Jeremiah · ספר ירמיהו

Section: Neviim · נביאים (Later Prophets) | Chapters: 52 | Days: 214-265

About the Book of Jeremiah

The Book of Jeremiah (ספר ירמיהו) contains the prophecies of Yirmiyahu ben Chilkiyahu, the priest from Anatot who prophesied for forty years across the reigns of Yoshiyahu, Yehoyakim, Yehoyachin, and Tzidkiyahu, and who lived to see the Churban he had warned against. It is the book of the destruction — and, in the field bought at Anatot and the covenant written on the heart, the book of the most concrete hope in all the Nevi’im.

Yirmiyahu: An Introduction

A boy at Anatot

The Book of Yirmiyahu opens not with a vision of the divine throne, as Yeshayahu’s and Yechezkel’s do, but with a refusal. A young man in a priestly village three miles north of Yerushalayim hears the word of Hashem and answers, “Ah, my Lord — lo yadati dabber, I do not know how to speak, for I am a boy.” It is the oldest excuse in Tanakh — Moshe made it at the burning bush — and Hashem overrides it exactly as He overrode Moshe. But what follows is unlike any other prophetic call. Yirmiyahu is told what his work will be before he has spoken a word of it: lintosh v’lintotz u’l’ha’avid v’laharos — to uproot, to tear down, to destroy, to overthrow — and only then, four verbs later, livnot v’lintoa, to build and to plant. He is told in the same breath that the kings and princes and priests and people will fight against him, and that they will not prevail. He is not promised that they will listen. He is promised only that they will fail to silence him.

This is the paradox that governs the whole book. Yirmiyahu is a navi commanded to fail — to speak for forty years to a city that will not turn, to watch everything he warned against come to pass, to be beaten and jailed and dropped into a cistern and dragged to Egypt against his will, and never once to be permitted the consolations that make a life bearable. He is forbidden to marry. He is forbidden to enter a house of mourning or a house of feasting. He is stripped of every ordinary comfort so that his solitude itself becomes a sign. And it is this bereft priest from Anatot through whom Hashem promises a covenant written on the heart, and who buys a field with silver while the Chaldean siege-ramps stand against the walls. The book of the Churban is also, and not by accident, the book of the most concrete hope in all the Nevi’im.

The shape of a broken scroll

Anyone who opens Yirmiyahu looking for a chronological narrative will be disoriented within a few chapters. The book moves back and forth across the reigns of Yoshiyahu, Yehoyakim, Yehoyachin, and Tzidkiyahu without regard for sequence, and the classical commentators — Rashi and Radak especially — spend considerable effort simply dating the oracles for the reader.

Underneath the disorder there is a discernible shape. The opening chapters, largely poetry, carry the early prophecies from the days of Yoshiyahu: Israel as a bride who followed Hashem into the wilderness and then forgot Him, the cracked cisterns that hold no water, the people who chant “the Temple of Hashem, the Temple of Hashem, the Temple of Hashem” as though the building were a charm. Then the book thickens into prose and into the reign of Yehoyakim, where the prophet’s own life becomes inseparable from his message: the sermon at the Temple gate, the trial, the scroll, the yoke. The long central section carries the reader into the siege under Tzidkiyahu — the pit, the secret audiences, the fall of the city, the king’s sons killed before his eyes and the blinding that followed. The aftermath is told with a bleakness no other book of Tanakh attempts: the assassination of Gedalyah, the flight to Egypt, the last recorded words of the prophet delivered to exiles who tell him to his face that things went better when they burned incense to the queen of heaven. Then the oracles against the nations, and a closing chapter that repeats the end of Melachim almost verbatim.

The Gemara in Bava Batra explains why Yirmiyahu is placed immediately after Melachim, ahead of Yeshayahu who lived a century earlier: because Melachim ends in destruction and Yirmiyahu is kuleih churbana, all destruction, and destruction is set beside destruction. The Maharsha adds that “all” cannot be literal — there is comfort in Yirmiyahu and doom in Yeshayahu — but the instinct behind the arrangement is right. This is the book in which the thing Moshe warned of in Devarim finally happens.

