Jeremiah

Jeremiah (Heb. Yirmeyahu, perhaps “the LORD exalts”) is a priest of Anathoth in Benjamin, son of Hilkiah, called by the LORD in the thirteenth year of Josiah (c. 627 BC). His ministry spans the reigns of Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah, and continues into the months after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC (Jer.1.2–3). He is the longest-serving of the writing prophets, more than forty years on a single message: the covenant has been broken, judgment by Babylon is now certain, and the only path is repentance and submission. The cost is enormous. He is forbidden to marry (Jer.16.2), beaten and put in stocks by the priest Pashhur (Jer.20), thrown into a muddy cistern by the princes (Jer.38.6), and ultimately carried against his will to Egypt by Jewish refugees after the assassination of Gedaliah (Jer.43). He prophesies the seventy-year exile (Jer.25.11) and the new covenant written on the heart (Jer.31.31–34). Along with his book he is the traditional author of Lamentations, the five-poem elegy over fallen Jerusalem. The New Testament reads his suffering ministry as a foreshadowing of the rejected Christ (Mat.16.14).