What the book is
Jeremiah was called as a young man and spoke the LORD’s word for some forty years, from the reign of King Josiah to the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 587 BC and beyond. He warned a people who trusted in the temple that God would destroy it, and he was beaten, imprisoned and thrown into a cistern for saying so. More than any other prophet, he lets us hear his own anguish: his complaints to God, his grief for his people, his wish that he had never been born. And in the darkest days he spoke of hope:
The days are coming, declares the LORD, and then I will make a covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah: a new covenant.
The letter of Hebrews quotes this promise in full (Hebrews 8:8–12), and Jesus spoke of “the new covenant in my blood” at the last supper.
Who wrote it, and when
The book names Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, from a family of priests at Anathoth near Jerusalem (1:1). It also tells how his words were written down: he dictated them to his scribe Baruch, and when King Jehoiakim burned the scroll, column by column, Jeremiah dictated it again “and many other words like them were added” (36:32). The book as we have it gathers his oracles, his prayers, and stories about him told by others, and was most likely completed during the exile.
Two forms of the book
Jeremiah has come down in two forms. The Hebrew text is about an eighth longer than the ancient Greek translation, and the two put the oracles against the nations in different places: after 25:13 in the Greek, at the end, in chapters 46–51, in the Hebrew. Fragments of both forms were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, so both circulated in ancient times. The draft translates the Hebrew text, and where the Greek is shorter or differs in a way that matters, a decision says so.
How the book is laid out
- Jeremiah’s call (1): the almond branch and the boiling pot.
- Warnings to Judah and Jerusalem (2–25): faithless Israel, the sermon at the temple gate, Jeremiah’s laments, the potter’s house, and the seventy years of exile.
- Jeremiah and the people (26–29): his trial, the yoke of the king of Babylon, and the letter to the exiles.
- The book of comfort (30–33): restoration and the new covenant.
- The last years of Jerusalem (34–45): the burning of the scroll, Jeremiah in prison and in the cistern, the fall of the city, and the flight to Egypt.
- Oracles against the nations (46–51).
- The fall of Jerusalem (52), told again.
How Open Word Bible translates Jeremiah
Lines of poetry. Much of Jeremiah is poetry, and the text keeps it in its lines; the stories about him are prose. See Hebrew poetry and parallelism.
The almond and the watcher (1:11–12). Jeremiah sees “a rod cut from an almond tree”, and the LORD says, “I am keeping watch over my word”. In Hebrew the two words sound almost the same: the almond is the tree that wakes first in spring. The footnote explains the play. See Wordplay that can’t be translated.
A future and a hope (29:11). “I have planned peace for you, not disaster, so as to give you a future and a hope.” The verse is from a letter to the exiles in Babylon, telling them to settle there for seventy years; the decisions note that setting.
The new covenant (31:31–34). “I will set my instruction deep inside them and write it on their hearts.” In 31:32, “I was a husband to them” may also mean “I was master over them”, and the Greek has “I turned away from them”; the footnote gives both.
The righteous Branch (23:5–6). God will raise up a king from David’s line, and “this is the name people will give him: ‘The LORD Is Our Righteousness.’” The draft marks uncertain who gives the name, people in general or the LORD, and footnotes the other reading.
The divine name. God’s personal name appears hundreds of times in Jeremiah, often in the formula “declares the LORD”. The text writes it “the LORD” in small capitals, and a reader setting shows “Yahweh” instead. See the divine name.