The fire in the bones

What makes Yirmiyahu unlike every other navi is that we are allowed to hear him when he is not prophesying. Scattered through the middle of the book are passages in which the prophet turns from the people to Hashem and speaks for himself — laments, complaints, near-accusations. No other prophet’s inner life is given this much space. Yeshayahu is a voice; Yirmiyahu is a man.

The most searing of them comes after a night in the stocks at the upper Binyamin Gate, where the priest Pashchur had him beaten for prophesying in the Temple court. “Pititani Hashem va’epat” — You enticed me, Hashem, and I was enticed; You overpowered me and prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long. And then the line that has defined the prophetic vocation ever since: “I said, I will not remember Him, I will not speak any more in His name — but it was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I wearied of holding it in, and I could not.” A few verses later he curses the day he was born. Iyov says such things; Yirmiyahu says them while remaining a navi, and the book preserves the curse without softening it.

The tradition did not find this scandalous. The Gemara in Megillah traces Yirmiyahu’s lineage back through the priests of Anatot to Rachav of Yericho, placing a convert and a harlot at the root of the prophet of Yerushalayim’s fall — and, by the same tradition, at the root of Baruch and Chuldah. The Midrash in Eichah Rabbah gives him a role no other human being is given: it is Yirmiyahu whom Hashem takes with Him to walk through the ruined Temple, Yirmiyahu who is sent to wake Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, and Moshe from their graves so that they can weep. The tradition understood that a man who could be so broken by the word was precisely the man to carry it into the fire. Elsewhere he describes receiving prophecy in a phrase no other navi uses: “Your words were found, and I ate them, and Your word was for me a joy and the delight of my heart.” The fire in the bones is the same word that was once eaten with joy. Yirmiyahu never resolves that contradiction, and the book is greater for not resolving it.

The yoke and the false prophets

The deepest argument in Yirmiyahu is not between the prophet and the wicked. It is between the prophet and other prophets — men who spoke in the name of Hashem, in the Temple courts, with sincerity, and whose message had every appearance of faith: Hashem will not abandon His house. Had not Yeshayahu promised, a century before, that Sancheriv would not enter the city, and had not that promise been kept? The optimists of Yirmiyahu’s day were not heretics. They were the heirs of Yeshayahu’s theology, applied to a generation that had forfeited it.

Against them Yirmiyahu stands at the Temple gate and delivers the sermon that nearly gets him killed. Go to Shiloh, he tells them — go and see what I did to the place where My name first dwelt. The priests and prophets demand his death; the princes and elders save him by recalling that Michah of Moreshet had said the same of Yerushalayim in the days of Chizkiyahu and had not been executed for it. The claim is easy to state and almost impossible for a people to accept: that the sanctity of a place is conditional on the conduct of those within it, and that Hashem will destroy His own house rather than let it shelter injustice.

The argument is dramatised in the encounter with Chananyah ben Azzur. Yirmiyahu has been walking Yerushalayim with a wooden yoke on his neck, a sign that Yehudah must submit to Bavel. Chananyah, in the Temple, before the priests and all the people, breaks it: thus will Hashem break the yoke of Nevuchadnetzar within two years. Yirmiyahu’s first response is astonishing: Amen. May Hashem do so. Only afterward does he return with the word that Chananyah has broken a yoke of wood and will be given one of iron, and that Chananyah will die that year. He does, in the seventh month. The Rambam draws from this book his principle that a prophet of doom need not be tested, since Hashem may relent, while a prophet of good must be held to his word. But the book’s own test is harsher: the prophet who tells a corrupt generation that all is well is, by that fact alone, suspect. Yirmiyahu’s contemporaries had a Tanakh full of divine rescues and no framework for divine abandonment. He gave them one, and they hated him for it.

