What's JEREMIAH about?

Summary

Jeremiah wrote around five hundred years before Jesus was born, at the time when the Israelites were being released from captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah is puzzled about why God would first allow the people to be conquered by a foreign power, and later allow them to return home. Jeremiah's answer changed the rest of history (see below, how). We can get tired of reading Jeremiah's warnings and criticisms. But remember that his entire point is that God wants us to be fulfilled and the way to do that is to ensure others are fulfilled, too. That's Jeremiah's message to us, and we would be wise to take it seriously.

The military background: captured and released

In the ancient world, Israel was a very small country located between several super-powers.

Egypt was to the east, Babylonia and Persia to the north, and later Greece and Rome to the north-west.

Like super-powers today, these large militarized countries were often in conflict. Because of deserts in that part of the world, in order to attack each other, these super-powers needed to send their armies through the territory of Israel. As these super-powers enlarged their empires they would invade smaller countries to seize local wealth. Thus the country of Israel was attacked from time to time sometimes because they were on the military route between super-powers and sometimes because they had valuables.

About 700 years before Christ, the Assyrian empire was expanding and captured the northern half of Israel. About a hundred years later the southern part was also captured and the Jewish leaders and people taken as slaves back to the city of Babylon. This was a terrible disaster for the Jewish people.

Seventy years after their capture, Cyrus the king of the Persian empire, conquered the Babylonian empire. Cyrus instituted a policy of allowing captured peoples from small countries to return to their lands so they would grow crops which Cyrus' armies could appropriate when they were en route to another war. He therefore encouraged the Israelites to return to their land and to re-build their temple, and to settle and farm again. If Cyrus hadn't done that, the Jewish people would likely have been assimilated into the Persian empire and would have disappeared from history and would never have been heard of again. It was a remarkable and unexpected turn of events that had a major effect on subsequent western history.

The religious puzzle: why were they allowed to return home?

As the people returned to Jerusalem and began to re-build the temple, the centre of their culture, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians, the Israelites were presented with a religious puzzle. The puzzle was why God would send the Babylonians to enslave them, and then send Cyrus to release them. What was the point of this?

Jeremiah wrote his book to solve this puzzle. Other prophets such as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos and the author of Lamentations also attempted to explain what had happened, in similar ways.

So why was their return home a puzzle? To us, it sounds like a happy ending to an unhappy event. But to them it was much more than that.

In the ancient world each country was understood to have its own god. The reason your country was conquered by another country was that the god of your enemies was more powerful than your god—the gods had been at war with each other and the god of the other country had won, so that's why your armies were defeated. So at first, the invasions by the Assyrians and later the Babylonians could be explained by the fact that the Babylonian god Marduk was more powerful than the Jewish god. That seemed obvious because Babylon was a super-power and the Jewish land was tiny in comparison, so of course the Babylonian super-god must have been more powerful than the tiny Jewish god. So when Cyrus, who governed the largest empire in world history, conquered the Babylonians that meant that Cyrus' god was even more powerful than the Babylonian god.

But then Cyrus encouraged the Israelites to return home.

This was astonishing because it would mean that the Jewish god, who had lost to the Babylonian god, had somehow forced the even more powerful god of Cyrus to let the Jewish people go. The puzzle was how could a powerless god like the small Jewish god force the most powerful god in the world to act against the god’s best interests and set them free? The only explanation must be that, in spite of appearances, the Jewish god was actually more powerful than the god of the largest empire in history. This became the basis of the ancient Jewish claim that their God was supreme over all other gods and supreme over history.

But if that was true, why would the Jewish god have allowed the Assyrians and Babylonians to enslave them in the first place?

That was the puzzle for which Jeremiah had an explanation.

The explanation he came up with changed the rest of history.

Jeremiah's explanation has two parts.

1. The most powerful God was interested in the least powerful country

Why would the most powerful god in the world (the god of the Israelites) chose to be the god of a tiny unimportant country? It wouldn’t do their god’s reputation any good to help a tiny country—that wouldn’t demonstrate their god’s power against the major international gods. Jeremiah and others concluded that this powerful god must be committed to treating unimportant countries as if they were important even though this god didn't get anything out of it—this powerful god didn't mind being the god of a tiny, small, weak country. In fact, this god must have made it a priority to help helpless people. This god must care about unimportant people more than anything else. Most gods were concerned to look powerful and important, but this god, which they started calling “God” wasn't concerned primarily about God's reputation. God was concerned about weak people just because everyone should be cared for. This was a God with a whole different agenda than the normal gods. But this God had turned out to be stronger than the strongest god of the whole world. How strange! But how wonderful for a small weak country!

