{"id":69058,"date":"2020-01-25T09:57:08","date_gmt":"2020-01-25T07:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=69058"},"modified":"2023-08-20T13:17:30","modified_gmt":"2023-08-20T10:17:30","slug":"jeremiah-a-historical-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/jeremiah-a-historical-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremiah: A Historical Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The opening verses of the Book of Jeremiah (1:1\u20133) inform us about its historical background. The prophet Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, a priest from the town of Anathoth (just north of Jerusalem), prophesied from the thirteenth year of King Josiah of Judah until the exile of Jerusalem in the eleventh year of King Zedekiah (626\u2013586 BCE). On the international scene, these years saw the meteoric rise of the Neo-Babyonian, or Chaldean, Empire; Judah’s fate is inversely proportional to this rise. During the earliest years, the once mighty Assyrian Empire, known in the Hebrew Bible for destroying the northern Kingdom of Israel, collapsed as the Babylonians reasserted themselves in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). With foreign powers occupied far away, the Kingdom of Judah flourished under Josiah, who consolidated worship in the Jerusalem Temple. Josiah’s death in battle (609 BCE) and, soon afterwards, the Babylonians’ rapid westward expansion under their king, Nebuchadnezzar, created the perfect storm to which Judah succumbed in 586 BCE. The Book of Jeremiah witnesses and responds to the successes and ultimate decline.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The exile of Jerusalem is the critical event to which many of the prophecies are understood to refer. A narrative account of this event (chapter 52) stands at the end of the book as a coda meant to confirm the veracity of Jeremiah’s predictions. Two other events\u2014Nebuchadnezzar’s defeat of the Egyptians at Carchemish (605 BCE) and the exile of King Jehoiachin (597 BCE)\u2014are crucial to understanding Jeremiah’s prophecies. The Babylonian victory at Carchemish marks a turning point in Judah’s history, indeed in the history of the entire region. According to chapter 36, it inspired Jeremiah to produce the first version of the book before us. The organization of the Book of Jeremiah reflects the event’s pivotal status. Prior to the main prophecy about the Battle of Carchemish (chapter 25, practically the book’s mid-point), prophecies of doom do not, for the most part, explicitly name Babylon; after this point, the identity of the agent of Judah’s destruction becomes clear. Nebuchadnezzar’s deposal and exile of Jehoiachin, the next-to-last Judean king, creates two communities of Judeans, one in Babylonia and the other in Judah proper, ruled by Zedekiah, a puppet installed by the Babylonians. It is in the exiled group, rather than in the Judeans on native soil, that Jeremiah sees the hope for continued communal existence under foreign hegemony.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Book of Jeremiah paints the prophet’s portrait in rich detail. A quasi-biography (chapters 37\u201345) narrates his interactions with the community in the besieged Jerusalem and afterwards in exile. In these chapters and elsewhere, Jeremiah stakes positions that put him at odds with his compatriots. Politically, his advocacy of submission to Babylon rather than resistance with Egyptian support, lands him in jail. His critiques of Judah’s social and religious flaws do not receive warm welcomes, either. Several laments (found in chapters 11\u201320) give first-person voice to a soul in emotional pain, not only about its own conflicted state, but, more profoundly, angry at the source of frustration, God.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Image by: Ben Schachter<\/span><\/p>\n

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