The field at Anatot

Then, at the darkest point of the book, the prophet does something so unexpected that the narrator records it in full legal detail. It is the tenth year of Tzidkiyahu. The Chaldeans are around the city. Yirmiyahu is under guard in the palace court for saying it will fall. And the word of Hashem tells him that his cousin Chanamel will come with an offer: buy my field in Anatot, for the right of redemption is yours. Chanamel comes. Yirmiyahu weighs out seventeen shekels of silver, signs the deed before witnesses, seals it, has Baruch place it in an earthenware jar so that it will last for many days — and then, holding the deed, turns to Hashem in bewilderment. The answer is the theology of the whole book compressed into a single act: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall yet be bought in this land.” Not a vision, not a sign in the heavens, but a title deed in a jar. Yirmiyahu’s hope is never abstract. It is the hope of a man who has counted out the silver.

The same concreteness governs the seventy years given in the letter to the first exiles — build houses, plant gardens, seek the peace of the city to which you have been carried — a number Daniel will read and pray over, and with which the Chronicler will close the whole of Tanakh. And it governs the chapters of consolation at the book’s heart, where the voice that has spoken only of uprooting begins to speak of planting. Kol b’Ramah nishma — a voice is heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted. And the answer: withhold your voice from weeping, for there is a reward for your labour, and your children shall return to their border. The Midrash in Eichah Rabbah makes this the climax of the Churban itself. Avraham pleads, Yitzchak pleads, Yaakov and Moshe plead, and Hashem does not relent; then Rachel rises and reminds Him that she gave her sister the signs on her wedding night rather than shame her, and asks how the Living God could be more jealous of an idol than she was of a rival. For Rachel’s sake, the Midrash says, Israel is brought home.

It is here too that Yirmiyahu speaks of a brit chadashah, a new covenant: “I will put My Torah within them, and on their heart I will write it.” No verse in the Nevi’im has been more contested, and the Radak addresses it directly. The newness lies not in a new Torah but in the permanence of the old one — a covenant that cannot be broken because its terms are written where they cannot be forgotten. Malachi seals the prophetic canon with “Remember the Torah of Moshe My servant,” and the Radak reads that as the last word on what Yirmiyahu meant. The covenant of Sinai is not replaced. It is, at last, kept.

The scroll and the knife

If the field is the book’s image of hope, the scroll in the fire is its image of survival. Barred from the Temple, Yirmiyahu dictates every prophecy he has spoken to Baruch ben Neriyah, who reads the scroll publicly on a fast day. It passes upward until it reaches Yehoyakim, sitting in his winter house with a brazier before him. As each few columns are read, the king cuts them off with a scribe’s knife and throws them into the fire until the whole scroll is consumed. Then Hashem tells Yirmiyahu to write it all again — and, the narrator adds, many similar words were added.

The Gemara in Bava Batra names Yirmiyahu as the author not only of his own book but of Melachim and of Eichah, and cites this episode — “he dictated all these words to me, and I wrote them with ink in the scroll” — as the model for how prophetic books came to be written. Chazal are unsparing about Yehoyakim. With his brother Tzidkiyahu they are very different. The Gemara in Sanhedrin says that Hashem wished to return the world to chaos because of Tzidkiyahu’s generation, looked at Tzidkiyahu, and was appeased; when it confronts the verse that says he did evil in the eyes of Hashem, it answers that he had the power to protest and did not. The Yerushalmi reads his very name: Tzidkiyahu, who accepted the justice of the judgment upon him. This is the frame within which the book’s portrait of the last king must be read — a man who summons Yirmiyahu in secret, is told to surrender and cannot, who is afraid of his own officers, and who watches his sons killed at Rivlah as the last thing he ever sees. The peshat shows a king paralysed. Chazal show a righteous man not strong enough for his hour, whose people, not he, brought the world to the edge of unmaking. Both are true, and the book is honest enough to leave them side by side.

The final chapter closes, as Melachim does, with Yehoyachin released from prison in Bavel and given a seat above the other captive kings. It is important not to make this carry more than the text does: the meforshim do not read it as a promise of restoration, and a reader who hears in it the ember of a Davidic future is reading homiletically. What the ending does establish is that the scroll survived the knife. The words Yehoyakim burned are the book in the reader’s hands.

