Boys · Hebrew · Old Testament · classic · Late monarchy / Fall of Jerusalem (7th-6th century BC)
Jeremiah
/jeh-ruh-MY-uh/
יִרְמְיָהוּ
"Yahweh will exalt; appointed by God; God will uplift"
Jeremiah 1:1
RoleProphet; weeping prophet; priest
Etymology
From 'rum' (to exalt, to lift up) and 'Yah' (Yahweh). Some scholars derive it from 'ramah' (to throw, to cast) — God has hurled/appointed. Either way, the name speaks of divine purpose imposed on a human life.
Who they were
Jeremiah is the most personally vulnerable of the prophets. God called him before birth — 'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart' — and Jeremiah protested that he was too young. God's response was not reassurance but mission: 'Do not say I am too young. You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you.' For forty years, from the reign of Josiah through the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, Jeremiah preached a message nobody wanted to hear: judgment was coming, Babylon would conquer, the temple would fall. He was thrown into a cistern, left in the mud to die. He was put in stocks. His scrolls were burned by the king. He was accused of treason. He wept. He complained to God — 'You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed' — in some of the rawest prayers in scripture. He was forbidden to marry; God told him not to, because the children born in that generation would die terrible deaths. Yet Jeremiah also delivered some of the Bible's most luminous promises. 'I know the plans I have for you — plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.' And the new covenant prophecy of Jeremiah 31 — 'I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts' — became the theological foundation of the New Testament (which literally means 'new covenant'). After Jerusalem fell, Jeremiah was taken against his will to Egypt, where tradition says he died. He is called the weeping prophet, but his tears were not weakness — they were the cost of telling the truth when the truth was unbearable.
Family
- Father
- Hilkiah (a priest)
Character qualities
- Costly obedience
- Emotional honesty with God
- Decades of rejection
- Tenderness and ferocity combined
- Refusal to stop speaking
Key verse
Jeremiah 1:5
Where they appear
Themes
Variants & related forms
Jeremy · Jeremias · Jerry · Yirmeyahu
Read their story
Jeremiah's story begins in Jeremiah.
The full passage is at Jeremiah 1:1. Any modern translation will do — the NLT and NIV are the most readable; the ESV and NKJV stay close to the wording the church has used for centuries.
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