Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who kept predicting Jerusalem's fall
For roughly four decades Jeremiah told the people of Judah that invaders from the north would take their city, while rival prophets promised peace. He was plotted against by his own relatives, locked in stocks, and lowered into a muddy cistern. Then Babylon took Jerusalem, and its conquerors set him free.
Born around 650 BC to Hilkiah, a priest from the village of Anathoth in Benjamin, Jeremiah said he was called in about 626 BC, the thirteenth year of King Josiah. He protested that he was only a child who could not speak. His ministry ran through five kings, from Josiah to Zedekiah, and his mentor was the prophet Zephaniah. Because he appears fully literate from the start, some scholars suspect he trained at the Jerusalem scribal school run by the Shaphan family.
His message made enemies. Kin at Anathoth, perhaps fearing their local sanctuary would close, plotted his death. The temple official Pashur had him beaten and put in stocks for a day. Under Zedekiah he wore a wooden yoke to show Judah would serve Babylon; when the prophet Hananiah broke it, Jeremiah answered that a yoke of iron would replace it. Officials who accused him of sapping morale had him dropped into a cistern, and an Ethiopian named Ebed-Melech pulled him out, though he stayed a prisoner until the city fell in 587 BC.
Released by the Babylonians, he joined Gedaliah, the new governor, at Mizpah. After Gedaliah was assassinated, Johanan ignored Jeremiah's advice and fled to Egypt, taking the prophet and his scribe Baruch with him. No reliable record of his death exists.
Scholars agree a historical Jeremiah existed and that parts of his book may come from him or Baruch, though Rainer Albertz traces several rounds of editing between about 550 and 520 BC. Archaeology has touched his world: seals naming Jehucal and Gedaliah son of Pashhur, figures in chapter 38, turned up in Jerusalem's City of David in 2005 and 2008. Rabbinic tradition paired his life with that of Moses, and the New Testament quotes his book about forty times.
Source: Jeremiah