That's the first part of Jeremiah's explanation: they had lucked out to have the world's most powerful God who made it a priority to look after a little weak defenceless country like them.

And that led to the second half of Jeremiah's explanation.

2. Abandoning care for the poor results in disaster

If this God was so powerful in the first place and cared so much about a tiny weak country, why had God allowed the Babylonian god to capture and enslave them in the first place?

Jeremiah said that if this God was so concerned about a tiny weak country, then God must be equally concerned about unimportant powerless people, and in the ancient world there were lots of those. Just like now. So why would God abandon the country and let them be enslaved? It must be because they themselves had not cared about their poor weak people. To abandon the poor weak people in their own country must have meant that they were turning away from the God who made poor weak countries a priority. It meant that their country had preferred to follow the ways of the apparently strong gods of other countries whose priority was to enslave people so they could get richer and more powerful. So the Isrealite God must have allowed the people to make that choice. It must have been that their God, who respected them so much, had allowed them to do what they wanted: to abandon the poor and weak people and act like the gods of the violent empires. That's why their God allowed the weaker Babylonian god (who looked strong but wasn't) to conquer and enslave them.

3. God couldn't change God's character of caring for the poor, so God arranged for them to go home.

But the real God, the most powerful God over all the gods, couldn't change character, and because the people made themselves even weaker by using violence and abandoning their own weak people, their God made sure that the people wouldn't perish. That's why God arranged for Cyrus to let them return to their country. Their God was actually in charge of the king of the largest empire in history! So their God, the God of little people, turns out to be in charge of the entire universe!

It was an astonishing claim.

So Jeremiah wrote to explain how the people, and especially their leaders and kings, had abandoned the poor and how that had such terrible consequences, not just for the poor, but led to the entire country being enslaved. Jeremiah insisted that their God would act to allow them to return home if they adopted their God's priorities that everyone in the country be treated with dignity and respect, no matter how unimportant. Jeremiah insisted that they begin to worship this extraordinary God.

They wrote the Old Testament to explain that insight.

This claim about what their God had done to rescue them when they didn't deserve it had an amazing result—responding to that extraordinary God became the central purpose of the Israelites' religion and their laws.

So the religious leaders arranged the oral stories and legends that had been passed down for a thousand years from the distant past and put them in an order that illustrated this astonishing discovery about the nature of God. They organized the ancient stories about the creation of the world, about Noah, Abraham, Joseph, the escape from Egypt, their entrance into the new land of Canaan, and many other stories, to illustrate how their powerful God had always been looking after them even before they had been a country. And even when they rejected God's priority of caring for everyone and especially for the poor. When the ancient stories were organized and put in roughly chronological order, that became the Hebrew Bible (what we used to call the "Old Testament).

As we read passages in Jeremiah it's important to bear in mind what he was trying to say. He wrote his entire book to warn people and their kings how badly things would go wrong if the country didn't start looking after the poor and powerless. In some passages it sounds as if God is angry and wants to punish, but Jeremiah was pointing to the terrible and inevitable consequences of not caring about the poor. After all, he insisted, if God made everything to work together to include everyone, then doing the opposite is going to produce chaos and disaster. As we read Jeremiah, remember that he is confronting people who don't want to care about the oppression of the poorest and he desperately wants them to change so that the entire country can be happy and fulfilled.

Why Jeremiah is still important

Exactly the same issues are very obvious in our own time. The more that economic disparity grows in a country, the more severe its problems become. As wealthy countries care little to ensure that poor countries get vaccinated, the more likely everyone, rich and poor, will suffer far more from a pandemic. Jeremiah wasn't popular, but his warnings remain as true today as they were then. He wants things to go well, and so do we. But he is clear that including everyone in dignity is the only way to accomplish that. And he's clear that God never stops offering opportunities of the world to be fulfilled.

We can get tired of reading Jeremiah's warnings and criticisms. But remember that his entire point is that God wants us to be fulfilled and the way to do that is to ensure others are fulfilled, too. That's Jeremiah's constant message to us, and we would be wise to take it seriously in our time.