Justified True Belief

(●) The prophet who preached for forty years to a nation that would not listen, and who promised a covenant written on hearts instead of stone. + In churches all over the world, most Sundays, somebody lifts a cup and says the words Jesus said over it: "This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood" (Luke 22:20). Almost nobody in the room hears a quotation. But the phrase "new covenant" was not coined in that upper room. A covenant is a binding agreement that makes two parties into something they were not before, and the promise that God would make a new one was written down about six centuries earlier by a priest’s son from a village outside Jerusalem, at the worst moment in his nation’s history. Jesus picked it up on the night he was betrayed the way you pick up a promise everyone present already knows by heart. Jeremiah son of Hilkiah preached in Judah, the small southern kingdom around Jerusalem, from about 627 BC until the city was burned by the Babylonians in 586 and for some years after that in Egyptian exile. Judah had been living on borrowed time between two empires, and his message for forty years was the one nobody wanted: the city was going to fall, the temple would not save it, and surrender was obedience rather than treason. He was beaten, put in the stocks, accused of desertion, dropped into a muddy cistern, and finally carried off to Egypt by the very people he had stayed behind for. Moses argued about the job at the burning bush and Jonah argued about it outside Nineveh, sitting in the sun after the plant that had shaded him withered, but nobody else’s quarrel with God over the work is preserved at anything like this length. Jeremiah argued out loud, in writing, for decades, and he lost. He is also the prophet whose book shows how a prophetic book was made. In chapter 36 he dictates twenty-three years of preaching to a scribe named Baruch, the scroll is read aloud in the palace in the winter of 604 BC, and King Jehoiakim sits by his fire and cuts it into strips with a knife, three or four columns at a time, feeding it to the coals until there is nothing left. Then Jeremiah dictates it again, "and many similar words were added to them" (Jeremiah 36:32). Nothing else in the Old Testament lets a reader watch a book of the Bible being composed, destroyed, and rewritten longer than before. Neither the year of his birth nor the year of his death is recorded anywhere. The dates attached to his name are a convention built on two things the book does give: he was called in the thirteenth year of King Josiah, which the standard chronologies put at 627 BC (Jeremiah 1:2), and he protested that he was "only a youth" (Jeremiah 1:6), which suggests a man in his twenties and so a birth somewhere around 650. The last thing recorded of him is a confrontation with Judean refugees in Egypt a few years after 586, and everything after that is silence. Both ends of his date range are estimates, and nothing in his story depends on them.

(●) c. 650 BC: Born into a priestly family at Anathoth, a village close enough to Jerusalem to see the smoke of its altar. + The book opens by telling you exactly where he came from: "the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin" (Jeremiah 1:1). Anathoth keeps its name in the modern village of Anata, a little under three miles northeast of Jerusalem, with the ancient settlement itself most likely the low hill of Ras el-Kharrubeh just to the southwest of it, an hour’s walk from the city on a good road. A boy growing up there could see the city from the ridge. Being a priest’s son mattered in a way the story keeps returning to. It meant he was raised inside the system he would spend his life attacking, and it may have meant something sharper still. Anathoth was where Solomon had banished the priest Abiathar three centuries earlier, sparing his life but ending his career (1 Kings 2:26), and a family of priests living there was a family with a long memory of being on the losing side. His father Hilkiah shares a name with the high priest who found the book of the law in Josiah’s temple (2 Kings 22:8), and some readers have wanted them to be the same man. There is no evidence for it, and the name was common. It is safer to say that Jeremiah was born a country priest’s son within sight of the capital, which is remarkable enough for what came next. He never married. God told him not to, and told him why: the children of that generation were going to die of disease and hunger and the sword, and a household would be a hostage to fortune (Jeremiah 16:2-4). The loneliness shows up in his prayers. "I sat alone," he says, "because your hand was upon me" (Jeremiah 15:17).

