The Call of Jeremiah

The Call of Jeremiah

The research community has long been absorbed into understanding the relationship between Prophet Jeremiah, the Genesis, and then Deuteronomy. One of the intractable and persistent historical questions in studying the Old Testament is the interaction between the call of Jeremiah and Deuteronomy. Strikingly, this interconnection has been ignored in most scholarly actions. Roman Youngblood is among the scholars who have described Jeremiah’s call with the coming of the Messiah and the prophetic work of Moses. Jeremiah was early acquainted with the original Deuteronomy edition. This case can be expected to be real based on whether his career started in 626 or between 614 and 614 BC.

A relationship that connects Jeremiah’s linking to the material, as found in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, has been expressed. Specifically, Youngblood asserted that Jeremiah had a vocational understanding and likeness of Prophet Moses. Although figuratively Moses has been mediated in Jeremiah through the Deuteronomy, Youngblood expresses that there is evidence of negotiating him by materialism as in Exodus. There is an expectation that if Jeremiah likened himself to Moses, certain profound parallels between the message of Jeremiah and Moses would exist.

Based on the historical context of Jeremiah’s call, Jeremiah started his prophetic work in Judah, during King Josiah’s reign between 640 and 609 BC. Youngblood writes that Jeremiah still prophesized all through other kings’ reigns, for example, Jehoahaz in 609 BC, Jehoiakim from 609 to 598 BC, Jehoiachin from 598 to 597 BC, and Zedekiah from 597 to 586 BC. During this period, there was a circus of stress and spiritual storms resulting in condemnation of the whole nation, including Judah. Historically, smaller states of Judah were often under constant attacks from stronger imperials such as Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt, which was not an exception during Jeremiah’s period.

Although only mentioned briefly in the book of Jeremiah, King Jehoahaz’s reign, the son of Josiah, marked a turning point in the attitude of the king towards Jeremiah’s prophecies. Once a king’s confidant and friend, Jeremiah became an influential critic of the king, receiving rounds of imprisonments and persecutions that alternated around each with only limited freedom periods. On one occasion, when prophetic writing was read to King Jehoiakim, he used a knife to tear apart the scroll and threw it in a firepot. However, Jeremiah continued to stress his message to the king by sending his prophetic words to Baruch with similar wordings. Youngblood likeness Jeremiah’s call to the call of Moses in a wilderness place far from the public domain. A similarity can be drawn from the two sets of calling where there was a lack of a spectacular puzzlement form of communication from God. Although scriptures indicate a direct connection from God to Jeremiah, an assurance of the specific message and words that the Lord gave to Jeremiah is not well interpreted as His messages are received through divine communications. Elements of Jeremiah’s call can, however, be summarized into four commissioning verbs.

The first element is the creation. The critical verb “form” has been used in this context to imply that God did a craftsman’s similar kind of work to create Jeremiah with His specifications the same to human creation in Genesis. The verb has been used by St. Augustine to describe the Lord as the sole creator who created the human species for His self until they leave the world. The element of choice by God has been extracted in this context. When justifying His call to Jeremiah, God puts it clear that He knew him, and He had chosen him from his mother’s womb. God’s intimate, personal, and individual knowledge of Jeremiah is a clear indication of an elective choice from the manner other persons in the region. There is a significant ramification that has been connected to this form of knowledge from God, which brings a justified mutual understanding of the people and God. Youngblood finally finds it ironic for Jeremiah, expressing that he did not know how to speak. Consecration is the third element described by the author. [1] According to the scriptures, Jeremiah was set apart from others, which according to Hebrew explanation means that he was holy to Him. Similar words were used in the calling of Moses when he was authorized to remove his sandals as he was on a sacred ground. A close relationship between the two contexts shows that to be a servant of God, one has to be sanctified, led holy, and consecrated similarly to the way Jeremiah was consecrated from other people for him to bring out God’s message. Commissioning is the fourth and final element that has been extracted in Jeremiah’s call context by the author. [2] Words from God to Jeremiah state that he was appointed to prophesy to all the nations. From the Hebrew interpretation, Jeremiah was “given,” meaning he was “placed,” “put,” or “appointed.” Youngblood expresses that commissioning followed consecration as his prophetic messages were provincially crucial to all people in the world. Jeremiah’s appointment was a divine selection that should not have produced any form of harmful or reluctant response from him.

