50 Fun Facts About Book of Jeremiah

Which animal cannot change its markings, according to a saying that comes from Jeremiah 13:23?

A leopard cannot change its spots, the verse says, any more than people long practised in evil can suddenly start doing good.

Which part of a person does Jeremiah 17:9 call 'deceitful above all things' and exceedingly corrupt?

The heart is so deceitful that no one can fully know it, the verse adds, and God replies in the next line that he searches and tests it.

Which phrase from Jeremiah's temple sermon did Jesus quote when he drove the money changers out?

A den of robbers was Jeremiah's charge against worshippers who stole and murdered, then stood in the temple and declared themselves safe.

What did King Jehoiakim do with the scroll of Jeremiah's prophecies as it was read aloud to him?

Cut and burned it, a few columns at a time, with a penknife and a winter brazier; Jeremiah simply dictated the whole scroll again and added more.

Jeremiah 29:11 says God's plans for the exiles are to give them hope and what else?

A future was promised in a letter Jeremiah sent to captives in Babylon, telling them to settle in because the wait would be long.

Jeremiah 8:22 asks whether there is no balm in which region, a line echoed in an African American spiritual?

Gilead was the source of a healing balm, and the spiritual 'There Is a Balm in Gilead' turns the prophet's despairing question into a yes.

What happened to Jeremiah when officials lowered him by ropes into Malchijah's waterless dungeon pit?

He sank in mud at the bottom and was left to starve until a palace official persuaded the king to have him hauled out.

Whose workshop did God send Jeremiah to visit in chapter 18, to learn how Israel could be remade?

A potter was reworking a spoiled lump of clay into a new vessel, and God said he could reshape a nation just as freely.

The English word 'jeremiad', taken from Jeremiah's name, describes a long work that bitterly bewails what?

The state of society and its morals is a jeremiad's target, and the form usually closes by predicting that society's downfall.

What reason did Jeremiah give for not knowing how to speak when God first called him as a prophet?

He was only a child, Jeremiah protested, and God told him not to say so: he would go wherever he was sent and say whatever he was told.

After Jeremiah objected to his call in chapter 1, what did God reach out a hand and touch?

His mouth was touched as God said 'I have put my words' there, setting him over nations to uproot and tear down, to build and to plant.

In Jeremiah's first vision he sees a rod of which tree, whose Hebrew name sounds like the word for watching?

Almond in Hebrew is shaqed and watching is shoqed, so the vision carries God's promise that he is watching over his word to carry it out.

What did Jeremiah see tipping away from the north in his second vision, a sign of coming invasion?

A boiling cauldron tilting southward meant that disaster would pour out of the north on everyone living in the land.

Jeremiah's call came in the thirteenth year of which reforming king of Judah, later killed at Megiddo?

Josiah was on the throne when Jeremiah began, and the prophet kept speaking for some forty years, until after Jerusalem fell.

Jeremiah came from a family of priests in which village in Benjamin, whose men later plotted to kill him?

Anathoth's men warned Jeremiah to stop prophesying in God's name or die at their hands, and God promised to punish them for it.

What did Jeremiah wear, then hide in a rock crevice by a river until it was ruined, in chapter 13?

A linen belt, bought new and never washed, came back rotten and useless, a picture of how the pride of Judah and Jerusalem would be ruined.

As a sign of the disaster coming on Judah, what did God forbid Jeremiah to do in chapter 16?

Take a wife was the forbidden step: Jeremiah was to have no sons or daughters, because children born in that place would die unburied.

What did the priest Pashhur do to Jeremiah at the temple gate after hearing him prophesy disaster?

Put him in the stocks after striking him, and on his release the next day Jeremiah told Pashhur he would become a terror to himself and his friends.

Jeremiah 20:9 says God's word became like a fire shut up where, when he tried to stop speaking it?

In his bones, Jeremiah says, and he grew so weary of holding the message in that he could not keep quiet.

In Jeremiah 24, two baskets of which fruit, one fine and one rotten, stand for two groups of Judeans?

Figs set before the temple made the point: the good ones were the exiles already carried off, the inedible ones the king and those who remained.

According to Jeremiah 25, for how long would Judah and the surrounding nations serve the king of Babylon?

Seventy years was the figure, and the book of Daniel shows Daniel reading this very prophecy in exile and praying for Jerusalem.

Which foreign king does God call 'my servant' in Jeremiah, even though his army destroys Jerusalem?

Nebuchadnezzar gets the title 'my servant' because Jeremiah presents Babylon's ruler as God's instrument, to whom every nation must submit.

What did Jeremiah wear on his neck as a sign that Judah and its neighbours should submit to Babylon?

A wooden yoke made the point, and when a rival prophet snapped it, God replied that the nations would now wear one of iron.

Which rival of Jeremiah promised Babylon's grip would break within two years, then died that same year?

Hananiah made the promise in the temple before priests and people; Jeremiah told him he would die for preaching rebellion, and two months later he was dead.

