"Ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it." (Jeremiah 6: 16) In Walking the Ancient Path, distinguished Old Testament scholar Walter C. Kaiser Jr. draws on a lifetime of study to illuminate the book of Jeremiah for a contemporary audience. Following an introduction that surveys the historical and literary background of Jeremiah along with its theological emphases, Kaiser examines each verse of the text, explaining its meaning and significance. Every section is followed by devotional and application insights that guide the reader in applying the text to their everyday lives. Bibliographies in each section provide resources for further study, and most textual and linguistic matters are discussed in footnotes. Pastors, scholars, and serious students of the Bible will find this volume indispensable for understanding Jeremiah's message and how to apply it today.
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Call or consecration narratives in the Old Testament exhibit parallel elements even if they are not always completely identical. Norman Habel finds six constituent literary elements in the calls of four prophets and one leader in Israel.1 Those who are called include Moses (Exod 3:1–4:17), Gideon (Judg 6:11–23); Isaiah (Isa 6:1–13); Jeremiah (Jer 1:4–10; 40:1–11), and Ezekiel (Ezek 1:1–3:11). The six literary elements that form the shape of their calls, though not every element is present in each call, are:
1.a “divine confrontation”
2.an “introductory word”
3.a “commission”
4.an “objection”
5.a “reassurance”
6.a “sign”2
But there are differences as well:
1.Jeremiah’s call does not exhibit the first two elements in Habel’s list.
2.The calls of Isaiah and Ezekiel are accompanied by strong visual features in which they see themselves as being in the heavenly presence.
3.Gideon is called in the same general way, but he is not called to be a prophet, as the others are.
4.Both Moses’s and Gideon’s calls include a description of the circumstances of their call, while Jeremiah’s, for example, simply begins with the divine call without any circumstances surrounding it.
However, looking at the last four elements of the call and omitting the calls of Isaiah and Ezekiel results in this table, as constructed by William I. Holladay (1986, 26–27), of elements in the calls of Jeremiah, Moses, and Gideon:
Jeremiah
Moses
Gideon
Commission
Jer 1:5
Exod 3:10
Judg 6:14
Objection
Jer 1:6
Exod 3:11
Judg 6:15
Reassurance
Jer 1:7–8
Exod 3:12
Judg 6:16
Sign
Jer 1:9
Exod 3:12
Judg 6:17–22
There is, however, one distinctive factor in Jeremiah’s call: he was to be a prophet “to the nations” (1:5, 10) as well as to Judah. Moreover, Jeremiah had been called even prior to his birth, which is another distinctive in the Old Testament; it is matched in the New Testament by the call of the apostle Paul (Gal 1:15).
THE DATELINE OF JEREMIAH’S CALL (1:1–3)
TRANSLATION
1The words of Jeremiah,3 son of Hilkiah, from the priests who were in Anathoth, in the land of Benjamin, 2to whom the word of Yahweh came in the days of Josiah, son of Amon king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. 3It was [also] in the days of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the end4 of the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, son of Josiah, king of Judah when [the people of] Jerusalem went into exile.
COMMENTARY
The opening lines introduce both the man Jeremiah and his book, supplying a brief description of Jeremiah’s family, residence, and times, and the date of his call to the ministry.
1:1 Jeremiah came from the priestly family of Hilkiah, in a town named Anathoth, which was north of Jerusalem by about two or three miles. Anathoth was the town where Abiathar, one of the two priests under King David, had been exiled for backing David’s son Adonijah, who rebelled against his father (1 Kgs 2:26–27). Jerusalem was in the territory of Judah, but Anathoth was in the tribe of Benjamin. Today it is usually thought to be Anata, a name originally derived from the Canaanite goddess Anat. Albrecht Alt, however, locates Anathoth on the rocky promontory the Arabs call Ras el-Harrubeh, “summit of the carob-beans,” a few hundred meters southwest from the present Arab village.5 Soundings6 at this site suggest that it began with an Israelite settlement in the Israelite monarchy.
1:2–3 If the word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah during the thirteenth year of Josiah’s reign, that would mean that Jeremiah was called about 627 BC, five years prior to finding the “book of the law” in Josiah’s eighteenth year, in 622/621 BC. But does the “thirteenth year” point to the year of Jeremiah’s birth or the year of his calling?
J. Philip Hyatt and William L. Holladay (1986, 9–15) emphasize that even before Yahweh formed Jeremiah in the womb, he had known him and set him apart as one he had appointed to be a preacher to Judah and to the nations (1:5). On this reading, then, 627 BC was the year of Jeremiah’s birth, not the year of his call to serve God. They give three reasons for their preference for this view:
1.There are no Jeremian oracles that can be confidently dated to the days of Josiah, according to some.
2.There is no direct word from Jeremiah about any of the reforms of Josiah.
3.There is no good candidate for the “foe from the north” (1:14) in 627 BC.
A later ministry, as proposed by Hyatt and Holladay, would solve all three of these difficulties, since Jeremiah would have begun his ministry in the early days of King Jehoiakim’s reign, about 609–598 BC, after King Josiah had been killed, in 609 BC. However, this view is problematic because “this would be an uncommon use of the expression ‘the word of Yahweh came’ ” (Huey, 48). It also “confuses the events of the coming word in vv. 2–4 with that of the Lord’s forming in v. 5. The latter verse only says God set him apart before birth” (Huey, 48).
Another view, representing the majority of the commentaries, identifies the thirteenth year as the date of Jeremiah’s calling (cf.Huey, 48). This places the prophet’s birth around 643 BC and sets the date of his call when he was somewhere around fifteen or sixteen years of age, in 627 BC. This would mean that he had lived through some of the reforms that had already begun and through the exciting days of the finding of the book of the law in 622/621 BC in the house of God.
A third view, espoused by T. C. Gordon,7 but one that has not found many adherents, is that the “thirteenth year” (1:2) is a scribal error for “twenty-third” year. The difference between the two spellings in Heb. is simply the pl. ending on the word for “ten” (an
-im, ending form), making it the word for “twenty” plus the word for “three.” If this view is correct, then Jeremiah began his preaching in the year 617 BC, just as Nabopolassar of Babylon began his attack on Assyria and initiated what would become the end for the Assyrian domination in the Near East and the commencement of a Babylonian hegemony. But there is no textual support for this supposition of “twenty-three” instead of “thirteen,” and thus it fails.
The first and third views present the most problems; therefore, it is best to go with the second option, the prevailing view, that Jeremiah was called by God in 627 BC and that he began his ministry as a lad—somewhere around sixteen years of age. In support of the view are the two chronological references to Josiah’s reign in 1:2 and 25:3, the specific reference to King Josiah in 3:6–14, and the presumption in 2:18 that Assyria is still a power to deal with, which would no longer be true if Jeremiah had begun his ministry in Jehoiakim’s time.8
During that time things were changing quickly in the Near East. Judah was determined to act exactly opposite to what they had been taught in the Torah. The capital city of the Assyrians, Nineveh, had fallen in 61...
Table of contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Prologue: The Call of Jeremiah (1:1–19)
The Personal Struggles of the Prophet (2:1–25:38)
Commentary
Doom and Lament (14:1–17:27)
The Failure of the Last Kings of Judah (22:1–23:8)
Increasing Unbelief and Opposition (26:1–29:32)
The Restoration of Israel and Judah to the Land (30:1–33:26)
The Call for Faithfulness (34:1–36:32)
The Siege, Fall, and Aftermath in Jerusalem (37:1–45:5)
