📜 Table of Contents ›
Jeremiah
📖 Jeremiah
יִרְמְיָהוּ Yirmeyahu — 'Jeremiah' — likely 'Jehovah exalts,' or 'Jehovah loosens/casts,' or 'Jehovah establishes' (the root is genuinely uncertain). The book is named for its prophet, whose forty-year ministry spanned the last kings of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem.
Ἰερεμίας (Ieremias) — In the Septuagint, Jeremiah is significantly SHORTER (by about one-eighth) and arranges the oracles-against-the-nations in a different place — one of the most important cases in the Old Testament of two genuinely different editions of one book (a Hebrew Dead Sea Scroll fragment matches the shorter Greek order).
The longest book in the Bible by word count — the forty-year cry of the 'weeping prophet' who watched Judah fall, who tore down and planted, and who was given the promise of a new covenant written on the heart.
Chapters
6 of 52 chapters translated · 11.5%
Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152
Chapter by chapter
Jeremiah 1The call of Jeremiah — the longest, most turbulent prophetic career in the Bible opens on a boy who says 'I am only a youth.' Known before the womb and made 'a prophet to the nations,' his mouth is touched and filled, and he is charged with the six verbs that are the program of the whole book: to uproot and to tear down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Two visions seal it — an almond branch (God WATCHING over his word) and a boiling pot tilting from the north (the disaster coming) — and a frightened boy is made an iron pillar.Jeremiah 18The potter's house — sent down to a workshop on the city's edge, Jeremiah watches a vessel go wrong under the hand and be thrown again, and hears the most CONDITIONAL sentence in the prophets: “if that nation turns back from its evil… then I relent.” The clay's answer is one flat word — “Hopeless” — refusing an offer that was still open. Then the potter's own verb turns on them (“I am FORMING evil against you”), the fourth “device” in the chapter is aimed at the prophet himself, and it closes in an imprecatory prayer this library will not soften. ⚠ Two genuine cruxes are left standing with their pedigrees and no vote: verse 14's “rock of the field” and verse 17's “back and not the face.”Jeremiah 19The potter's flask comes back FIRED — bought and smashed beyond mending at the Potsherd Gate over the valley of Ben-Hinnom, Baal named outright at last, the days coming when the place is called the valley of slaughter, and the sentence carried out of the valley and into the temple court itself.Jeremiah 20Pashhur and the stocks — the prophet renames his jailer Terror-All-Around, names Babylon at last, confesses the fire shut up in his bones — and curses the day he was born.Jeremiah 21The final siege — Zedekiah's delegation asks for a miracle and hears the bleakest answer in the book: the Exodus formula aimed inward, the way of life through the enemy camp, and fire for the cedar forest.Jeremiah 22The tariff of the last kings — Shallum carried to Egypt, Jehoiakim's donkey-burial, and Coniah the signet torn off God's right hand; 'is that not to know me?' and 'write this man childless.'
About the book
Where it sits
One of the Major Prophets (with Isaiah and Ezekiel), placed after Isaiah; in the Hebrew canon, among the Latter Prophets. The book of Lamentations, traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, follows it in the Christian order.
Genre
PROPHECY — poetry and prose intertwined: oracles of judgment and hope, symbolic sign-acts, a running biography of the prophet's own sufferings (the 'confessions'), and historical narrative of Jerusalem's last days. By word count, the largest book in the Bible.
Author
JEREMIAH son of Hilkiah, a priest of Anathoth, called in 627 BC (1:2). The book credits its writing to Jeremiah dictating to his scribe BARUCH son of Neriah (ch 36 — where the king burns the first scroll and it is rewritten larger). The complex final shape — poetry, prose sermons, and third-person narrative — points to Baruch and later hands gathering and arranging the material.
Date written
The ministry runs c. 627-586 BC and after (Jeremiah is carried to Egypt following the fall). The book reached its two differing editions — the shorter Greek and the longer Hebrew — over the decades that followed, likely in the exile.
