JEREMIAH, the plaintive prophet, was the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests of Anathoth, not the high priest as some have imagined. At a very early age, Jeremiah received a Divine commission to be a prophet (in the 13th year of Josiah, B.C. 629). The hostility which he incurred, both from his townsman and his own more immediate friends, drove him to Jerusalem, there, on a wider field though with no greater success, to help on the reformation of the people from idolatry. The death of Josiah was the signal for an attack upon Jeremiah by the priests and the prophets, and had it not been for the influence of a few powerful friends such as Ahikam, the prophet would probably have lost his life. As it was, he was imprisoned, and only allowed to write his predictions, and have them read to the people by Baruch. He escaped the vengeance of Jehoiakim through the favour of the princes; but in the time of Zedekiah, the princes became his enemies, while the monarch consulted him in secret. When Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar, the prophet was found in prison to which the princes had consigned him. The heathen conqueror, forming a far more correct estimate of his worth than his own countrymen had done, gave special instructions to his general to provide for Jeremiah and attend to his counsels. Being offered the choice of going to Babylon or of remaining in his own fallen country, the patriotic prophet chose the latter, and went to Mizpah with Gedaliah, the Babylonian governor. At the time of the downfall of his country, Jeremiah had been fully forty years a prophet—

| During Josiah | 18 years (B.C. 629) | |--------------|-------------------| | Jehoahaz | 3 | | Jehoiakim | 11 | | Jehoiachin | 3 | | Zedekiah | 11 |

40½ years (B.C. 588).

But he did not now cease to give warning to the remnant of the people. On the murder of Gedaliah he resisted the wayward movement among the Jews to go to Egypt, the scene of their bondage, and destined again to become the scene of their religious ruin. To stay their downward career, however, he went with them, and it is said met his death at their hands in the streets of Cairo, where his tomb used to be shown. A less credible tradition relates that his bones were removed to Alexandria by Alexander the Great.

The character of Jeremiah forms a remarkable contrast with that of his contemporary Ezekiel—the one displaying the latent boldness of a sensitive and shrinking spirit, the other showing the absorbent power of divine inspiration in a soul of finer and firmer texture. The style of Jeremiah is quite in accordance with such a character. A monotony of pain runs through the whole of his prophecy, which makes him dwell always on the same images; and there is marked carelessness of diction which betits a soul in the deepest grief. Numerous quotations from the older books of the Bible, and especially from the older prophets, betray his personal sensitiveness without subtracting from his power.

The authenticity and canonicity of the writings of Jeremiah may be regarded as beyond dispute. Only in very recent times have traces of a later hand been imagined in the second decade of the chapters into which his prophecy is now divided. In Matt. xxvii. 9, there is a quotation from Jeremiah not now found in that prophet's writings; but as it is found in Zech. xi. 12, 13, it is not improbable that the name of Jeremiah has crept into the text from the margin. Besides this, the difference of order in the prophecies as given in Hebrew and Septuagint copies, as well as the omission of numerous passages in the latter, have occasioned some difficulty. These diversities have been mostly accounted for by the supposition of a double recension.

The unchronological order of the prophecies, although it has been the occasion of much scientific criticism, can scarcely be regarded as a stumbling-block in the works of a prophet distinguished above all for the tragic looseness of his style. Ewald, on the supposition that the various parts have been dislocated accidentally, or even designedly after Jeremiah's prophetic career was broken by his departure into Egypt, attempts to reconstruct the whole, but in truth nearly follows the existing order of arrangement.

The principal commentators who have given separate treatises on Jeremiah are—Calvin, Piscator, Venema, Michaelis, Schmurrer, Dahler, Movers, Umbreit, Nägelbach (1850), and Neumann (1856).