(●) 627 BC: The word came to him in King Josiah’s thirteenth year, and his first response was that he was too young for it. + The call is a few lines long and it opens before he was born. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5). To consecrate something is to set it apart for one use and no other, the way a cup kept for a wedding anniversary never goes in the everyday cupboard. God is telling a young man that the decision about his life was made before he had one. His answer is the least heroic sentence in the prophetic books. "Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth" (Jeremiah 1:6). The Hebrew word he uses, na’ar, covers everything from a boy to a young man not yet established, and the excuse is not false modesty; it is a man doing the arithmetic of what he is being asked to do and coming up short. God overrules the arithmetic, touches his mouth, and gives him a commission with six verbs in it: to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant (Jeremiah 1:10). Four of demolition, two of construction. That ratio is the shape of his career. The thirteenth year of Josiah was 627 BC, five years before the young king’s great reform, and the timing is worth holding on to. Jeremiah began preaching into a nation that was about to have a religious revival, and he watched that revival happen, and he still said the city was doomed. A few scholars have suggested that 627 was his birth year rather than his call, on the grounds that his recorded preaching seems to start later. The book itself gives no room for it: it dates his ministry from that year straight through to the exile (Jeremiah 1:2-3), and the plain reading has always been the one it asks for.

(●) 609 BC: King Josiah died at Megiddo, and within months Jeremiah stood in the temple gate and nearly lost his life for what he said there. + Josiah was the best king Judah ever had after David, and he was killed in his thirties trying to stop Pharaoh Neco’s army in the pass at Megiddo. After that everything came apart, and it came apart quickly. His son Jehoahaz lasted three months on the throne before Egypt deported him, and Egypt then installed another son, Jehoiakim, who taxed the country to pay the tribute Pharaoh wanted and who had inherited none of his father’s religion. At the beginning of that reign Jeremiah was told to stand in the gate of the temple and preach to everyone coming in to worship (Jeremiah 7:1-15; the same sermon is told again from the outside in Jeremiah 26). What he said was that the building would go the way of Shiloh, the old sanctuary in the north that housed the ark in Samuel’s day and was destroyed so completely that a ruin was all anyone could point to. Israel had assumed God would never let his own house fall. Shiloh was the counterexample, and Jeremiah put it in front of them. The priests and prophets seized him as he finished and said he deserved to die. What saved him was a piece of legal memory and one well-placed friend. Some of the elders recalled that Micah had said much the same thing a hundred years earlier under Hezekiah and had not been executed for it, and Ahikam son of Shaphan, from a family of royal scribes, stood between Jeremiah and the crowd (Jeremiah 26:17-24). The narrator then tells you what happened to a prophet without such a friend. A man named Uriah son of Shemaiah preached the same message, fled to Egypt, was extradited by Jehoiakim’s men, and was killed with a sword and thrown into a common grave (Jeremiah 26:20-23). Jeremiah lived because of Ahikam. He never seems to have forgotten how narrow it was.

(●) 605 BC: He put twenty-three years of preaching onto one scroll, and the following winter the king burned it column by column. + In 605 BC, at Carchemish on the Euphrates, the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Egyptian army that had been running Judah’s politics. Jeremiah dates his own account of it to that year (Jeremiah 46:2), and the same battle is recorded from the winning side in the Babylonian Chronicle, a run of clay tablets in the British Museum written in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script a scribe pressed into the wet clay with the cut end of a reed, setting down the king’s campaigns year by year. The prophet had been saying for two decades that trouble was coming out of the north. It had just arrived. That same year he was banned from the temple precinct, so he found another way in. He dictated everything he had said since 627 to Baruch son of Neriah, a professional scribe, and told him to wait for a fast day and read it aloud in the temple, where the crowd could not avoid it (Jeremiah 36:1-10). The fast came the next year, in the ninth month, and Baruch read. Word travelled up to the palace. The officials had it read again, went pale, and told Baruch to hide. Then comes the scene that gives the book its picture of itself. It was December 604 BC, and the king had a fire going in a brazier in his winter apartments. A courtier named Jehudi read the scroll aloud, and as he finished each three or four columns Jehoiakim took a scribe’s knife, cut them off, and dropped them in the fire, "until the entire scroll was consumed" (Jeremiah 36:23). Three officials begged him not to. He did not listen, and unlike his father Josiah, who had torn his own clothes when the book of the law was read to him, nobody in that room was afraid. So Jeremiah dictated the whole thing over again to Baruch, "and many similar words were added to them" (Jeremiah 36:32). A king with a knife could destroy an edition. He could not stop the dictation.