Two small notes from the ground. Clay bullae bearing the names Gemaryahu ben Shafan and Yehuchal ben Shelemyahu — both officials named in the book, one in the scroll episode itself — have been recovered in the City of David. And a set of letters on potsherds, found in the burned layer at Lachish, records an officer watching for the fire-signals of Lachish because those of Azekah can no longer be seen — the last two fortified cities of Yehudah, named in exactly that pairing in Yirmiyahu, going dark one after the other.

The voice of the Ninth of Av

Jewish memory has given Yirmiyahu a role no other prophet holds. He is the voice of the Three Weeks: the haftarot that open the season of mourning are drawn from his first two chapters, and the day itself belongs to the man who, by rabbinic tradition, composed Eichah from within the ruin. The kinot return again and again to the images he supplied — Rachel at Ramah, the daughter of Zion, the pit, the fire.

And yet the tradition never let him become only that. The same book supplies the haftarah of the second day of Rosh Hashanah — Rachel weeping and being answered, Ephraim the darling son whom Hashem remembers still — and the words that close the Zichronot, “I remember for you the devotion of your youth.” The field at Anatot and the scroll in the jar are the tradition’s own images for what it means to hope from inside a catastrophe.

To begin Yirmiyahu is to sit with a man who was told he would fail and who did, and who was told he would not be silenced and was not. It is to watch the most exacting fulfilment in Tanakh of the curses of Devarim, and to hear, from within it, the most exact promise of return. The book is kuleih churbana, and the Maharsha is right that it is not. Both things, held together in one long and disordered scroll, are what Israel has carried through every exile since: the knowledge that the house can fall, and the deed to the field.

