The Life
Jeremiah was born around 650 B.C. in Anathoth, a small village about three miles north of Jerusalem. He was the son of the priest Hilkiah. The Lord called him to prophetic service when he was only fifteen years old. He protested that he was too young, that he could not speak well, that the people would never listen. The Lord answered: “Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee” (Jeremiah 1:7-8). Then the Lord touched his mouth and said: behold, I have put my words in your mouth. From that moment until his death over forty years later, Jeremiah carried the burden of speaking the divine word to a people who would not hear it. He prophesied through the reigns of five kings of Judah — Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah — and watched the slow collapse of the kingdom into Babylonian conquest. He was imprisoned. He was thrown into a slimy pit and left to die. He was rescued from the pit by an Ethiopian official named Ebed-melech. He was forced into Egypt against his will after the destruction of Jerusalem. He was finally stoned to death by his own countrymen in the city of Tahpanhes. Through all of it he wept. He wept for the city he loved and watched be destroyed. He wept for the Temple that was burned. He wept for the children carried into Babylonian captivity. He has been called the Weeping Prophet for two thousand years because the Book of Lamentations — his five poems of grief over the fallen Jerusalem — contains some of the most heartbreaking poetry in the entire Old Testament.
Jeremiah was about fifteen years old when the word of the Lord came to him for the first time. He was at home in Anathoth, the small priestly village outside Jerusalem where he had been raised. The voice was unmistakable. The Lord said: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5). Jeremiah was terrified. He protested: “Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child.” The phrase he used in Hebrew is the same word used for a teenage boy. He was not making a metaphor about his spiritual immaturity; he was a literal teenager being given the office of speaking the divine word to kings and to nations. The Lord answered: “Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee” (1:7-8). Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched Jeremiah’s mouth and said: “Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant” (1:9-10). Then the Lord showed him two visions: a rod of an almond tree (because the Hebrew word for almond, shaqed, is a pun on the word for watching, shoqed, and the Lord said: I am watching over my word to perform it) and a boiling cauldron tipping out of the north (which the Lord interpreted as the coming Babylonian invasion). His vocation was sealed. From that moment until his death over forty years later, Jeremiah carried the burden of speaking the words that the Lord had placed in his mouth as a teenager.
When Jeremiah prophesied that Judah was about to be enslaved to the king of Babylon, and that resistance was futile, he did something extraordinary to drive the message home. He made a wooden yoke — the kind that goes around the necks of oxen pulling a plow — and he wore it around his own neck through the streets of Jerusalem. He went to all the foreign emissaries who had come to Jerusalem to negotiate an anti-Babylonian alliance, and he told them: take this yoke back to your kings, and tell them to submit to the king of Babylon, because that is what the Lord has decreed. A false prophet named Hananiah broke the wooden yoke off Jeremiah’s neck and prophesied that within two years the Lord would break the yoke of Babylon. Jeremiah answered: “You have broken the yoke of wood, but you have made instead a yoke of iron” (Jeremiah 28:13). Hananiah died two months later, just as Jeremiah had foretold. The next time Jeremiah went out, he was wearing an iron yoke around his neck. The political and religious establishment hated him. They said he was undermining morale, betraying the nation, prophesying defeat in time of war. Under King Zedekiah they had him arrested and beaten. The princes of Judah took him and threw him into a pit — a cistern dug into the ground for collecting water, but this one was empty except for thick mud at the bottom. They lowered him in by ropes and left him there to die slowly of starvation and exposure. He sank into the mud up to his armpits. He was about to die. An Ethiopian eunuch named Ebed-melech, who served in the palace, heard what had happened. He went to King Zedekiah and pleaded for the prophet’s life. The king told him to take thirty men and pull Jeremiah out. Ebed-melech went down to the dungeon, took old rags and worn-out clothes, let them down by ropes to Jeremiah, and said: put these rags between your armpits and the ropes, so the ropes will not cut you. They pulled him out. He survived. The Lord later sent Jeremiah to Ebed-melech with a personal message: “I will surely deliver thee, and thou shalt not fall by the sword... because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 39:18). When Jerusalem fell to Babylon, Ebed-melech was preserved alive.
