The Call of Jeremiah
1 The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin. 2 Yahweh’s word came to him in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. 3 It came also in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, to the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, to the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month. 4 Now Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, 5 “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.” 6 Then I said, “Ah, Lord Yahweh! Behold, I don’t know how to speak; for I am a child.” 7 But Yahweh said to me, “Don’t say, ‘I am a child;’ for you must go to whomever I send you, and you must say whatever I command you. 8 Don’t be afraid because of them, for I am with you to rescue you,” says Yahweh. 9 Then Yahweh stretched out his hand and touched my mouth. Then Yahweh said to me, “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. 10 Behold, I have today set you over the nations and over the kingdoms, to uproot and to tear down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”
Jeremiah is not invited to be a prophet but told that he already is one, and the objection he raises is answered with a presence and a set of words rather than with any improvement in him.
The opening line places him twice. He is a priest, and he is from Anathoth in Benjamin — a village three miles from the temple, and the place a deposed high priest had been sent home to under Solomon 1 Kings 2:26. The man commissioned to announce the end of the sanctuary system belongs to it by birth, and to its sidelined branch by address. Nothing in his position gives him a motive for the message or an audience for it.
The commission itself is stated before any response is possible, and its verbs are all in the past tense: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. Three actions are complete before Jeremiah has done anything at all, and the fourth follows from them: appointment as a prophet to the nations. The claim is not that God foresaw what Jeremiah would become. It is that the appointment predates the man. That removes the one argument he is about to make.
He makes it anyway: Ah, Lord Yahweh! Behold, I don't know how to speak; for I am a child. The objection is competence, and it has a precedent. The same protest of unfit speech was made at a burning bush, and answered there with a brother Exodus 4:10–16. Here it is answered without a concession. He is told not to say it, and then told the two things that replace it. He will go where he is sent, and say what he is given. The remedy for inadequacy is not capacity but assignment.
Then a gesture. Yahweh touches his mouth and says, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. It is worth noticing what this is not. There is no coal, no burning, no declaration that guilt is removed, as in the throne-room vision of another prophet Isaiah 6:6–7. Jeremiah's problem was never that his lips were unclean. It was that they had nothing to say. The touch supplies content, not cleansing, and the whole authority of the book rests on that transfer rather than on the speaker.
The last verse of the section is the largest claim in it. A village priest with no office and no army is told I have today set you over the nations and over the kingdoms. The six verbs that define the appointment are agricultural and architectural: to uproot, to tear down, to destroy, to overthrow, to build and to plant. Four demolish and two construct, in that order, and the order holds every time the formula returns Jeremiah 18:7–9 Jeremiah 31:28. What is described is not influence over empires but the effect of a word spoken about them. Jeremiah will do none of these things. The word he carries will do all of them, and the book spends forty years proving that this is not a figure of speech.
settled What this mark means