Jeremiah 1:4-10
Before I formed you
Known and ordained before birth. He objects that he cannot speak because he is a child, and is told not to say that, and a hand touches his mouth.
People of the Bible
Jeremiah
Was told before he was born what he would do, objected that he was a child, and preached forty years to a city that did not change.
Jeremiah is given the job in Josiah’s thirteenth year and holds it through the reforms, the collapse and the siege. He is forbidden to marry, beaten and put in the stocks, thrown into a cistern with no water and sunk into the mud, and kept in a courtyard of the guard while the city starves. He also buys a field during the siege, at full price and with the deed sealed and witnessed, because houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land. Both things are true of him at once.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Jeremiah
- 01
- 02
Jeremiah 18:1-6
The potter’s house
Sent to watch a potter work. The vessel is marred in his hand and he makes it again into another vessel as it seemed good to him to make it.
- 03
Jeremiah 20:7-9
A fire shut up in my bones
Beaten and put in the stocks overnight by a priest. He says he will not speak again in that name, and then that he could not, because the word burned.
- 04
Jeremiah 32:6-15
Buy the field
The Babylonians are building siege works around the city and he is under arrest in it. He weighs seventeen shekels of silver, signs the deed, and has it put in an earthen vessel to last.
- 05
Jeremiah 36:20-32
The scroll in the fire
The king cuts the scroll with a penknife three or four columns at a time and burns it in the brazier. Jeremiah dictates it again to Baruch, and many similar words are added.
- 06
Jeremiah 38:1-13
Ropes and old rags
Lowered into a cistern to sink in the mire. An Ethiopian court official goes to the king for him and is granted thirty men, and sends down worn clothes to put under his armpits so the ropes will not cut.
Why it matters
Jeremiah is the prophet whose interior life is on the page. He argues with God, accuses him of deceiving him, curses the day he was born, and says the word is a burning fire shut up in his bones so that he cannot hold it in. He is right about everything and is believed by almost nobody. And in the middle of the worst of it he is given the new covenant: not like the covenant made when they were brought out of Egypt, but the law written on hearts, and every one shall know me.
29 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
Jeremiah 6:13-15; 7:1-28; 20:7-13; 26:1-24; 37:11-38:13; 39:1-10
The Prophet No One Heard
Jeremiah 39:1-18; 40:1-43:13; 52:1-34
The City Fell as the Word Had Said