In the summer of 586 B.C., after a long and brutal siege, Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar. The walls were breached. The city was looted. The Temple of Solomon, which had stood for nearly four hundred years, was burned to the ground. King Zedekiah was captured trying to escape. His sons were killed in front of him. Then his eyes were put out, and he was carried in chains to Babylon. The bulk of the population was carried into the seventy-year Babylonian Captivity. Only a small group of the poorest people were left in the ruined land, along with Jeremiah himself, whom the Babylonians treated kindly. Nebuchadnezzar gave Jeremiah his choice of where to live, and the prophet stayed at the ruins of Jerusalem. He sat among the ashes and the corpses and wept. The Book of Lamentations, which the Orthodox tradition has consistently attributed to Jeremiah, contains five poems of grief over the fallen city. They are some of the most heartbreaking poetry in the entire Old Testament. “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!” (Lamentations 1:1). “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me” (Lamentations 1:12). The Hebrew text of Lamentations is structured as an alphabetic acrostic; each of the first four chapters has twenty-two stanzas, one beginning with each successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the third chapter has sixty-six verses (three for each letter). The form articulates the depth of the grief: the prophet has gone through the entire alphabet of sorrow. In the very middle of the third chapter, however, in the absolute center of the entire book, comes the supreme statement of hope: “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23). Even in the ruins, even after the loss of everything, Jeremiah refused to abandon the conviction that the Lord’s mercies are new every morning.
After the destruction of Jerusalem, the small group of Jews left in the ruined land was placed under the authority of a governor named Gedaliah, a righteous man who had been a friend of Jeremiah. Gedaliah was murdered after just two months by a renegade of the royal house. The remnant of the people, terrified that the Babylonians would punish all of them for the murder, decided to flee to Egypt. They came to Jeremiah and asked him to pray to the Lord for guidance. Jeremiah prayed and answered them: do not go to Egypt. The Lord has decreed that those who remain in Judah will be preserved, and those who go to Egypt will perish. The people refused to listen. They accused Jeremiah of lying, of being manipulated by his scribe Baruch, of secretly serving Babylonian interests. They took him by force and dragged him along with them into Egypt. He lived for four years at the city of Tahpanhes in the Egyptian Delta, continuing to prophesy to the exile community. He was respected by some of the Egyptians, who had heard that his prayers had killed crocodiles and other dangerous creatures infesting the area. But he kept telling the Jewish exiles that they had been wrong to come to Egypt, that the Babylonian king would eventually invade Egypt, and that they would all perish there. Eventually his own countrymen — the same people he had warned, prayed for, and suffered alongside for over forty years — turned on him. They stoned him to death at Tahpanhes. He was about seventy years old. In that very same year, the Babylonian invasion of Egypt that he had prophesied took place. According to a later tradition preserved in the Orthodox synaxarion, when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt approximately 250 years later, he transferred the relics of the Prophet Jeremiah from Tahpanhes to the new city of Alexandria, where they were venerated as protective relics for the city.
In the middle of the catastrophe — in the middle of the chapters where Jeremiah is announcing the destruction of Jerusalem and the seventy-year Babylonian Captivity — the Lord gave him a vision of something completely different. He prophesied a future covenant that would not be like the old covenant of Sinai. “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:31-34). The Apostle Paul cites this prophecy directly in Hebrews 8 as the foundation of the doctrine of the New Covenant. The very phrase “New Testament” — the title of the second half of the Christian Bible — comes directly from this prophecy of Jeremiah. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself uses the language at the Last Supper, when He takes the cup and says: “This cup is the new testament in my blood” (Luke 22:20). Every time an Orthodox Christian receives the Eucharist, the cup contains the fulfillment of this Jeremianic prophecy. The Old Covenant was external: written on stone tablets, kept in an Ark, observed through hundreds of ceremonial laws. The New Covenant is internal: written on the heart by the Holy Spirit, sealed in the blood of Christ, fulfilled in the union of the soul with God through grace. Jeremiah saw it. He saw it in the middle of the destruction of his city. The whole subsequent biblical theology stands on what he saw.
These two verses sit in the absolute center of the Book of Lamentations. The book has five chapters; the third chapter is the longest and contains the midpoint of the entire work. Within that third chapter, in the middle of sixty-six verses of grief, come these words. They are the supreme statement of hope in the entire book. They are spoken not by an outsider offering theological commentary on someone else’s suffering. They are spoken by Jeremiah himself — the prophet who watched his city be destroyed, the prophet who watched the Temple burn, the prophet whose body had just been pulled out of a slimy pit, the prophet who would soon be dragged into Egypt and stoned by his own countrymen. He is sitting in the ruins, surrounded by death, and he says: it is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is Thy faithfulness. The hymn that the Christian tradition built on these verses (“Great Is Thy Faithfulness”) has been sung at countless Christian funerals across the centuries. The verses themselves have been the supreme refuge for every soul that has ever wondered, in the depths of catastrophe, whether the divine love is still present. Jeremiah’s answer is yes. The mercies are new every morning. The compassions never fail. Even when the city has fallen, even when the Temple has burned, even when everything has been destroyed, the Lord’s faithfulness has not been destroyed. Every morning is a new beginning. Every dawn is a new gift. The supreme grief of Jeremiah’s entire life produced the supreme statement of hope in the entire Old Testament.
