Only a Boy, and the Fire in His Bones

There was a village called Anathoth, a walk of about an hour from Jerusalem, and in it lived a priest called Hilkiah, and Hilkiah had a son called Jeremiah. And while Jeremiah was still very young, the word of the Lord came to him, and it began like this: “Before I made you in your mother, I knew you. Before you came out of her, I set you apart. I have made you a prophet to the nations.” And Jeremiah answered the way anybody would answer that: “Master and Lord — look at me. I do not know how to talk to people. I am only a boy.” And God said: “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy.’ You will go to everyone I send you to, and you will say everything I tell you to say. Do not be afraid of them, because I am with you to get you out, says the Lord.” And then the Lord reached out and touched his mouth, and said: “Look. I have put my words in your mouth.”

Then God showed him two things, the way you point things out to a child on a walk. “What do you see, Jeremiah?” A stick cut from a nut tree, said Jeremiah. You have seen well, said God; I am watching over my words to do them. And then a big cooking pot, boiling over a fire, tipped, and facing north — and God said: out of the north the trouble is going to boil over onto everybody who lives in this land. And then he told him what the job would be like, which was this: “Look, today I have made you a walled city, and an iron pillar, and a wall of bronze, against the whole country — against the kings of Judah, and its rulers, and its priests, and all the people of the land. They will fight you. They will not beat you, because I am with you to get you out, says the Lord.” They fought him for forty years.

And this is what those forty years were actually like. He stood in the gate of the house of the Lord on a busy day and said what God had given him to say: straighten out the way you are living. Stop squeezing the newcomer and the orphan and the widow. Stop spilling blood that has done nothing to deserve it. And stop standing in this doorway chanting, ‘It is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,’ as though the building would keep you safe while you did as you liked. “Has my house, the house my name is on, turned into a den of robbers in your eyes? I have seen it, says the Lord.” They did not like that at all. The chief officer of the temple, a priest named Pashhur, heard him say it, and had him beaten, and shut him in the cell by the upper gate. And when Pashhur brought him out again, the first thing Jeremiah said to him was: “The Lord has not named you Pashhur. He has named you Exile.” And then he went back and said the rest of it again. And he was lonely. God had told him not to marry and not to have children, in a country where that was the strangest thing a man could do; and not to go into a house where there was a feast, and not to go into a house where there was a funeral. He was to be a walking sign of what was coming — and everybody in Jerusalem knew his face, and nobody wanted him at the door. And he complained about it to God, out loud: “I have turned into a joke. Every single day, without stopping, people laugh at me. I said to myself: right, then — I will not say his name again, I will not speak in his name any more. And it turned into a fire shut up in my bones, and I got tired of holding it in, and I could not.” He even said he wished he had never been born.

One day God said to him: “Get up and go down to the potter’s house. I will let you hear my words down there.” So Jeremiah went down to the potter’s house, and the potter was at his wheel, and Jeremiah stood and watched him work. And the pot the potter was making went wrong in his hands and collapsed. And the potter did not throw the clay away. He gathered it up and started again and made it into another pot, the way he thought best. And God said: “House of Israel, can I not do with you what this potter does? Look: as the clay is in the potter’s hands, so you are in my hands.” “One day I may say about a nation that I am going to pull it up and knock it down. But if that nation turns away from the wrong it is doing, I will change my mind about the harm I meant to do to it.” That is the whole of Jeremiah’s message, and he said it for forty years, in every way he could think of: turn round, and you will not have to have this.