(●) 597 BC: Babylon took the king, the treasure and the craftsmen, and Jeremiah wrote to the deportees telling them to plant gardens. + Jehoiakim rebelled against Babylon, then died, leaving the siege of his own capital to his eighteen-year-old son. Jehoiachin surrendered Jerusalem after three months, and Nebuchadnezzar took him back to Babylon along with the queen mother, the court, the craftsmen and the metal workers, and the temple treasury, installing the boy king’s uncle Zedekiah on the throne in his place. The Babylonian Chronicle, on the tablet the British Museum numbers 21946, dates the capture of the city to the second day of the month Adar in Nebuchadnezzar’s seventh year, which converts to the middle of March 597 BC, and records that the king of Babylon then appointed a ruler of his own choosing over it. It is one of the tidiest agreements between a Babylonian tablet and a page of Scripture that exists. Jerusalem in the years after that was full of prophets promising the exiles would be home within two years and the temple vessels back on their shelves. Hananiah son of Azzur said so publicly, took the wooden yoke Jeremiah had been wearing around the city as a sign of submission to Babylon, and broke it off his neck in front of everyone (Jeremiah 28:10-11). Jeremiah walked away and came back with a harder word: iron bars in place of the wooden ones, and a death sentence on Hananiah, who died two months later. Then he did something no one expected of the prophet of doom. He wrote a letter to the people already in Babylon, and it told them to settle down: build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children, and pray for the city that had deported them, because seventy years was the term and not two (Jeremiah 29:1-14). Half of that letter is the most quoted sentence he ever wrote. The other half is the one nobody quotes, and it is the reason the first half is worth anything.

(●) 588 BC: With the siege ramps going up he bought a field, and for telling the soldiers to surrender he was dropped into a cistern. + Zedekiah rebelled in his turn, and in January 588 BC the Babylonian army came back and sat down around Jerusalem, and stayed there until the wall broke two and a half years later. Only once did they leave, when an Egyptian army came up and drew them off and the city allowed itself to believe it had been spared, which Jeremiah told them plainly it had not (Jeremiah 37:5-11). Jeremiah’s counsel throughout was the same and it sounded like treason: go out and surrender, and you will live. It was in that gap, walking out to Anathoth to see to a piece of family property, that he was stopped at the Benjamin Gate by a sentry named Irijah, accused of deserting to the enemy, beaten, and imprisoned in a house that had been turned into a jail. While he was locked in the court of the guard, his cousin Hanamel arrived with a business proposition. There was a field at Anathoth, in territory the Babylonians already held, and the law of redemption, the rule that kept land inside a family by giving the nearest relative first refusal on it, put the offer in front of Jeremiah before anyone else. Jeremiah weighed out seventeen shekels of silver, signed the deed in front of witnesses, and had Baruch seal the papers in a clay jar so they would keep, because "Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land" (Jeremiah 32:15). He believed the country was finished and he bought real estate in it anyway. It is the single clearest thing he ever did, and it took no words at all. The palace officials had had enough. Four of them, named in the book as Shephatiah, Gedaliah son of Pashhur, Jucal son of Shelemiah and Pashhur son of Malchiah, got permission to deal with him and lowered him on ropes into a cistern in the guard court. A cistern is a pit cut down into the rock and plastered to hold rainwater through the dry months, narrow at the neck and wide below, which is what makes it a serviceable prison for a man with nobody outside willing to pull him up. There was no water in this one, only mud, and he sank into it (Jeremiah 38:1-6). What saved him this time was a foreigner: Ebed-melech the Cushite, a court official from the upper Nile, who went to the king, said plainly that the man would die of hunger down there, and hauled him out with old rags padded under his armpits so the ropes would not cut him. Two of those officials have left their signatures behind. Excavations in the City of David under Eilat Mazar recovered a clay seal impression reading "Yehucal son of Shelemiah" in 2005 and another reading "Gedaliah son of Pashhur" in 2008, both names appearing together in Jeremiah 38:1. The men who wanted the prophet dead are among the very few people named in the Old Testament whose own seals have come back out of the ground.