Youngblood asserts that Jeremiah expressed a sense of reluctance during his appointment. His objections have been categorized into timidity and youthfulness. A similarity between Moses and Jeremiah’s call indicating the lack of capacity to speak eloquently to the crowd with an articulated message precision was a common factor in reluctance to God’s call. Besides, Jeremiah’s appeal would have occurred in his young adulthood stage, accompanied by a lack of experience and wisdom to articulate his thoughts to a loyal message expressed to the king. There have been interlinks of young teenagers being held up by worldly evil desires that hinder most youths from pursuing love, faith, peace, and righteousness, which is among the reasons why most teens have not been entrusted much with holy messages. But through God’s guidance, Jeremiah was separated from youthful desires. He was able to boast of his capacities, wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of the will of God, although his immaturity overburdens him to being relatively reluctant.

The fifth context that has been expounded in the call of Jeremiah is God’s divine reassurance to Jeremiah.[3] After Jeremiah expressed his reluctance in taking God’s message to the kings due to his young state, God assured His presence and support throughout the divine prophetic work. A divine authority element is among the first reassurance that God gave him after he expressed his youthfulness as an objection to delivering the messages. God ascribes to him that he should not be wary of his articulated messages, but he should say what God had wanted him to communicate. This textual context has also been linked to the similar divine authority commands that God provided to Moses in Mt. Sinai. God further reassures Jeremiah of his divine presence after Jeremiah had expressed his timidity objections.[4] In a comforting promise, God tells Jeremiah that he would be with him always. The divine presence of God has been shown in several other contexts in the scriptures such as “I AM WHO I AM” and “Immanuel (God With Us).” God expresses these ontological messages in a gracious reassurance of the permanent presence and protection of His people.

The Foe and the North in Jeremiah

A major issue in the context of the theological and historical message and background of Jeremiah is a reoccurrence of the enemy from the north, as expressed by Reimer.[5] The message had explicitly been alluded and prophesied over fifteen times. A foe has been described as an instrument from God that would punish individuals and nations that turned away from Him through disasters and continued prophet motifs. Significant concerns have surrounded the authenticity of Jeremiah’s text with specific regard to prose sections in chapter eight and ten and from chapters forty-six to fifty-one.[6] In the text, the foe is described in various forms.

Most of the contexts referencing the foe from the north are extracted from chapters one, four, five, six, forty-six, and fifty. For the analytical purpose, one should note that the passages regarding the foe characterized Jeremiah’s text. Oracles and posits against the nation and later additions caused complications in comparison to foes texts in chapters 50 and 51, which formed an instrumental opposing Babylon.

Reimer analyzes the foe from the north from a historical approach in the context of the Scythians. The Scythians moved southwards in Jeremiah’s early ministry, identifying his messages as Scythian poems. With the dissolution of the Assyrian empire, these horsemen (Scythian) clans became powerful following the fall of Nineveh. The approach was earlier documented by Herodotus, suggesting that Scythian domination had an extension to Egyptian borders lasting for about 28 years. Based on Herodotus’s context, one could interpret that the Scythians had an influence dating back to Josiah’s ascension as the King of Judah.

Although the presence of Scythian can be expressed in Anatolia and the North, examples of Scythian artworks have been traced in Palestine and Syria. This case would, therefore, form an expectation that biblical and extra-biblical sources would relate the extensity within such a large assault scale. Scythian identification of the foe from the north thus provides conclusive evidence, although suggestions have been that it was not a norm for pre-exilic prophets to refute the naming of conquering groups if they were aware of them. Reimer attributes the ancient Scythian to an Assyrian delegation contingent group that functioned as a reflection of Assyrian control. With modern scholars, the understanding of the foe from the Scythian context has been rejected due to the lack of inscriptions that placed them in Ancient Near East and exaggerated the perception of Herodotus twenty-eight-year rule.

On a different approach, Reimer attributes foe from the north to a Babylonian menace. Within chapters four to six of Jeremiah’s book, the foe of the north was seen to exist during King Josiah’s reign when the reality of Babylonian menace had started. The chronology of Jeremiah’s call is placed within his prophetic ministries that affirmed the Babylonian threats. We can interpret the context of the foe from the north as an alignment to Ezekiel 26:7, where the Babylonians were sent by the Lord to conquer the Tyre from the north. Trying to comprehend the foe from the north based on the Babylon point of view, as expressed in Jeremiah’s chapters, creates difficulties as a result of northern enemies that were portrayed as judgment instruments against Babylon.

