Biblion Bible Commentary
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A Word for Baruch
Jeremiah 45:1-5
1 The message that Jeremiah the prophet spoke to Baruch the son of Neriah, when he wrote these words in a book at the mouth of Jeremiah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, saying, · WEB
The scribe who wrote the book gets five verses of his own, and what he is told is that the losses he is grieving over are God's losses first.
The date places this in the year of the first scroll, which means the complaint belongs to the work of writing it — twenty-three years of oracles taken down at dictation, then burned by a king, then written again. What Baruch said is quoted, and it is not noble: Woe is me now! For Yahweh has added sorrow to my pain! I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.
The answer does not deny any of it. It reframes the scale: what I have built I will break down, and what I have planted I will pluck up, and this in the whole land. The four verbs are the ones Jeremiah was commissioned with in the first chapter Jeremiah 1:10, and they are now spoken by God in the first person about his own work. Baruch's grief is real and it is small beside the grief of the one who planted the vineyard he is watching come down.
The question that follows is short and it is the only rebuke in the passage: Do you seek great things for yourself? Don't seek them. Nothing suggests that what he wanted was corrupt. The point is timing — this is not a season in which anyone's career survives, and a man attached to a prophet in the last years of a kingdom has to let that go or be broken by it.
What he is given instead is stated as a soldier's wage: I will bring evil on all flesh... but I will let you escape with your life wherever you go. Life as plunder, carried out of a burning country, with nothing else attached. It is the same promise given to the Ethiopian who pulled him out of the cistern Jeremiah 39:18, and it is what the book offers to the few people in it who are not destroyed. Baruch appears once more, taken to Egypt against his will Jeremiah 43:6, and the promise is the last thing said to him.
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