Read this if you…
- want the most emotionally raw prophet — the original 'jeremiad,' bewailing a destruction he saw coming for forty years and couldn't stop
- like the autobiographical bits: thrown in a cistern, mocked, plotted against, watching Jerusalem burn while telling everyone he'd warned them
- care about a prophet who hated his own job — 'his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing'
Skip this if you…
- don't want to read explicitly religious/Christian texts
The lineage through Jeremiah
- Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville. Jeremiah shaped it. - Melville named the ship that saves Ishmael after one of this book's most piercing lines - The *Rachel* — searching for her lost children, refusing to be comforted — enacts Jeremiah 31:15 directly: "Rachel weeping for her children, because they were not" - Father Mapple's drumbeat of "woe" is prophetic borrowing too, pulled from Jeremiah and his fellow prophets
Depicted in Art
A monumental, white-bearded Jeremiah looms over the seated Baruch, who poises his quill above an open scroll to take down the prophecy.
Washington Allston, 1820
Jeremiah slumps on his marble throne, beard untrimmed, head sunk on one hand, gazing downward in brooding silence while two mourning women flank him.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1512
An aged Jeremiah leans his head on his hand, propped against a gleaming pile of temple gold, while Jerusalem burns dimly in the dark distance behind him.
Rembrandt van Rijn, 1630
A white-robed Jeremiah sits crumpled on a stone block amid colossal toppled columns and shadowed temple wreckage, head bowed into his hand.
Horace Vernet, 1844
A balding, gaunt-faced Jeremiah stands in a heavy tunic, weight on one leg, head turned sharply left, mouth slightly parted as if mid-rebuke.
Donatello, 1436
A faithful color reproduction of Michelangelo's brooding seated Jeremiah, head sunk on his hand, scroll across his knees.
Marian (after Michelangelo)
A bespectacled Jeremiah in heavy robes stands on the hexagonal base of a monumental crucifixion well, clutching an unfurled scroll inscribed with words from Lamentations.
Claus Sluter, 1403
A grey-bearded Jeremiah in robes stands holding a scroll on a stone ledge crowded with books, a flickering oil lamp burning beside him.
Barthélemy d'Eyck (Master of the Aix Annunciation), 1445
A wild-haired Jeremiah throws his head back and cries out, arms half-raised, surrounded by the rubble and smoke of the fallen city.
Ilya Repin, 1870
Recommended Editions
King James Version
Oxford University Press · 1611
The most influential and commonly quoted translation in English. The prose rhythm everyone else is responding to, even modern translations.
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Notable Quotes
Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.
- S. R. Driver, Oxford biblical scholar, 1846–1914: "By his conception of the New Covenant, Jeremiah surpasses in spirituality and profundity of insight every other prophet of the Old Testament."
- Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader & theologian, 1929–1968: "He was one of the bravest men in Judah."
- Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament theologian, b. 1933: Jeremiah's voice compels us to rediscern our own situation, issuing an urgent invitation to faith, obedience, justice, and compassion.