Jeremiah (Heb. Jirmejâhú, or Jirmejâh), the prophet, son of Hilkiah, the priest, was a native of
Anathoth (now Anata), in the territory of Benjamin, about miles NNW. of Jerusalem. In Anathoth while still young (i. 6) he received the prophetic call, described in the opening of his book, in the thirteenth year of Josiah (627-26 B.C.), and his prophetic activity, principally carried on in Jerusalem, continued for at least forty years thereafter. His teaching in its political, ethical, and religious aspects can be understood only after a careful study of the complicated circumstances of his time, which, of course, can only be broadly indicated here. It was after he had been for five years a prophet—in the eighteenth year of Josiah—that the important occurrences connected with the finding of the book of the law (2 Kings, xxii., xxiii.) took place; and, although Jeremiah is not mentioned in the history as having had any part in these, he was fully in sympathy with the reformation movement which they inaugurated, and most of his distinctive prophetic teaching had reference to it (see, for example, especially xi. 1-8; xvii. 19-27). In the thirty-first year of Josiah, when Jeremiah had been for eighteen years a prophet, occurred the death of that king on the battlefield of Megiddo, and Jehoahaz or Shallum, his immediate successor, was, after a brief reign of three months, deposed by Pharaoh-Necho, the conqueror, in favour of Jehoakim, the subservient vassal of the Egyptian king. Jehoakim had not been long on the throne before Jeremiah began to foretell the doom of Judah and Jerusalem, which he saw to be inevitably approaching, in the series of characteristic discourses preserved in chaps. vii.-ix. and xxvi., warning the Jewish leaders of the folly of the security with which they vainly trusted in the presence of the temple of the Lord among them, and bidding them look to the ruins of Shiloh. It was at the close of one of these discourses that he was seized by the priests and the prophets and all the people and brought before the authorities on the capital charge of having 'prophesied against the city,' and it was chiefly to the intervention of his fast friend Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, that he owed his acquittal and release. The battle of Carchemish, in the fourth year of Jehoakim, when the defeat and retreat of Pharaoh-Necho laid the whole of Syria and Palestine open to the approach of the Chaldeans, naturally had a profound effect upon the foreign policy of Judah; the same year marked also a new departure in the prophesying of Jeremiah, in so far as he began henceforward to declare Nebuchadnezzar's divinely-appointed mission to be to lay upon Judah a period of desolation which was to last for 'seventy' years. It was in this year that he received the divine command to commit to writing the various oracles he had up to that time delivered, and this he did with the assistance of Baruch, his disciple and friend. The incidents of the public reading of this record, and of a subsequent partial reading in the presence of the king, which led to its being committed to the flames, are among the most graphic in the whole book (xxxvi.).
Jehoakim after a reign of eleven years was succeeded by his son Jeconiah, whose brief and obscurely-recorded reign of three months terminated in the deportation of himself and a number of his subjects to Babylon, the incident alluded to in the parable of the two baskets of figs (xxiv.). To these exiles the prophet shortly afterwards addressed the letter contained in chap. xxix., with hopeful assurances, but warning them that the captivity would certainly last for seventy years. To King Zedekiah, who had succeeded, and his advisers, Jeremiah held equally decided language, declaring the futility of all their politic devices against the Chaldean power; the watch-word of his policy was 'Serve the king of Babylon and live,' and this, in the teeth of angry and bitter opposition, he never failed to maintain, as, for example, in his public controversy in the temple court with the rival prophet Hananiah, whose theme was 'Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon' (xxxviii.). At length, in consequence of Zedekiah's treacherous and impolitic alliance with Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar, in Zedekiah's ninth year, invaded Judæa. For a time he was compelled by the appearance of an Egyptian army to raise the siege of Jerusalem, a temporary relief which led the nobles to use their influence with the king to revoke the emancipation of the slaves which shortly before had been proclaimed. This revocation, against which Jeremiah strongly protested, was the theme of his last public address (xxxiv.). Persuaded that the catastrophe he had so long foretold was only postponed, he was in the act of leaving Jerusalem in order to spend the rest of his days in retirement at Anathoth, when, on the suspicion that he was deserting to the Chaldeans, he was arrested and thrown into prison. Still adhering to his gloomy prophecy, he was consigned to the deepest dungeon, where but for the interference of Ebedmelech he would doubtless soon have perished. He was not restored to liberty until an eighteen months' siege had ended in the capture of the city, when he received from Nebuzaradan permission to fix his residence where he chose. It was towards the end of the siege that he gave practical proof of his faith in the ultimate return of his countrymen to their own land by exercising his right of redemption over the ancestral lands of his family in Anathoth. Jeremiah now attached himself to Gedaliah, the governor whom the Babylonians had set over the Jews whom they had left, with his headquarters in Mizpah; after the murder of Gedaliah he accompanied his compatriots to Tahpanes, the border city of Egypt, where, according to tradition, he died a martyr's death.
Viewed in the light of the preceding brief sketch of Jeremiah's life, it will be seen that the book of his prophecies as we now possess it does not follow any chronological order. It consists of the following four parts: (1) chaps. i.-xxxix., consisting of prophecies relating to Judah, mostly with some historical data attached, and all belonging to the period prior to the fall of Jerusalem; (2) chaps. xl.-xlv., narrative of events subsequent to the fall, along with certain prophecies belonging to that period, and also including an oracle relating to Baruch, spoken in the fourth year of Jehoiakim; (3) xlv.-li., oracles relating to foreign nations—Egypt, Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Damascus, Kedar, and the kingdoms of Hazer, Elam, Babylon—of various dates: according to most critics, i.-li. are not by Jeremiah, but by a prophet who wrote in Babylonia towards the close of the captivity; (4) chap. lii., a historical appendix closely parallel to 2 Kings, xxv.
Important critical questions are suggested by the fact that the LXX. version of Jeremiah differs considerably in its arrangement from that now seen in the Massoretic text, and that it is considerably shorter—by about one-eighth of the whole—mainly through the omission of words, clauses, and single verses. The relative value of the Greek and Hebrew recensions has not yet been conclusively determined; neither seems to deserve unqualified preference.
The distinctive advance of Jeremiah's teaching on that of his predecessors is due to his clear recognition of the fact that the divine purpose could not be realised under the forms of the Hebrew state, that the continuity and victory of the true faith could not be dependent on the continuity of the nation. Israel must be wholly dispersed, and can only be gathered again by a divine call addressed to individuals, and bringing them one by one into a new covenant with their God, written on their hearts (xxxi.). Here for the first time in history the ultimate problem of faith is based on the relation of God to the individual soul; and it is to Jeremiah's idea of the new covenant that the New Testament teaching directly attaches itself.
The most important expositions of Jeremiah are those of Ewald (Prophets, vol. iii. Eng. trans. 1887), Graf (1862), Hitzig (1841), and, in English, Cheyne (Pulpit Commentary, 1883-85). See also Cheyne's Jeremiah: his Life and Times (1888), and Ball's The Prophecies of Jeremiah (1890); and Workman's Text of Jeremiah (1889) is useful, though not to be implicitly trusted.