(●) 586 BC: Jerusalem fell, he chose to stay in the ruins, and the survivors carried him off to Egypt against his word. + In the summer of 586 BC, by the reckoning most chronologies use (some put it a year earlier), the wall was breached on the ninth day of the fourth month, and a month later Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, burned the temple, the palace and every large house in Jerusalem and pulled the walls down (Jeremiah 39:2; 52:12-14). Zedekiah was caught running for the Jordan, made to watch his sons killed, blinded, and taken to Babylon in chains. Two things the account says about those weeks can be checked against objects that came out of the ground rather than out of a Bible. The first is a set of ostraca, letters written in ink on broken pottery, found in the ruins of the fortress at Lachish in the 1930s. In the fourth of them an officer reports that he is watching for the fire signals of Lachish because he can no longer see Azekah, which is a soldier’s way of saying that the other fortress has gone dark; Jeremiah 34:7 names those same two towns as the last fortified cities still holding out. The second is a cuneiform receipt in the British Museum, dated to 595 BC and picked out of the tablet room in 2007, recording a gift of gold to a Babylonian temple by Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the chief eunuch of Nebuchadnezzar. His name and his office match the Babylonian officer listed among those who sat in the Middle Gate after the breach (Jeremiah 39:3), which means one of the men in that gate has left a receipt behind him. The victors treated Jeremiah better than his own people had. Nebuzaradan gave him a choice, Babylon with honour or Judah with the poor, and he stayed, joining the small administration Gedaliah son of Ahikam had been left to run from Mizpah. It was the son of the man who had saved his life more than twenty years earlier at the temple gate. For a few months there was something like peace, farms restarted, people drifting back from the hills. Then Gedaliah was assassinated at dinner by a member of the royal family with Ammonite backing, and the survivors panicked. They came to Jeremiah, swore they would do whatever God said, waited ten days for an answer, were told to stay in the land and not fear Babylon, and immediately did the opposite, taking Jeremiah and Baruch with them down into Egypt (Jeremiah 42:1-43:7). At Tahpanhes in the Nile delta he buried stones in the pavement in front of Pharaoh’s residence and said Nebuchadnezzar would one day set his throne over them. The last scene we have of him is an argument with Judean women who had gone back to burning incense to the queen of heaven, a goddess whose household worship they had kept up in Judah before the fall, and who told him, to his face, that things had gone better for them when they did (Jeremiah 44:15-19). How he died is not recorded. The Lives of the Prophets, an early Jewish collection of prophetic biographies, reports that his own countrymen stoned him to death at Tahpanhes, and Tertullian and Jerome repeat it; the New Testament’s roll of the persecuted mentions prophets who "were stoned" without naming them (Hebrews 11:37). It is a tradition, not a report, and it may be right. What Scripture actually leaves us is an old man in a foreign country still saying the thing nobody wanted to hear.

