Sanhedrin 132

Since there was no outward sign that he could offer the general public to "prove" that he had a commission from God, the true prophet was in a cleft stick: he could prove that he had a commission from God, and by the same token he could not disprove a similar claim from a false prophet. Jeremiah is a perfect example of a prophet in such a predicament. One of the major differences between the genuine prophet and the false prophet, from our point of view, is a psychological one that can only be appreciated with benefit of hindsight. The false prophets seem to have been self-motivated and they seem to pursue their task with enthusiasm. This is not the case with those genuine prophets whose attitude to their status is known to us – and Jeremiah was a person who revealed his innermost feelings with great pathos. We know of the reluctance of Moses and of Isaiah to accept their commission [Exodus 4 and Isaiah 6], but Jeremiah can serve as a paradigm for them all. His "call" is described in the very first chapter of the book that bears his name. The title of his book [1:1-3] describes him as being of priestly descent, from a village just to the north of Jerusalem. His career is said to have begun in the 13th year of King Josiah and to have continued until after the collapse of Judean independence and the mass deportation to Babylon. We know from later chapters in his book that Jeremiah was not among the deportees, and that he ended up as a refugee in Egypt (one of the greatest ironies in the history of Israelite prophecy). The Deportation to Babylon took place in the summer of 587 BCE and Jeremiah's unwilling flight to Egypt must have taken place within a couple of months after that. Since Josiah ascended the throne of Judah in the year 640/39 BCE, we can date Jeremiah's call with considerable exactitude to the year 627 BCE. If his career extended until after 587 BCE, he was publicly active for at least forty years! This means also that he must have been a teenager or in his early twenties at the most when he received his call.

In verse 5 of Chapter 1 Jeremiah hears God telling him that he was chosen to be a prophet even before he was born! The young man is aghast and (like Moses) makes excuses why he shouldn't be required to perform this task: "Oh dear God, I don't know how to speak publicly, I'm only a boy" [verse 6]. "Don't you tell me that you are only a boy! Wherever I send you you will go, whatever I order you will say!" [verse 7]. Not a very encouraging start! God's next words are even more discouraging: "Do not be afraid of them: I will be with you to save you" [verse 8]. From this, Jeremiah can learn that there is, indeed, something to be afraid of! (Very many times during his career as a prophet he was in mortal danger; he was publicly humiliated by the authorities, he was imprisoned, he was threatened, he was ridiculed, and assassins – both paid and unpaid – threatened his life. And all this is faithfully documented in his book.) The rest of the chapter explains why Jeremiah will be in danger: his message will be a socio-political one, and it will involve direct confrontation with the government and the priestly hierarchy. (It is noteworthy that this chapter is the Haftarah for the first of the three Sabbaths preceding Tish'ah b'Av.)

We thus see that Jeremiah did not choose to become a prophet, and would rather have declined the invitation. Being a prophet in biblical Israel was not a pleasant occupation. There must have been many times during his career that Jeremiah wanted to give up and just become an "ordinary" citizen. We know of one such occasion, described in chapter 20. Jeremiah had been preaching his usual message in the Temple precincts, but his "usual" message was not one that the priests could agree with. Socially, Jeremiah taught that if Judean society in general did not start acting with greater moral and ethical identity with God's law it could not survive and the very Temple itself would be destroyed. The priestly caste held that God would never destroy His own house, therefore Judah was inviolate regardless of the behaviour of her citizens. Jeremiah's preaching on the occasion in question must have been similar to his preaching elsewhere.

Do you think you can rob, murder, fornicate, perjure yourselves… and just come and stand before Me in this House which bears My Name, and think that you are saved thereby in order to [continue doing] all these atrocities?! Has this House become then a den for reprobate wretches?…" [7:9-10]

This is a society that we can recognize.

On another occasion [29:26] one of Jeremiah's enemies had reminded the priests in Jerusalem that they had the authority to incarcerate "every madman and prophet" or to put them in the mahapekhet. This was exactly what happened on this occasion: one of the senior priests arrested Jeremiah and put him into this contraption called a mahapekhet. We may guess that this was some kind of stocks, but that the victim was rotated in some way. When he is finally released from this public indignity Jeremiah is outwardly unrepentant, but in the privacy of his own room he pours out his anguished soul before his God, whom he views as a tyrant, or as a rapist:

You seduced me, God, and I let myself be seduced! You were stronger than me and it was You who prevailed. I am an object of public derision all day long, everyone laughs at me. Whenever I preach I have to cry "violence! pillage!" [instead of the nice things I would like to say] So God's word has nothing but reproach and shame for me all day long. So I tell myself that I will no longer speak in God's name. But then there is a kind of fire in my heart, a burning within my very bones; I become weak from trying to hold it in and can no longer do so. I hear the many slanders, terror on all sides. "You denounce him and then we'll denounce him." All my so-called friends watching my every step… [20:7-10]

This does not sound like a person who has taken this task of his own volition. He is motivated, as he himself admits, by some inner compulsion over which his rationality has no control. Thus far the etiology of the genuine prophet.