When the word of the Lord first came to Jeremiah at the age of fifteen, this was the divine declaration that inaugurated his entire prophetic ministry. The verse has been one of the most theologically influential single sentences in the entire Old Testament. It articulates the biblical conviction that the Lord knows His servants before they know themselves — that the divine relationship with each human person is established not at the moment of conscious religious commitment but at the moment that precedes physical existence. Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. The Hebrew word for knew (yada) carries the biblical sense of personal relational intimacy, the same word used in Genesis when Adam knew Eve and she conceived. The Lord’s knowledge of Jeremiah is intimate and personal from before the moment of his physical conception. Before you came out of the womb, I sanctified you. The Hebrew word for sanctified (hiqdashtikha) means “I set you apart for a holy purpose.” The pre-natal consecration of Jeremiah was the foundation of his entire subsequent vocation. I ordained you a prophet to the nations. The Hebrew word for ordained (netattikha) literally means “I gave you,” as a gift placed into a particular function. The pattern of this divine declaration has shaped the entire subsequent biblical theology of vocation. The Apostle Paul applies the same pattern to himself: “When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace” (Galatians 1:15). The angel Gabriel applies the same pattern to Saint John the Forerunner: filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself, conceived by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, embodies the deepest form of pre-natal divine relationship. The verse has also been the scriptural foundation of the Orthodox tradition’s defense of the sanctity of pre-natal human life: if the Lord can know, sanctify, and ordain a prophet before his physical conception, then human personhood and the divine relationship that constitutes its deepest meaning extend backward into the pre-natal period.
After Jeremiah’s martyrdom at Tahpanhes around 570 B.C., his body was buried in Egypt. The local community of Egyptian Christians, in subsequent centuries, venerated his tomb. According to the tradition preserved in the Orthodox synaxarion, when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt approximately 250 years later (in 332 B.C.), he was deeply moved by the stories of the prophet who had killed crocodiles by his prayers and who had warned the Jewish community of the coming Babylonian invasion. Alexander founded the new city of Alexandria as the capital of his Egyptian conquest. He ordered the relics of the prophet Jeremiah transferred from Tahpanhes to the new city as protective relics. The tradition holds that the relics were placed at four points around the city, protecting it from invasion, from disease, and from the various forms of catastrophe that struck other ancient cities of the Mediterranean. Alexandria itself, founded over the relics of Jeremiah, became one of the most important cities of the ancient world: the supreme center of Hellenistic learning, the home of the great Library, the birthplace of the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament (which is the version of the Old Testament that the Orthodox Church has used since the apostolic age), and one of the supreme cities of early Christianity (Saint Mark the Evangelist established the Christian Church there in the first century). The continuing veneration of Jeremiah at Alexandria across the entire Hellenistic and early Christian period has shaped the Orthodox tradition’s understanding of the protective intercession of the saints across centuries. The same prophet who was rejected by his own countrymen and stoned to death in his own lifetime continues to intercede across the centuries for cities, communities, and individual souls that have venerated his memory. His prayers have surrounded the Church for nearly three thousand years.
Jeremiah matters to every Orthodox Christian for many reasons. He is the supreme example of prophetic faithfulness through to the bitter end. He prophesied for over forty years through the slow collapse of the kingdom of Judah. He was rejected by kings, princes, false prophets, religious leaders, and finally by the very people whose welfare he had spent his life trying to secure. He was thrown into a slimy pit and left to die. He was forced into Egypt against his will. He was finally stoned to death by his own countrymen. Through all of it he wept. He wept for the city he loved. He wept for the Temple that was burned. He wept for the children carried into captivity. He has been called the Weeping Prophet for two thousand years because he is the supreme Old Testament icon of the suffering heart of authentic prophetic ministry. He is also the supreme prophet of the New Covenant. In the middle of the destruction, surrounded by ruins, he prophesied that the Lord would establish a new covenant with His people — not on stone tablets but on the human heart. The New Testament takes its very name from his prophecy. Every Eucharistic celebration in the Orthodox tradition fulfills the vision he saw in the depths of his suffering. He is the friend of every soul that has ever wept for a city, a community, or a beloved that would not turn back. He is the friend of every Christian who has felt the divine grief over the unfaithfulness of a generation. He is the friend of every soul that has ever discovered, in the middle of catastrophe, that the Lord’s mercies are new every morning and that His compassions never fail.