What He Taught

(T1) A holy building does not protect a people who will not do justice. + Imagine a family that has not spoken to each other in years, arriving at church every Christmas Eve and going home unchanged, quietly certain that the attendance counts for something. That is close to what Jeremiah found at the temple gate, on a national scale, and with a much stronger case behind it. Judah had a promise about that building. God had put his name there. Sennacherib’s Assyrians had come up to the walls a century before and gone away broken. The people who filed past Jeremiah into the courts had every historical reason to believe the city was untouchable. His answer was to take the promise seriously enough to read the conditions attached to it. Amend your ways, he says, do not oppress the sojourner, the fatherless and the widow, do not shed innocent blood, and then I will let you live in this place. Otherwise the house that carries my name is no safer than Shiloh, which is a field of rubble you can walk to (Jeremiah 7:1-15). The line that stung most was about theft. You steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely, he says, and then come and stand before me in this house and say "We are delivered!" Has this house become a den of robbers in your eyes? A den is where thieves go between jobs, the safe place they return to; he is accusing them of treating the temple as a hideout rather than a home. Christian readers should notice how easily the same accusation transfers, and that it has never been an argument against holy places. Jeremiah was a priest. He wanted the sacrifices to mean what they said. His complaint is against a religion of location, one that trusts a postcode rather than repentance, and Jesus took the complaint up in the same courtyard six centuries later, quoting this very sermon as he turned the money tables over (Mark 11:17).

(Q) "Do not trust in these deceptive words: 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.'" + Source: Jeremiah 7:4 (English Standard Version). Spoken standing in the gate of the temple to worshippers on their way in, at the start of Jehoiakim’s reign around 609 BC. The threefold repetition is the crowd’s own slogan, quoted back at them (T1).

(T2) The human heart is the problem, and it is the one thing a person cannot examine honestly. + Everyone has met the difficulty from the inside. You decide, quite sincerely, that you are staying out of an argument for the sake of peace, and only three days later does it occur to you that you were actually avoiding an apology. The motive was hidden while you were acting on it, and it was hidden by the same mind that was doing the acting. Jeremiah says that in one sentence and does not soften it: the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, and who can understand it? "Heart" in Hebrew is not the seat of the emotions the way the English word suggests; it is closer to what we mean by the inner person, thinking, deciding and wanting all together. His claim is that this centre is not merely weak but crooked, and crooked in a way that includes the instrument you would use to check it. Elsewhere he puts it as a stain: sin engraved on the tablet of the heart with an iron tool and a diamond point (Jeremiah 17:1), and he asks whether an Ethiopian can change his skin or a leopard his spots (Jeremiah 13:23). The verse does not stop there, and the second half is the relief. If the heart cannot be read from inside, it can be read from outside, and God says he does exactly that: "I the Lord search the heart and test the mind." Christian theology later gave this diagnosis a name, original sin, meaning the inherited bent in human nature that shows up long before anyone teaches a child to lie. Paul is working the same ground in Romans 3 and Romans 7, and Calvin, who lectured through this book verse by verse in the last years of his life, drew heavily on it. It is worth seeing that the diagnosis and the cure are in the same prophet: nothing short of a rewritten heart will do, and a rewritten heart is precisely what he goes on to promise (T5).

(Q) "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds." + Source: Jeremiah 17:9-10 (English Standard Version). From a short collection of sayings on trust, set between a curse on the man who trusts in man and a blessing on the man who trusts in the Lord. The two verses belong together: the question at the end of the first is answered by the speaker of the second (T2).

(T3) A believer may take his complaint straight to God, and the complaint belongs in Scripture with everything else. + Scattered through the first half of the book are six passages that scholars have long grouped together and called the confessions, though they are not confessions of sin. They are the prophet’s private prayers, and somebody kept them (Jeremiah 11:18-23; 12:1-6; 15:10-21; 17:14-18; 18:18-23; 20:7-18). What is remarkable is not that a man in his position prayed like this. It is that the prayers were written down, edited into the book, and read aloud in worship for twenty-five centuries. They go a long way. He asks the oldest question there is, why the way of the wicked prospers, and he asks it of God rather than about him (Jeremiah 12:1). He accuses God of being to him "like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail," which in a dry country is the worst thing you can say about a water source: it looked reliable and it was not (Jeremiah 15:18). He says outright that he was talked into this, using a Hebrew verb that elsewhere describes talking someone into something against their better judgment: "O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived" (Jeremiah 20:7). He curses the day he was born, at length, and the passage does not end with a resolution (Jeremiah 20:14-18). And in the middle of it sits the reason he cannot resign. He has tried silence, and silence was worse: the word turns into a fire shut up in his bones and he cannot hold it in. This is not doubt that has broken free of faith; you do not sue a God you have stopped believing in, and every one of these prayers is addressed. Job does the same thing, so do a third of the Psalms, and the Christian tradition has been at its healthiest when it has let people pray this way rather than tidying them up. God’s answer to Jeremiah, when it comes, is not an explanation. It is an offer to take him back if he will stand up, and a promise that the wall will hold (Jeremiah 15:19-20).