Chapters

• Chapter 1 — The call of Yirmiyahu: known before he was formed, the almond branch and the boiling pot, and the charge to uproot and to plant
• Chapter 2 — The covenant lawsuit: the remembered devotion of Israel’s youth, and the twofold wrong — forsaking the fount of living waters to hew out broken cisterns
• Chapter 3 — The two sisters, backsliding Israel and treacherous Yehudah; ‘shuvu banim shovavim’ called northward, and a Yerushalayim that will not miss the Ark
• Chapter 4 — Circumcise the foreskin of your hearts; the shofar and the evil from the north; the prophet’s writhing bowels, and the earth seen again as tohu vavohu
• Chapter 5 — Search the squares for one man who does justice; the sand that bounds the sea obeys, but this people has a stubborn heart — yet ‘I will not make a full end’
• Chapter 6 — The siege closes from the north; healing the wound lightly with ‘shalom shalom v’ein shalom’; stand at the crossroads and ask for the ancient paths — but they said, we will not walk
• Chapter 7 — The sermon at the Temple gate: ‘heichal Hashem’ thrice repeated as a charm, the warning from Shiloh, the ban on praying for this people, and the Tofet that will be called the Valley of Slaughter
• Chapter 8 — Bones spread before the host of heaven; the stork knows her seasons but My people do not; the lying pen of the scribes; the harvest is past, and is there no balm in Gilad
• Chapter 9 — A lodging place in the wilderness; the tongue bent like a bow for falsehood; the mourning women summoned; and let him that glories glory only in knowing Me
• Chapter 10 — The scarecrow gods that cannot walk or speak, answered by the Maker of heaven and earth; the one Aramaic verse in the book; ‘lo k’eleh chelek Yaakov’; and a man’s way is not his own
• Chapter 11 — The words of this covenant and the iron furnace; gods as numerous as Yehudah’s cities; the leafy olive tree set alight; and the plot at Anatot against a lamb led to the slaughter
• Chapter 12 — ‘Why does the way of the wicked prosper’; the answer that offers no comfort — if footmen wearied you, how will you run with horses; and God’s own lament over the beloved of His soul
• Chapter 13 — The linen waistcloth ruined at Perat; the jars filled with drunkenness; give glory before it grows dark; and can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard his spots
• Chapter 14 — The words of the droughts, and the hind abandoning her newborn; ‘Hope of Israel, why be as a stranger in the land’; the lying prophets of peace; and do not dishonour the throne of Your glory
• Chapter 15 — Though Moshe and Shmuel stood before Me; woe is me, my mother, that you bore me; Your words were found and I ate them; and will You be to me as a brook that fails
• Chapter 16 — The prophet forbidden a wife, a funeral and a feast; the voice of bridegroom and bride silenced; the oath that will name a new exodus from the north; and the nations confessing their fathers inherited falsehood
• Chapter 17 — Sin engraved with an iron stylus on the tablet of the heart; the partridge hatching eggs it did not lay; the tamarisk in the desert against the tree planted by water; ‘the heart is devious above all, who can know it’; and the Shabbat oracle at the gates of Jerusalem
• Chapter 18 — The potter’s house and the spoiled vessel remade on the wheel; the principle that a decree is conditional and repentance overturns it; the people’s flat reply ‘it is hopeless’; and the plot to strike the prophet with the tongue
• Chapter 19 — The earthen flask carried to the Valley of Ben-Hinnom; a disaster to make the ears tingle; the sons burned in fire that never came into God’s mind; Tofet renamed the Valley of Slaughter; and the vessel shattered beyond repair
• Chapter 20 — Pashchur strikes the prophet and is renamed Terror on Every Side; ‘You enticed me and I was enticed’; the word as a burning fire shut up in the bones; a doxology of deliverance; and then ‘cursed be the day on which I was born’
• Chapter 21 — Tzidkiyahu’s embassy during the siege; the outstretched hand and strong arm of the exodus turned against Israel; the way of life and the way of death set before the people; and the house of David charged to execute justice in the morning
• Chapter 22 — The prophet sent down to the palace: do justice and David’s line endures, or ‘this house shall become a ruin’; ‘weep not for the dead, but for him who goes away’; woe to Yehoyakim who builds his house without righteousness, and ‘is not this to know Me?’; the burial of a donkey; and Konyahu torn off like a signet ring and inscribed childless
