Retribution and Divine Justice

Jeremiah was the prophet of exile par excellence. He was active before and during the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, from the thirteenth year of King Josiah (627 BCE) through the reign of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah (reigned 597–586 BCE). He engaged in debates with royal officials and with other prophets in Jerusalem, urged submission to Babylonia, and was repeatedly imprisoned as a traitor. Although Jeremiah himself did not go into exile in Babylonia (he went to Egypt shortly after 586 BCE), much of his book is concerned with the exile. It contains judgments against Judah that justify God’s punishment for the people’s religious and moral sins and against the other nations, as well as prophecies of comfort, picturing a return from exile and God’s inscribing his covenant on the people’s hearts so that they will never sin again. The book contains poetic speeches, prose sermons, disputations, symbolic actions, prophetic visions, a letter (to the exiles in Babylonia), numerous biographical stories about Jeremiah, and dialogues with God in which Jeremiah laments his tribulations as a prophet. The prophecies and events recorded are not arranged in chronological order. Like the book of Isaiah, the book of Jeremiah contains, in chapters 39 and 52, narrative inserts from the book of Kings. Jeremiah drew on narrative, legal, and poetic traditions in the Torah and on earlier prophetic traditions as well. Especially in its final version, it bears the stamp of Deuteronomistic thought and style, linking it in some way with the group responsible for the compilation of Deuteronomy and the Former Prophets.