Jeremiah the Young Man. 

        The peculiar importance of Jeremiah’s life makes it ad­visable to use it as a framework within which to study the book as a whole. It so happens that the three kings under whom he prophesied, Josiah, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah, coincide with the first three of the four periods of his prophetic activity.

        Jeremiah was born of a priestly family (1:1) in Anathoth, the modern Anata, a village about four miles to the north-east of Jerusalem, in the tribal portion of Benjamin (For an excellent description of the surroundings see G. A. Smith: Jeremiah, pp. 67-72.). The usual assumption is that he was a descendant of Abiathar (IKings 2:26). The banishment of his great ancestor did not necessarily imply that his descendants were barred from temple service in Jerusalem, and Hilkiah, his father, may well have officiated there as a priest. In any case, however, he was not Josiah’s high priest (IIKings 22:4) — the similarity in names will be accidental. The frequent suggestion that Jeremiah’s father was priest of the village high place that will have been abolished by Josiah has little to commend it. Abiathar would not have been willing to serve at a village sanctuary, while a major sanctuary would not have been possible at that short distance from Jerusalem, nor would the expelled high priest have been allowed to found one.

        Jeremiah never acted as priest, nor is there any evidence that he would have done so, had he not been called to be a prophet. The contrast between him and Ezekiel in this respect is remarkable (see ch. XIII).

        Jeremiah will have been born about the year 645 B.C. to­ward the end of the reign of the evil king Manasseh. The way in which Jeremiah was steeped in the prophecies of his pre­decessors, especially Hosea, suggests that his home may have been one of those where the light of the persecuted prophetic tradition was kept alive in a dark age. The story of his call (ch. 1) suggests that he had been expecting it. His only pro­test was that he was too young (1:6). On general grounds we may suppose him to have been between 18 and 20 at the time. The Hebrew word (na’ar) should not have been translated “child;” it means one who has not yet a recognized place in the community; while used of children, it refers more commonly to young unmarried men and to slaves.

        His call came in 626 B.C. (1:2). If we compare Chron. with Kings, we see that Josiah’s reformation began in the year before (IIChron. 34:3), though it did not reach its height and become effective till 621 B.C. (IIKings 22:3; IIChron. 34:8). From the human standpoint, this will have been the impulse that finally prepared Jeremiah for his call.

        In spite of frequent assertions to the contrary, there is no real evidence that Jeremiah helped in Josiah’s reformation, and very little, if any, that he really sympathized with it. It is true that his earliest prophecies are directed mainly against the idolatry that the reformation was to sweep away for the time being (2:1-3:5; 3:19-4:4; note that 3:19 is the immediate sequel of 3:5), but in a prophecy probably only a little later (3:6-13) he recognizes that the reformation is merely outward and feigned (3:10). That is why his remaining prophecies from the time of Josiah give a picture of unrelieved gloom.

        In modern text-books 11:1-8 are generally referred to Jeremiah’s activity during the time of the reformation. 11:3f do not fit in with the insistence of the modern scholar that the book found (IIKings 22:8) was Deuteronomy, for Jeremiah is obviously referring to the covenant at Sinai, not to some­thing done at the end of the wilderness journey. The natural interpretation of ch. 11 would place it in the reign of Jehoiakim for the whole section seems to “belong to his reign, the pro­phecies under Josiah ending with ch. 6. Still more important is it that 11:1-14 is one of those prose reports of Jeremiah’s sayings we have attributed with a high degree of probability to Baruch. There is no evidence, however, that Baruch was in touch with Jeremiah before the reign of Jehoiakim. It seems rather that once Jeremiah had convinced himself from the lack of changed lives (ch. 5) that the reformation was purely external, he dropped into the background, not wishing to embarrass a king he respected so highly (IIChron. 35:25; Jer. 22:15f). This would explain the lack of prophecies which can reasonably be attributed to the later years of Josiah.

        It is instructive to note even in his early prophecy that deep sympathy and feeling that marks out Jeremiah, e.g. 4:10, 19, and his feeling for nature, so rare in the Old Testament, e.g. 1:11ff; 4:25.