• Chapter 23 — Woe to the shepherds who scatter the flock; the remnant gathered and the righteous branch of David called ‘HaShem Tzidkenu’; the prophets of Jerusalem worse than the prophets of Shomron; ‘what has the straw to do with the grain’ and the word like fire and a hammer shattering rock; and the forbidden word ‘massa’, the burden cast off
• Chapter 24 — The vision of two baskets of figs before the Heichal after Yechanyahu’s exile; the good figs are the exiles in Bavel, whom God will build and not overthrow, plant and not uproot; a heart given to know the LORD, ‘they shall be My people and I will be their God’; and Tzidkiyahu, the remnant in Jerusalem and those in Egypt as the bad figs, made a horror and a byword among the nations
• Chapter 25 — Twenty-three years of rising early and speaking, unheeded; Nevuchadretzar ‘My servant’ and the seventy years of Babylonian rule; the cup of the wine of fury passed to Jerusalem and all the nations, with Sheshach drinking last; and the LORD roaring from on high as the shepherds howl and the lion forsakes its lair
• Chapter 26 — The Temple sermon at the start of Yehoyakim’s reign, ‘I will make this house like Shiloh’; the priests and prophets seize Yirmiyahu and demand his death; the trial at the New Gate and the prophet’s defense, ‘behold I am in your hands’; the elders cite Michah’s ‘Zion shall be plowed as a field’ and Chizkiyahu’s repentance; the killing of the prophet Uriyahu by Yehoyakim; and Achikam son of Shafan shields Yirmiyahu
• Chapter 27 — The yoke of wood bars sent to the envoys of Edom, Moav, Ammon, Tzor and Tzidon; serve Nevuchadnetzar and live; the warning to Tzidkiyahu and the priests against the prophets of ‘you shall not serve the king of Bavel’; and the Temple vessels that will go to Bavel until the day of their remembrance
• Chapter 28 — Chananyah son of Azur’s counter-prophecy of two years and the breaking of the yoke from Yirmiyahu’s neck; the prophet’s ‘Amen, may the LORD do so’; the yoke of wood replaced by a yoke of iron; and Chananyah’s death in the seventh month, as foretold
• Chapter 29 — Yirmiyahu’s letter to the exiles in Bavel: build houses, plant gardens and seek the peace of the city; seventy years and then the return, ‘I know the thoughts I think toward you’; the false prophets Achav and Tzidkiyahu roasted in fire; and Shemayah the Nechelami’s letter against Yirmiyahu
• Chapter 30 — The Book of Consolation opens: ‘write all the words in a book’; the day of Yaakov’s trouble, ‘and from it he shall be saved’; ‘fear not, My servant Yaakov’; the incurable wound that God Himself heals; and the city rebuilt upon its mound
• Chapter 31 — Everlasting love and the virgin of Israel rebuilt; Rachel weeping for her children and ‘there is hope for your future’; Efrayim, ‘My dear son’; the new covenant written on the heart; the fixed order of sun and moon as Israel’s guarantee; and Jerusalem rebuilt, holy to the LORD
• Chapter 32 — In the tenth year of Tzidkiyahu, with Jerusalem under siege and Yirmiyahu confined in the court of the guard, he buys his cousin Chanamel’s field at Anatot; the deeds sealed in an earthenware vessel; the prophet’s prayer, ‘nothing is too wondrous for You’; and the promise that fields will again be bought in this land
• Chapter 33 — A second word in the court of the guard: ‘call to Me and I will answer you’; healing and the return of the captivity; the voice of joy, of bridegroom and bride; the righteous shoot of David; and the covenant with day and night as surety that David’s line and the Levitical priests will never be cut off
• Chapter 34 — A private word to Tzidkiyahu: the city will burn and he will see the king of Bavel eye to eye, yet he will not die by the sword but in peace, mourned with royal burnings; Lachish and Azekah, the last fortified cities; the covenant to proclaim liberty for Hebrew slaves and its betrayal when the siege lifted; ‘I proclaim liberty for you’ to sword, pestilence and famine; the calf cut in two; and the Kasdim commanded to return and burn the city
• Chapter 35 — In the days of Yehoyakim, Yirmiyahu brings the Rechabites into a Temple chamber and sets wine before them; their refusal, out of loyalty to Yonadav son of Rechav’s command to drink no wine, build no houses and dwell in tents; ‘will you not take instruction?’, the lesson to Yehudah, who would not listen to God’s prophets; and the promise that Yonadav will never lack a man standing before God
