Jeremiah 45: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

In the fourth year of King Jehoiakim, Baruch has just written Jeremiah's words on a scroll as Jeremiah dictated them. Baruch complains that the LORD has added grief to his pain and that he can find no rest. Jeremiah gives him a message from the LORD: God is about to tear down what he built and uproot what he planted across the whole land, so Baruch should stop seeking great things for himself. Disaster is coming on everyone, but Baruch is told he will escape with his life wherever he goes.

Claim by Claim

1. 45:1
   • Jeremiah the prophet spoke a word to Baruch son of Neriah.
   • Baruch had written these words on a scroll.
   • Baruch wrote them from the mouth of Jeremiah, at Jeremiah's dictation.
   • This happened in the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah, king of Judah.
2. 45:2
   • Jeremiah told Baruch that the LORD, the God of Israel, spoke this concerning him.
3. 45:3
   • The LORD said that Baruch had said: 'Woe is me now.'
   • Baruch said the LORD had added grief to his pain.
   • Baruch said he was worn out with his groaning.
   • Baruch said he had found no rest.
4. 45:4
   • The LORD told Jeremiah to say this to Baruch.
   • The LORD says: what he has built he is tearing down.
   • The LORD says: what he has planted he is uprooting.
   • This applies to the whole land, though the Hebrew phrasing here is elliptical and leaves the connection unstated.
5. 45:5
   • Baruch seeks great things for himself.
   • The LORD tells Baruch not to seek great things.
   • The LORD is bringing disaster upon all flesh.
   • This is declared by the LORD.
   • The LORD will give Baruch his own life as spoil.
   • This will hold in every place where Baruch goes.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

45:1

Baruch son of Neriah was Jeremiah's secretary; he came from a well-connected family (his brother Seraiah held a court post under King Zedekiah). A "book" in 1611 English meant a scroll (a long roll of papyrus or leather, written on and rolled up, not bound pages. "At the mouth of Jeremiah" means by dictation: Jeremiah spoke, Baruch wrote. The scene behind this chapter is told in Jeremiah 36. The fourth year of Jehoiakim was about 605 BC, the year Babylon defeated Egypt at Carchemish and became the dominant power over Judah) roughly eighteen years before Jerusalem fell. The chapter is dated far earlier than the chapters around it; the book is not arranged in date order.

45:2

"The LORD" printed in capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew letters usually written YHWH. Jewish readers avoided saying it aloud and substituted the ordinary word for "lord," and English translations have followed that practice ever since.

45:3

"Woe is me" is a set cry of grief and alarm, closer to "I am finished" than to a mild complaint; the same formula opens laments all through the prophets. "I fainted in my sighing" uses "faint" in its older sense of being worn down and exhausted, not passing out, and the sighing is loud groaning rather than a quiet sigh.

45:4

"Build" and "plant" paired against "break down" and "pluck up" are the same four verbs used when Jeremiah was first commissioned (Jeremiah 1:10); they are the book's standing formula for God making and unmaking a nation. The Hebrew of this verse is compressed, and the last phrase can be read either as "even this whole land" (the object of the tearing down) or as "and that is the whole land of it", translators differ on where it attaches.

45:5

"Great things" is unspecified in the Hebrew, position, wealth, safety, a career at court, or a prophetic reputation of his own; the text does not say which, and readers have argued the point for centuries. "I will give thy life unto thee for a prey" is a battlefield idiom: plunder is what a fighter carries off from a lost battle, and here the only plunder Baruch gets is his own survival. "All flesh" is a Hebrew phrase for every living creature, sometimes narrowed to all human beings; both senses are possible here.