Place
Judah — Anathoth, Jerusalem, and finally Egypt, where fleeing survivors carry Jeremiah off after the assassination of Gedaliah (chs 42-44). He prophesied through the reigns of Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah.
Audience
Judah in its last generation — kings, priests, false prophets, and people — warned to submit to Babylon as God's instrument and to turn back, and refusing; and then the exiles, given a letter (ch 29) to settle, build, and pray for the city of their captivity, and wait out seventy years.
How it's laid out
1The call — Jeremiah known before the womb, the almond branch and the boiling pot, the charge to uproot and to plant.
2-25Oracles against Judah and Jerusalem — the great indictment (the broken cisterns, the temple sermon, the potter's house, the sign-acts), interlaced with the prophet's own anguished 'confessions.'
26-45Narratives of conflict and the fall — Jeremiah against the kings and false prophets; the burned scroll; the letter to the exiles; the siege, the cistern, the destruction, and the flight to Egypt.
30-33The Book of Consolation (set within the above) — restoration, and the NEW COVENANT written on the heart (31:31-34).
46-51Oracles against the nations — Egypt, Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Damascus, Kedar, Elam, and Babylon.
52A historical appendix — the fall of Jerusalem retold (paralleling 2 Kings 25).
What it's about
- THE COVENANT BETRAYED — Judah has 'forsaken the fountain of living waters and hewn out broken cisterns' (2:13); idolatry is adultery, and the judgment is the marriage's grief, not God's caprice.
- SUBMIT TO BABYLON — Jeremiah's scandalous, treasonous-sounding message: Babylon is God's instrument, resistance is rebellion against God, and the exile must be accepted and outlasted (the seventy years).
- TEAR DOWN AND PLANT — the six verbs of 1:10; a ministry mostly of demolition that nonetheless ends in building, because judgment is never God's last word.
- THE NEW COVENANT — the book's summit (31:31-34): a covenant written not on stone but on the heart, sins remembered no more — the passage the New Testament takes as fulfilled in Christ (Hebrews 8).
- THE COST OF THE WORD — the 'confessions' (e.g. 20:7-18), where the prophet accuses God of deceiving him, curses the day of his birth, and yet cannot stop speaking because the word is 'a fire shut up in my bones.' No prophet's inner life is so exposed.
Key words & people
Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:
People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:
The source text
Translated from the pointed Hebrew Masoretic Text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre). ⚠️ Jeremiah is the Old Testament's great case of a book that survives in TWO editions: the Hebrew (Masoretic) text is roughly one-eighth longer than the Greek Septuagint, and the two place the oracles-against-the-nations differently — and a Hebrew fragment from Qumran matches the shorter Greek. This translation follows the Masoretic Hebrew and notes the major differences where they fall. The book is otherwise rich in wordplay — the almond/watcher pun of 1:11-12 is the first of many.
Looking forward
Jeremiah's summit is the NEW COVENANT (31:31-34): 'I will put my law within them, and write it on their hearts… and I will remember their sin no more.' The New Testament takes this as the covenant sealed in Christ's blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25) and quotes it in full as fulfilled (Hebrews 8:8-12; 10:16-17). The weeping prophet — rejected by his own, made to suffer for the word, promising a covenant of the heart — has long been read as a figure of the one who wept over the same city (Luke 19:41) and inaugurated the covenant Jeremiah foresaw.
Where the debates are
The two EDITIONS (shorter Greek vs longer Hebrew, and the differing place of the nations-oracles) — most scholars now see the Greek as translating an earlier, shorter Hebrew edition, and the Masoretic text as a later expanded one. The book's COMPOSITION — how its poetry, prose sermons, and biography (the last likely from Baruch) came together — is much studied, as is the authenticity and dating of individual oracles, especially the prose sermons whose style resembles Deuteronomy. The prophet himself, by contrast, is one of the most vividly and personally known figures in the Old Testament.