Jeremiah did not think that evil was inevitable. Over and above man’s blindness stood the wonder of repentance, the open gateway through which man could enter if he would.

The Prophets, p. 132, Jeremiah

Jeremiah’s was a soul in pain, stern with gloom….He called, he urged his people to repent—and he failed. He screamed, wept, moaned—and was left with a terror in his soul.

The Prophets, p. 133, Jeremiah

God’s pain and disappointment ring throughout the book of Jeremiah.

The Prophets, p. 139, Jeremiah

The heart of melancholy beats in God’s words.

The Prophets, p. 139, Jeremiah

The prophet feels both the attraction and the coercion of God, the appeal and the pressure, the charm and the stress.

The Prophets, p. 145

A man whose message is doom for the people he loves not only forfeits his own capacity for joy, but also provokes the hostility and outrage of his contemporaries. The sights of woe, the anticipation of disaster, nearly crush his soul.

The Prophets, p. 145

A man whose message is doom for the people he loves not only forfeits his own capacity for joy, but also provokes the hostility and outrage of his contemporaries. The sights of woe, the anticipation of disaster, nearly crush his soul.

The Prophets, p. 145

The ultimate purpose of a prophet is not to be inspired, but to inspire the people; not to be filled with a passion, but to impassion the people with understanding for God.

The Prophets, p. 146

The prophet must learn to feel for himself God’s intimate attachment to Israel; he must not only know about it, but experience it from within….Like Hosea in his marriage experience, Jeremiah must learn the grief of God in having to spoil what is intimately precious to Him.

The Prophets, p. 149

He was a person overwhelmed by sympathy for God and sympathy for man.

The Prophets, p. 154

Polarity of emotion is a striking fact in the life of Jeremiah. We encounter him in the pit of utter agony and at the height of extreme joy, carried away by divine wrath and aching with supreme compassion.

The Prophets, p. 159

Man is unable to redeem himself, to cure the sickness of the heart. What hurts the soul, the sould adores. Can man be remade? A prophet can give man a new word, but not a new heart. It is God who must give man a heart to know that He is God (24:7).

The Prophets, p. 163

But a prophet has a responsibility for the moment, an openness to what the moment reveals. He is a person who knows what time it is. To Jeremiah his time was an emergency, one instant away from a cataclysmic event.

The Prophets, p. 134

These words are aglow with a divine pathos that can be reflected, but not pronounced: God is mourning Himself. “Thus says the Lord. Behold, what I have built I am breaking down, and what I have planted I am plucking up…” (45:4). God’s sorrow rises again and again to unconcealed heights of expression.

The Prophets, p. 141

O Lord, Thou hast deceived me,
And I was deceived;
Thou art stronger than I,
And Thou hast prevailed.
Jeremiah 20:7

this standard rendition misses completely the meaning of the text and ascribes to Jeremiah a pitiful platitude. (“Thou art stronger than I.”) The proper rendition of Jeremiah’s exclamation would be:

O Lord, Thou hast seduced me,
And I am seduced;
Thou hast raped me
And I am overcome.

The meaning of this extraordinary confession becomes clear when we consider what commentators have failed to notice, namely, the specific meaning of the individual words. The striking feature of the verse is the use of two verbs patah and hazak. The fist term is used in the Bible and in the special sense of wrongfully inducing a woman to consent to prenuptial intercourse (Exod. 22:16; cf Hos. 2:14; Job 31:9). The second term denotes the violent forcing of a woman to submit to extranuptuial intercourse, which is thus performed against her will (Deut. 22:15; cf. Judg. 19:25, II Sam. 13:11). The first denotes seduction or enticement; the second,r ape. Seduction is distinguished from rape in that it does not involve violence. The woman seduced has consented, although her consent may have been gained by allurements. The words used by Jeremiah to describe the impact of God upon his life are identical with the terms for seduction and rape in the legal terminology of the Bible.

These terms used in immediate juxtaposition forcefully convey the complexity of the divine-human relationship: sweetness of enticement as well as violence of rape. Jeremiah, who like Hosea thought of the relationship between God and Israel in the image of love, interpreted his own involvement in the same image. The interpretation betrays and ambivalence in the prophet’s understanding of his own experience.

The Prophets, p. 144-5

The prophet feels both the attraction and the coercion of God, the appeal and the pressure, the charm and the stress

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