• Chapter 36 — In the fourth year of Yehoyakim, Yirmiyahu dictates his prophecies to Baruch son of Neriyah, ‘perhaps the house of Yehudah will hear’; Baruch reads the scroll in the Temple on a fast day in the chamber of Gemaryahu son of Shafan; the frightened officials hide prophet and scribe; Yehoyakim cuts the scroll column by column and burns it in his winter-house brazier, neither fearing nor tearing his garments; and a second scroll is written, with many words like them added
• Chapter 37 — Tzidkiyahu reigns but will not listen, yet asks Yirmiyahu to pray; Pharaoh’s army lifts the siege for a time, and the word comes that Egypt will retreat and the Kasdim will return and burn the city; Yirmiyahu, leaving for the land of Binyamin, is seized at the gate as a deserter, beaten and thrown into the pit in Yehonatan the scribe’s house; the secret audience, ‘is there a word from the LORD?’ ‘There is’; and his transfer to the court of the guard with a daily loaf until the bread runs out
• Chapter 38 — The officials demand Yirmiyahu’s death for weakening the hands of the soldiers; ‘he is in your hand, for the king can do nothing against you’; the prophet sunk in the mud of Malkiyahu’s cistern; Eved-melech the Kushite and thirty men draw him up with worn rags under his arms; the secret meeting at the third entrance: surrender and live, or ‘you will burn this city’; the women’s taunt, ‘your feet have sunk in the mire’; the king’s cover story; and Yirmiyahu in the court of the guard until Yerushalayim is taken
• Chapter 39 — The siege begun in the tenth month and the city breached on the ninth of the fourth; the Babylonian officers in the middle gate, fulfilling 1:15; Tzidkiyahu’s flight by the king’s garden and capture in the plains of Yericho; his sons and the nobles slaughtered at Rivla before his eyes, his eyes put out and his feet in bronze fetters; the palace and houses burned and the walls torn down; Nevuzaradan exiles the remnant and gives vineyards and fields to the poor; Nevuchadnetzar’s order, ‘take him and set your eyes upon him’; Yirmiyahu taken from the court of the guard and entrusted to Gedalyahu; and the promise to Eved-melech the Kushite, ‘your life will be yours as spoil, because you trusted in Me’
• Chapter 40 — Nevuzaradan frees Yirmiyahu from his chains at Rama: ‘the LORD your God spoke this evil against this place’; the choice between Bavel and the land, and ‘return to Gedalyahu’; the prophet stays with the remnant at Mitzpa; the army officers gather and Gedalyahu swears, ‘do not fear to serve the Kasdim’; Judeans return from Moav, Amon and Edom and gather wine and summer fruit in abundance; Yochanan ben Kare’ach warns that Ba’alis king of Amon has sent Yishmael ben Netanyah, offers to kill him in secret, and Gedalyahu answers, ‘you are speaking falsely about Yishmael’
• Chapter 41 — In the seventh month Yishmael son of Netanyah, of the royal seed, eats bread with Gedalyahu at Mitzpah and murders him, the source of Tzom Gedalya; eighty mourning pilgrims from Shechem, Shilo and Shomron lured in by false weeping and slaughtered, ten spared for their hidden stores of wheat, barley, oil and honey; the pit of King Asa filled with corpses, ‘by the hand of Gedalyahu’ who ignored the warning; the remnant and the king’s daughters taken captive toward Amon; Yochanan son of Kare’ach rescues them at the great waters of Givon as Yishmael escapes with eight men; and the remnant halts at Gerut Kimham near Beit Lechem, bound for Egypt out of fear of the Kasdim
• Chapter 42 — The officers and all the people, from the least to the greatest, ask Yirmiyahu to pray and swear to obey ‘whether good or bad’; after ten days the word comes: stay in the land and ‘I will build you and not overthrow, plant you and not uproot’; ‘do not fear the king of Bavel’; but if you go down to Egypt, the sword you fear will overtake you there and the famine will cling to you; you will become an oath and a curse and never see this place again; and the prophet’s rebuke, ‘you have deceived yourselves’, for they had decided before they asked
• Chapter 43 — Azaryah son of Hoshayah, Yochanan son of Kare’ach and ‘all the arrogant men’ call Yirmiyahu a liar, ‘the LORD our God did not send you,’ and blame Baruch son of Neriyah for inciting him; they refuse to stay in the land and take the whole remnant down to Egypt, Yirmiyahu and Baruch included; the arrival at Tachpanches; the sign of the great stones hidden in the mortar of the brick terrace at Pharaoh’s house; Nevuchadnetzar, ‘My servant,’ will set his throne over them and spread his canopy; he will strike Egypt, burn the houses of its gods, wrap up the land ‘as a shepherd wraps himself in his garment,’ and shatter the pillars of Beit Shemesh