Understanding Jeremiah chapter four to six, a historical approach that binds Babylonian’s traditions as an unidentified human foe and Jeremiah oracles as Babylon kingdom emanation from the north, is another way of analyzing the foe from the north. According to Reimer[7], Robert Carroll is among the scholars who base their arguments upon this view. Carroll understands the northern enemy as a prophecy that failed to result in adaptive predictions when the false prophecies did not end in the invasion but resulted in motif reassurance in Babylonian’s advent.

Reimer has also employed a metaphorical in analyzing the foe in the context of traditional chaos, as pointed out by Brevard Child. The approach offered by Child involves the expression of the word vor, which comprises shaking, trembling, and quaking idea as used in the book of Jeremiah in chapters 4 and 47. In the Old Testament, Childs asserts that the root had occurred about twenty-nine times with new vor use linked to Yahweh during his reveal as being over the creation with an accompaniment of rumbling and shaking. In the later stages, when Exilic and post-exilic prophets existed, vor developed to a terminus technicus word within return of chaos language use. Finally, the term was later implanted in the latter prophets’ chaos tradition.

Based on earlier Jeremiah’s passages, Childs develops assertions that there is no definite relationship identifying the foe from the north with a specific nation of origin, although there is a feeling that use a term foe is a mythical recreation. Analyzing the pre-exilic prophets, the Child ascertains that no earlier prophet had mentioned about the foe from the north had a baseline argument from vor.

From the early pre-exilic prophecies and Babylonian context of the foe from the north, and use of chaos language, Childs proposes that an unbroken continuity does exist pt found in the biblical passages and genuine oracle concepts of Jeremiah forty-six to forty-nine. The author consequently affirms an understanding of historical foe usage within these two scriptures, yet Jeremiah adopted a different approach in understanding the foe as expressed in chapters fifty and fifty-one. A trans-historical apocalyptic understanding has been included with an appearance of transition from an early exilic period whereby an incursion of the enemy on superhuman characteristics is depicted in the form of chaos myth drawn language aids.

A mythical approach has also been employed by the author [8] in understanding the foe from the north as a fictitious entity enemy. The method that was pioneered by Welch and subsequently studied by Staerk and Lauha concluded that there had been a furnishing of the Antichrist’s first faint hint, a notion that understandably has not been adopted by preceding scholars. The main problem with the mythical approach lies within the actual imagery prevalence that has been used by Jeremiah, describing the foe as having fast horses, bows, chariots, battle formations, spears, and frequently attacking at noon.

Another non-specific approach that has been proposed by Reimer is studying the term foe from a historical, prophetic circle. The research denotes that the foe passages by Jeremiah cannot yield clear, accurate, and precise imagery of an ancient enemy. Reimer further identifies the use of the term NwopDx to mean the north. Instead of specification of the northern geographic area, the time is used to depict a place where the agent’s judgment is made. Jeremiah’s messages consequently fail to bring out the judgmental instruments but point out Yahweh Himself as the judgment. Based on these analyses, the north is identified as the most appropriate term to signify a judgment seat, meaning a dwelling place for the Lord, diminishing the quest to bring out an accurate historical destruction instrument.

Jeremiah: Prophet and the Book

There have been numerous discussions surrounding the authorship of the book of Jeremiah based on two old schools of thought. On one set, scholars have minimized Jeremiah’s contribution by a huge emphasis on the liberal expansion of his material in support of the agenda of a pro-Deuteronomic covenant. Other scholars give credit to the traditional authorship view of Jeremiah’s amanuensis with a bibliographical interpretation of his prophecies. According to McConville, the Book of Jeremiah gives a clear, accurate, and comprehensive understanding of prophetic messages and the baseline behind historic critics aligned. [9] McConville suggests an understanding mechanism of Jeremiah’s prophecies as a sustained and authentic theological reflection of redemption and repentance that have been developed by the prophet throughout his prophetic ministry, listening and proclaiming God’s word to the people of Judah, Babylon, and the surrounding nations.