(Q) "If I say, I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name, there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot." + Source: Jeremiah 20:9 (English Standard Version). From the last and fiercest of the confessions, prayed after the priest Pashhur had him beaten and locked overnight in the stocks at the upper Benjamin Gate of the temple. Two verses earlier he has accused God of deceiving him, and a few verses later he curses the day of his birth; this line stands between them (T3).

(T4) Exile is discipline with a term on it, so build houses in Babylon and pray for the city that took you there. + Put yourself among the deportees of 597 BC, a few thousand craftsmen and officials and their families resettled on an irrigation canal in southern Iraq, listening to prophets among them promise that this is temporary and the vessels will be back in the temple within two years. Do you unpack? Everything depends on the answer. If you are home in two years you camp, you keep your bags by the door, and you treat every Babylonian as an occupier to be endured. Jeremiah’s letter told them to unpack. Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what grows, take wives, have sons and daughters, and let your children marry there, because you will be seventy years in that country. Then comes the sentence that must have stopped the reader cold: pray for the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Not endure it. Not resist it. Pray for it, and understand that your own welfare is bound up with its welfare. The Hebrew word behind "welfare" is shalom, which means not just the absence of trouble but a whole life in working order, and he uses it three times in the one sentence, twice of Babylon and once of them. Two things follow from this that Christians have leaned on ever since. The first is that God’s discipline of his people has a term on it and a purpose in it, which is why the letter can end with plans for welfare and not for evil, "to give you a future and a hope" (Jeremiah 29:11). That famous line is a promise to a deported nation about the end of a seventy-year sentence, and it is worth far more read that way than as a private guarantee that things will work out: it survived the worst that could happen to a people, because it was addressed to people it had already happened to. The second is a working posture for any believer living somewhere that is not home. Peter writes to Christians scattered across Asia Minor as "sojourners and exiles" and tells them to live honourably among the pagans (1 Peter 2:11-12), and Augustine built a whole book on the two cities, one of which the citizens of the other are told to seek the peace of. All of it starts here, in a letter carried to Babylon by two men on a diplomatic errand.

(Q) "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." + Source: Jeremiah 29:7 (English Standard Version). From the letter Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the elders, priests and prophets deported in 597 BC, carried by two royal envoys travelling to Babylon on other business (T4).

(T5) God will make a new covenant, written on the heart, and he will remember their sin no more. + A covenant is a binding agreement that creates a relationship, closer to a marriage than to a contract: it has terms, it has witnesses, and it makes two parties into something they were not before. Israel’s covenant had been cut at Sinai and written on stone, and by Jeremiah’s day the evidence that it was broken was overwhelming, which is exactly why his contemporaries expected the story to end. A treaty whose terms have been violated by one side is over. What he says instead is that God will start again, and start further in. The law will not be handed over on tablets to be kept; it will be put inside them and written on their hearts. Everyone in the new arrangement will know God personally, from the least of them to the greatest, so that nobody will need to be told to know him. And the ground of the whole thing is forgiveness, stated as a decision rather than a mood: I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Two features of it changed everything. It is unconditional in a way Sinai was not, because God undertakes the part Israel could not perform, which answers the diagnosis of the deceitful heart (T2) with the only cure that fits it. And "they shall all know me" democratises what had been the possession of a priestly class in a single building; a nation of individuals who each know God directly does not need a temple gate to stand in. Jeremiah says this while the temple is still standing and the country is a few years from ashes. He is not describing a repair. He is describing a replacement, and he is doing it as a man who has watched every institution he grew up inside fail.

