonadab: no wine, no houses, no sowing, no vineyards, live in tents. They kept it for generations, and when Jeremiah set jars of wine in front of them in the temple and told them to drink, they refused.
Scripture names the men who prophesied against its own prophets, and it does not present them as obvious frauds. Hananiah broke the wooden yoke off Jeremiah's neck in the temple and announced that Babylon would fall in two years. Zedekiah son of Chenaanah made iron horns and promised Ahab victory, then struck Micaiah across the face.
The officers and priests who move through Jeremiah's later chapters. Johanan son of Kareah warned Gedaliah of the plot against him, avenged him, and then led the survivors into Egypt against Jeremiah's explicit word, taking the prophet with them. Seraiah son of Neriah, Baruch's brother, carried a scroll of judgment to Babylon and threw it in the Euphrates.
The high priest who found the book of the law during Josiah's temple repairs, and the scribe Shaphan who read it to the king. Josiah tore his clothes. Shaphan's son Ahikam later protected Jeremiah from being killed.
Ahikam's son, appointed by Babylon to govern the few people left in Judah after Jerusalem fell. He told them to settle down, gather the harvest, and serve the king of Babylon, and it was working.
Crowned at eight, and the great reformer. When the lost Book of the Law was found during temple repairs, the young king tore his robes and set about tearing down idols across Judah and even Bethel in the north, fulfilling a prophecy three centuries old. He kept the largest Passover since the judges. No king turned to the LORD so wholly, yet he fell at Megiddo, fighting Pharaoh Neco.
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