In the fourth year of King Jehoiakim, God told Jeremiah to get all of it written down. “Take a scroll and write on it every word I have spoken to you about Jerusalem and about Judah and about all the nations, from the first day I spoke to you until today. Perhaps the house of Judah will hear all the trouble I mean to do to them, and turn from their evil way — and then I will forgive them.” Jeremiah could not go to the temple himself; he was under guard. So he sent for his friend Baruch, who was a scribe, and Jeremiah said the words out loud, and Baruch wrote them all down on the scroll, every one. And on a fast day, with the courtyard of the house of the Lord full of people who had come in from all the towns of Judah, Baruch stood up in a room by the new gate and read the whole scroll out loud. A man called Micaiah heard it, and went down to the palace, where all the king’s officials were sitting in the secretary’s room, and told them. So they sent for Baruch. “The scroll you were reading to the people — bring it here in your hand.” So Baruch came, with the scroll under his arm, and read the whole thing out to them again. And when it was finished the officials looked at one another, frightened, and said: “We shall have to tell the king every word of this.” And they asked him how he came to write it, and Baruch said: “Jeremiah said all these words to me out of his own mouth, and I wrote them in the book.” And the officials — who were not bad men — said: “Go and hide. You and Jeremiah. And do not let anybody know where you are.”

It was winter, and the king was sitting in the winter house with a fire burning in a bronze pan in front of him. And a man named Jehudi stood there and read the scroll out loud to him. And every time Jehudi had read three or four columns, the king took a little knife — a scribe’s knife, the kind you sharpen a reed pen with — and cut that piece off the scroll, and dropped it in the fire. Three of his officials begged him not to. He did it anyway, a column at a time, until the whole scroll had gone into the pan and there was nothing left of it but ash. Josiah, this king’s own father, had heard the book of the law read out and torn his clothes in fear. This king heard forty years of the word of God read out and did not turn a hair — he and all his servants who listened to it. And then he sent men to arrest Jeremiah and Baruch, and could not find them, because they were hidden. And the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, after the burning: “Take another scroll, and write on it all the words that were on the scroll King Jehoiakim burned.” So they did it all again. Jeremiah said it and Baruch wrote it, from the beginning, every word — and this time a great many more words like them were added to it as well. So there was more of it after the fire than there had been before.

The last king of Judah was Zedekiah, and by then the army of Babylon was in the country. Jeremiah went out through the Benjamin Gate one day, to see about some family land at Anathoth, and a guard seized hold of him and said: “You are running away to the Chaldeans!” It was not true, and the man would not listen. They dragged him to the officials, who were furious with him, and had him beaten, and shut him in the cells under the secretary’s house, and he stayed there a long time. And King Zedekiah, who was frightened of everybody, sent for him in secret and asked in a whisper whether there was any word from the Lord. There was, and it was no comfort at all. And then Jeremiah said: “What have I done wrong to you, or to your servants, or to this people, that you have put me in a prison house?” So the king had him moved to the courtyard of the guard, with one loaf of bread a day from the bakers’ street — until the day the bread ran out in the city.

But he kept saying, out loud, where the soldiers could hear him, that the city was going to fall and that anybody who walked out of it would live. So the officials went to the king and said: “Have that man put to death. He is making the hands of the fighting men go weak, and the hands of all the people. He is not looking for what is good for us. He is looking for harm.” And Zedekiah, who could never say no to anybody, said: “Look — he is in your hands. I cannot do anything with you.” So they let him down on ropes into a cistern in the courtyard — a deep stone pit for storing water. There was no water in it. There was mud, and he went down into the mud, and stayed there. And he would have died there, except that a man in the palace heard of it — a foreigner, an Ethiopian named Ebed-melech, who walked straight out to the Benjamin Gate where the king was sitting and said, in front of everybody: “My lord the king, these men have done a wicked thing. They have left that man to starve to death in the pit, because there is no more bread in the city.” And the king said, ‘Take thirty men with you and get him up out of that cistern before he dies.’ And Ebed-melech found old rags and worn-out clothes in a storeroom under the palace, and let them down on the ropes, and called: “Put these under your arms, under the ropes.” Somebody had thought about the ropes cutting him. They pulled him up out of the mud, and he went back to the guard court, and stayed there until the day Jerusalem was taken.