(Q) "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." + Source: Jeremiah 31:33-34 (English Standard Version). From the Book of Consolation, the four chapters of promise at the centre of the book (Jeremiah 30 to 33), most of it addressed to the northern tribes deported by Assyria a century earlier and now extended to Judah. The passage beginning at verse 31 is quoted in full in Hebrews 8:8-12, the longest continuous quotation of the Old Testament anywhere in the New (T5).

(Q) "Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: The Lord is our righteousness." + Source: Jeremiah 23:5-6 (English Standard Version). The close of a long denunciation of the kings and prophets of Judah, and the pivot from what the shepherds of Israel have done to what God will do instead. Zedekiah, the failing king on the throne when it was spoken, bore a name meaning "the Lord is my righteousness," so the promised king’s title is the reigning king’s name given back to someone who will earn it.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The New Testament took his phrase for its own name, and calls the whole Christian arrangement the new covenant. + The two words Jeremiah put together at 31:31 became the title of half the Bible. "New Testament" is simply the Latin testamentum standing in for the Greek word for covenant, so the name on the spine of every Christian Bible is a quotation from a Judean prophet who never heard of Christ. That is not an accident of translation. It is what the first Christians thought had happened. Jesus made the connection himself over the cup at the Passover meal, in words Luke and Paul both record: this cup is the new covenant in my blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25). Paul then describes his own ministry as the service of that covenant, "not of the letter but of the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:6), and says the Corinthians themselves are a letter from Christ, "written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3:3), which is Jeremiah’s image handed straight over. The letter to the Hebrews goes furthest: it quotes Jeremiah 31:31-34 entire, the longest single Old Testament quotation in the New Testament, and then rests its whole argument on one word in it. If God calls this covenant new, the old one is by definition ageing and near to vanishing (Hebrews 8:8-13), and the sacrifice that needs no repeating has arrived. The clinching line, "I will remember their sins no more" (Hebrews 8:12), comes back at the climax of the argument in a fuller form still: "I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more" (Hebrews 10:17). The rest of the New Testament reaches for him in smaller ways that show how present he was. Matthew hears Rachel weeping for her children in Jeremiah 31:15 when Herod’s soldiers reach Bethlehem (Matthew 2:17-18). Jesus quotes the temple sermon while clearing the temple court (Mark 11:17). And when Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is, one of the answers on the street is Jeremiah (Matthew 16:14), which tells you the sort of figure a first-century Jew thought he was: not a footnote but a name you might reach for when a prophet turned up who wept over Jerusalem and said the temple was coming down.

(†) He is where the church learned that religion has to reach the inside of a person, and Augustine read his new covenant as the difference between law and grace. + Origen, the great biblical scholar of Alexandria in the third century, preached through Jeremiah at length, and twenty of those homilies survive in his own Greek, with two more surviving only in the Latin translation Jerome made of them. They are among the very few sermons of his that we still have in the Greek he preached them in rather than in somebody’s Latin. What drew him was the same thing that drew everyone after: a prophet who talks about the interior life more than any other, and who is himself the most visible interior in the Old Testament. Jerome came back to Jeremiah at the very end. His commentary on the book was the last thing he wrote, in Bethlehem, and he died in 420 with it unfinished, the six books he had got through reaching only to the end of chapter 32. Augustine, working at the same time in North Africa, took the promise of the law written on hearts and made it the hinge of an argument that has shaped Western theology ever since. In On the Spirit and the Letter, written in 412, he asks what the difference is between a law that commands from outside and a grace that changes from inside, and answers it out of Jeremiah 31 by way of Paul, setting the new covenant passage down entire in his thirty-third chapter: the letter kills, because a rule tells you what to do without giving you the power to do it, and the Spirit gives life, because God writing on the heart is God supplying the wanting as well as the knowing. The whole later argument about grace runs through that distinction, and the distinction is a reading of Jeremiah. The Reformers went back to him for the same reason. Calvin lectured his students through the entire book in the last years of his life, and the lectures were taken down and printed; the appeal, for a movement arguing that the church of its own day had confused an institution with a promise, is not hard to see. And his name has left a mark on plain English. A jeremiad is a long complaint about the state of the world, and the word comes straight off him, from his name and his tone together. It is a fair word as far as it goes, though it is not the whole of the man, and Rembrandt caught the part the word misses: his portrait in the Rijksmuseum shows an old man resting his head on his hand against a heavy book, a gold bowl and pitcher saved from the temple lying on the stone beside him, and Jerusalem burning behind his shoulder.