• Chapter 44 — Yirmiyahu’s last prophecy, to the Judeans of Migdol, Tachpanches, Nof and Patros: ‘you have seen all the evil I brought on Yerushalayim’; ‘have you forgotten the evils of your fathers’ and of the kings’ wives; ‘they were not crushed to this day’; the remnant who fled to Egypt will perish there, save a few fugitives; the men and women of Patros refuse: ‘we will burn incense to the queen of heaven,’ for then ‘we had plenty of bread’; the prophet answers that God remembered that incense; ‘establish your vows and perform your vows’; God’s name will no longer be invoked by Yehudah in Egypt, and ‘they will know whose word will stand, Mine or theirs’; the sign of Pharaoh Chofra given into the hands of his enemies like Tzidkiyahu
• Chapter 45 — The word to Baruch son of Neriyah in the fourth year of Yehoyakim, as he wrote the prophet’s scroll; Baruch’s lament, ‘the LORD has added grief to my pain… I have found no rest,’ read by the midrash as his longing for prophecy like Yehoshua and Elisha; God’s answer, ‘what I have built I am tearing down, what I have planted I am uprooting’; ‘do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them,’ for prophecy comes only in Israel’s merit; and the promise, ‘I will give you your life as spoil in all the places where you go’
• Chapter 46 — The oracles against the nations begin ‘concerning the nations’ with Egypt; the army of Pharaoh Nechoh routed by Nevuchadnetzar at Carchemish on the Perat in the fourth year of Yehoyakim; ‘buckler and shield’ made ready, then ‘terror all around’; Egypt that rose ‘like the Nile’ to cover the earth; a day of vengeance for Yoshiyahu and God’s ‘sacrifice in the north country’; ‘go up to Gilead and take balm’, for there is no healing; Nevuchadnetzar’s coming to strike Egypt itself, from Migdol to Nof and Tachpanches; Pharaoh mocked as ‘a noise who let the appointed time pass by’; ‘as Tabor among the mountains’; the ‘beautiful heifer’ and the gadfly from the north; Amon of No and all who trust in Pharaoh punished, yet Egypt to be inhabited again ‘as in days of old’; and the comfort, ‘do not fear, My servant Yaakov’, for ‘I will not make a full end of you’
• Chapter 47 — The oracle against the Pelishtim ‘before Pharaoh struck Aza,’ dated by Seder Olam to Pharaoh’s raid during the siege of Tzidkiyahu’s tenth year; ‘waters rising from the north’ become a sweeping torrent; the stamping of hooves and rumbling of wheels, and fathers who do not turn back for their children ‘from weakness of hands’; every helper of Tzor and Tzidon cut off, ‘the remnant of the island of Kaftor’; baldness comes to Aza and Ashkelon is silenced; and the cry ‘O sword of the LORD, how long will you not be quiet?’ answered, ‘how can it be quiet, when the LORD has commanded it against Ashkelon and the seacoast’
• Chapter 48 — The oracle against Moav: ‘woe to Nevo,’ and a ravager comes to every city of the tableland, from Cheshbon and Madmen to Choronayim, Luchit and Aro’er; ‘because you trusted in your works and your treasures,’ Kemosh goes into exile with his priests; ‘cursed is he who does the LORD’s work deceitfully’; Moav ‘settled on his lees,’ never poured from vessel to vessel, now tipped out by pourers and ashamed of Kemosh as Israel was of Beit El; the roll call of condemned towns; ‘he magnified himself against the LORD’ and mocked Israel ‘as if found among thieves’; the prophet’s lament for the vine of Sivmah and the end of the ‘hedad’ shout; the eagle spreading its wings, ‘terror, pit and trap,’ and fire from Cheshbon echoing the song of Sichon; and the closing promise, ‘I will restore the captivity of Moav at the end of days’
• Chapter 49 — Yirmiyahu’s prophecies against Ammon, Edom, Damascus, Kedar and Chatzor, and Eilam: pride and false security fall, with a promise of restoration for Ammon and Eilam.
• Chapter 50 — The first half of the prophecy against Bavel: the hammer of the earth is broken, the scattered flock of Israel and Judah returns to Zion, and the Temple is avenged.
• Chapter 51 — The great prophecy against Bavel concludes: God’s war club is broken, Jerusalem’s cry is answered, the exiles are called home, and Serayah sinks the scroll in the Euphrates.
• Chapter 52 — The historical appendix: Jerusalem falls, Tzidkiyahu is captured and blinded, the Temple is burned and stripped, the exiles are counted, and Yehoyachin is released in Bavel.

← Back to Nach Yomi