The primary texts provide precise expansion of Jeremiah’s background and biographical details as the son of Hilkiah, one of the Anathoth’s priests in Jerusalem. The book does not mention anywhere a link of Jeremiah being a priest himself, although a presumption arises based on priestly concepts and duties that revolved around their family heritage. The book immediately introduces the readers to divine consecration and appointment into prophetic ministry by the Lord through an emphasis on a calling that happened before his birth. The book expresses the period in which his prophetic ministry lasted. His ministry started during king Josiah’s reign and ended during king Zedekiah’s reign when the people of Judah were taken to exile in 587/6 BC. As have been reckoned by Yahweh, Jeremiah was not only the prophet of Judah but also a prophet of all nations, putting him in a national and international sphere of those days. His tension in expressing obedience to the Lord’s call is evident throughout the entire book through his expansions in private communication with the Lord, unrelenting life experiences based on intense suffering during prophetic message deliveries, and rejections by his people that despised God’s message, public addresses, and boldness in proclamation of the Lord’s message. He is eventually taken to Egypt against the word of God and his personal will with remnants of Judahites escaping that results in a continuation of prophetic ministry in Babylon.

McConville’s interpretation of Jeremiah’s book by is based on Caroll’s treatment of repentance topic, analysis, and understanding.[10]

More encompassed with a frustrating form of commentary, Carroll uses this revised proponent approach to criticize Jeremiah’s ministry by arguing from a general liberal placement approach with theological and dating concern. Supporting from a broad revamped foundation, Carroll’s concerns are based on the work represented by Holloday on one spectrum side, which hinders the capacity of reaching Holloday’s detailed and impressively researched approach. Most of what is described by Carroll feels surface, leaving the readers with a reason not to read the book of Jeremiah, especially if the individual finds a perfect idea as not having a proper contextual mindset of understanding Jeremiah in person. McConville further expresses that Carroll creates a more exploratory curiosity that renders knowledge of the context through the removal of irrelevant atrocities.

The ultimate concern of Jeremiah’s book is whether there will be faithfulness to God’s message by the people amid a harsh, chaotic environment. Jeremiah becomes more concerned with the people’s loyalty in an aspect of religion, life, government, family, agriculture, and military, among other life and work spheres. This factor brings out an evident phenomenon where people are called to be faithful to the work of God though they miserably fail to follow His ways in most workplaces. Jeremiah had, therefore, to deal with these instances of unfaithfulness virtually expressed by all people from prophets, priests, kings, and princes. These individuals, however, came to the temple to offer sacrifices calling the name of God though they failed to acknowledge His commandments through their lifestyles.

Within God’s faithfulness framework, Jeremiah offers several passages that are related to faithfulness to God in totality, work, and implications of the work we do. In the work oracles, he introduces commands and principles. He acknowledges the principles in the Law of Moses’ commands and admonishes people for not following them, warning them of terrible devastations bound to happen from God’s wrath. After the occurrence of the disaster, Jeremiah encourages the people with the promises of God, which reassures them of the restoration of prosperity and joy on conditions that they remain faithful. Although he lives in over 600 BC, his prophetic ministry and teachings on work can be summed up with the scriptures from the book of Colossians 3:23 that “whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters.”

In the context of prophetic interpretation, McConville has expressed the production of attempts in understanding relationships between Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry and the whole book on premise of having responsibilities for most of the work. There is the establishment of poetry and prose factors in confronting issues of theological articulations of the position of Judah’s people before the coming of the Messiah. The main context of Jeremiah’s prophetic word is to cultivate repentance from the people and the installation of covenant conditions bound by the rule of law of Moses. Due to the people’s hostility to God’s messages, a more effective mechanism that involves capturing the individuals, increased agony, and painful atrocities in the exile are experienced in the form of provoking and securing a passionate understanding and repentance back to faithfulness. McConville moves further to respond to Raitt and Unterman’s prophetic interpretations of the book of Jeremiah. He expounds it as a more sophisticated reflection of the relationship between redemption and repentance as encased in most topics of the text. In this, readers are brought into a conclusive awareness that there is a permanent and sustained treatment on the failure of people’s capacity to become faithful to God’s way and the covenant preached.

[1]. Ronald Youngblood, “The Call of Jeremiah,” Criswell Theological Review 5 (1990): 101.

[2]. Ibid., 104.

[3]. Ibid., 105.

[4]. Ibid., 106.

[5]. David Reimer, “The» Foe «and the» North «in Jeremiah,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 101, no. 2 (1989): 224.

[6]. Ibid., 227.

[7]. Ibid., 230.

[8]. David Reimer, “The» Foe «and the» North «in Jeremiah,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 101, no. 2 (1989): 229

[9]. Gordon, McConville. “Jeremiah: Prophet and Book.” Tyndale Bulletin 42, no. 1 (1991): 84.

[10]. Ibid., 91.