(†) His seventy years gave the exiles a way to read a catastrophe without concluding that God had lost. + When a nation is destroyed in the ancient world, the ordinary conclusion is that its god has been beaten by a stronger one. Judah did not draw that conclusion, and the reason is largely Jeremiah. He had said in advance exactly what was going to happen and why, so when it happened it arrived as evidence that God was still in charge rather than evidence that he was not. Nebuchadnezzar is called God’s servant in this book, which is a startling thing to call the man who burned the temple, and it is precisely what keeps the disaster inside the story instead of ending it. The generation after him reads him that way. Daniel says he "perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years" (Daniel 9:2), and then prays as a man who has done the arithmetic and knows the term is nearly up. The Chronicler, the writer who retold the whole story of Israel in the books we call 1 and 2 Chronicles, ends his history by noting that the land kept its sabbaths until the seventy years were fulfilled, "to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah" (2 Chronicles 36:21), and the book of Ezra opens with the same formula as Cyrus lets the exiles go (Ezra 1:1). A prophet nobody listened to while he was alive became, within a lifetime, the man whose timetable everyone was counting on. That pattern is why the church has gone back to him whenever the visible institution has failed. Augustine began the City of God because Rome had been sacked in 410 and pagans were saying the Christian God had not held the walls, and his answer, that the city of God is not the same thing as any city on a map, is Jeremiah’s answer in Latin. Jeremiah is the standing proof that the collapse of a Christian order is not the collapse of Christianity, because the man who watched the first temple burn is the same man who bought a field in occupied territory and wrote down a promise about hearts.

(†) He prayed for the children of his enemies to starve, and asked God not to forgive them. + The confessions are honest, and honesty includes what is in them. More than once Jeremiah asks God not merely to stop his persecutors but to destroy them and their families. "Therefore deliver up their children to famine; give them over to the power of the sword; let their wives become childless and widowed" (Jeremiah 18:21). He asks God explicitly not to forgive them: "Forgive not their iniquity, nor blot out their sin from your sight" (Jeremiah 18:23). Elsewhere he asks to be allowed to watch: "let me see your vengeance upon them" (Jeremiah 11:20). Two things should be said before anything else, and they are both true. He is not planning to act; every one of these is a prayer, which means the vengeance is being handed to God rather than taken, and Paul later says that handing it over is exactly right (Romans 12:19). And he is not alone in the Old Testament: a good many psalms pray this way, and the tradition has generally read such prayers as raw grief brought to the only place it can safely be brought. But the ledger is his own, and by his own standard it does not balance. This is the man who told the exiles to pray for the welfare of Babylon (T4), the empire that had deported them, and who could not pray for the welfare of Anathoth, the village he grew up in. A prayer that asks God to withhold forgiveness asks for the exact opposite of what he was sent to announce, that God would forgive iniquity and remember sin no more (T5). Christ, praying under worse treatment from the same class of religious officials, said "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34), and Stephen, with the stones already coming, prayed the same (Acts 7:60). That is the fuller thing, and Jeremiah does not reach it. It is worth saying plainly rather than explaining away, because a Bible that recorded only the prayers its heroes should have prayed would be a much less believable book, and because the promise he was given to carry, of a heart rewritten from the inside, was one he needed as much as the people he was preaching it to.