A priest's son from Anathoth, drafted as a boy over his own objection ('before I formed you in the womb, I knew you… I am only a youth,' ch. 1) — and made to say, for some forty years under Judah's last kings, exactly what Jerusalem least wanted said: the city would fall, and Babylon was the instrument. The cost is on the record like no other prophet's: beaten and locked in the stocks (20:2), his scroll burned column by column in the king's brazier (ch. 36, redictated to Baruch, longer), dropped into a mud cistern (ch. 38), and at last dragged to Egypt by the refugees he warned. The book preserves his 'confessions' — private arguments with God (chs. 11–20), of which chapter 20 ('You enticed me… fire shut up in my bones… cursed be the day I was born') is the last and rawest. Tradition, weeping over Jerusalem, gave him Lamentations too.