| Jeremiah | |
|---|---|
| Birthplace | Anathoth |
| Occupation | Prophet |
Born circa 650 B.C. in Anathoth, the Kingdom of Judah; died after 586 B.C. in Egypt. The second of the so-called great prophets of Judaism. He began his work as a prophet as a youth in 626 B.C. A great number of Jeremiah’s sermons were devoted to the political situation of the Kingdom of Judah. Jeremiah preached of the necessity for peace with the most powerful of Judah’s enemies, Babylon; he preferred dependence on Babylon to the destruction of Judah. After the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 B.C. , Jeremiah was allowed to remain in his homel and, but opponents of Babylonian rule forcibly took him to Egypt. Jeremiah’s sermons and sayings form the basis of the book of the Old Testament that bears his name. Some of them were written down by Jeremiah himself and some by his associate Baruch, who also included his own narratives about Jeremiah in the book. The final editing of the text was most probably carried out in the second century B.C. The Book of Jeremiah is an important source for the history of the Near East of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.
It cannot be proved that Jeremiah wrote even one of the poems that make up the Old Testament book The Lamentations of Jeremiah. The traditional attribution of The Books of the Kings to Jeremiah is fallacious.