The Prophet Jeremiah and His Warnings
For forty years he repeated one message: change, or the city burns. He was beaten, thrown into a pit, his scroll was burned — and then he wrote Lamentations.
Jeremiah son of Hilkiah was a priest from Anathoth; the word came to him in the thirteenth year of Josiah. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." He refused: "I am a boy." He was shown an almond branch — shaked — "I am watching (shoked) over My word" — and a boiling pot tipping from the north.
For forty years he spoke to kings, priests and crowds. He stood in the Temple gate and said: do not trust the words "the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord" — if you steal and murder and then come here saying "we are saved," this house will become like Shiloh. They nearly killed him for it. He walked with a wooden yoke on his neck: submit to Babylon, this is a verdict, not politics.
When Baruch son of Neriah read out the dictated scroll, King Jehoiakim cut off column after column with a scribe's knife and burned it; Jeremiah dictated another. He was thrown into a muddy cistern and sank; Ebed-Melech the Cushite hauled him out with ropes. To those already deported he wrote the charter of exile life: build houses, plant gardens, marry — "and seek the peace of the city where I have exiled you."