Jeremiah's letter told the deported Judeans to build houses, raise families and plant what in Babylon?

Gardens, whose produce they were to eat, were part of settling in: the same letter told them to pray for the city, since its peace would be theirs.

What name does Jeremiah 30:7 give a day of distress so great that none is like it?

Jacob's trouble is followed at once by a promise that he will be saved out of it, and that strangers will no longer be his masters.

In Jeremiah 31:3, God tells Israel that he has loved the nation with a love of what kind?

Everlasting love is the reason God gives for drawing Israel back with kindness, in a chapter that promises the scattered nation will be rebuilt.

Which matriarch does Jeremiah 31 picture mourning in Ramah for her lost children, a verse Matthew quotes?

Rachel refuses to be comforted, and Matthew's Gospel applies the verse to the killing of Bethlehem's infants under Herod.

Jeremiah 31 retires a proverb in which parents eat what, and their children's teeth are set on edge?

Sour grapes would no longer be an excuse: Jeremiah says each person will die for their own wrongdoing, not for what their parents did.

Which promise in Jeremiah 31, quoted in Hebrews, replaces what Israel broke after the Exodus?

A new covenant would be written within people rather than imposed from outside, with God promising to forgive their wrongs and forget their sins.

While Jerusalem was under siege and he was a prisoner, what did Jeremiah buy from his cousin Hanamel?

A field, paid for with seventeen shekels of silver, was a sign of hope: the deeds went into a clay jar because land would be bought and sold again.

In Jeremiah 33:3, what does God promise to do for whoever calls to him, before revealing hidden things?

Answer them, God says, and the promise reached Jeremiah while he was still locked up in the court of the guard.

In Jeremiah 34, whom did Jerusalem's nobles swear to set free during the siege, only to seize them back?

Their own slaves, all fellow Israelites, went free under an oath sealed by walking between the halves of a calf; Jeremiah said breaking it would cost the nobles their lives.

The Rechabites passed Jeremiah's test by refusing to drink what, as their ancestor had commanded?

Wine was off limits to them, along with houses and farming, and Jeremiah held up their obedience to shame a nation that ignored God.

Which scribe wrote down Jeremiah's prophecies by dictation and read them aloud in the temple?

Baruch read the scroll in public because Jeremiah was barred from the temple, and officials told the two to hide before the king ordered their arrest.

What charge did the officer Irijah make when he arrested Jeremiah leaving Jerusalem by the Benjamin Gate?

Deserting to the enemy was a believable charge, since he had urged surrender; Jeremiah called it false but was beaten and locked in a scribe's house.

Which Ethiopian palace official hauled Jeremiah out of the dungeon pit, padding the ropes with old rags?

Ebed-Melech went straight to the king to protest, and Jeremiah later sent him God's promise that he would survive the city's fall.

In Jeremiah 39, what did Babylon's king do to Zedekiah at Riblah after killing his sons in front of him?

Put out his eyes, so the death of his sons was the last thing he saw, then led him in fetters to Babylon, where he died in prison.

Freed from his chains at Ramah and offered care in Babylon, what did Jeremiah choose to do?

Stay in Judah was his choice: he went to Mizpah to live among the people left in the land, carrying food and a present from the Babylonian captain.

In Jeremiah 40, whom does Babylon appoint governor at Mizpah, only for Ishmael to murder him over a meal?

Gedaliah had been warned of the plot and refused to believe it; Jewish tradition still marks his death with a fast day that bears his name.

To which country did Johanan's remnant carry Jeremiah, ignoring his warning that they would die there?

Egypt was the one place Jeremiah had told them not to go; they accused him of lying and took him and his scribe along anyway.

To whom did the refugees of Jeremiah 44 vow to keep offering incense and pouring out drink offerings?

The queen of heaven had kept them fed, they argued, and hardship only began when the offerings stopped; the women baked cakes in her honour.

Jeremiah 46 opens with Pharaoh Neco's army beaten by Babylon at which site, in Jehoiakim's fourth year?

Carchemish, a crossing on the Euphrates, saw Babylon rout Pharaoh's army about 605 BC; Jeremiah's poem mocks the swift soldiers who stumble and fall.

Jeremiah 48 is a long oracle against which neighbouring nation, described as the people of the god Chemosh?

Moab is pictured as never having been poured from jar to jar, and the oracle ends with a promise to restore its fortunes in days to come.

After reading Jeremiah's scroll aloud in Babylon, Seraiah was to throw it in the Euphrates tied to what?

A stone would drag the scroll under, and Seraiah was to say that Babylon would sink in the same way and never rise again.

Which exiled king ends the book of Jeremiah released from prison and dining at Babylon's royal table?

Jehoiachin had spent thirty-seven years as a captive before Babylon's new king freed him and gave him a daily allowance for life.

Which book placed directly after Jeremiah in Christian Bibles is traditionally credited to him as well?

Lamentations is five poems grieving for fallen Jerusalem, and the Hebrew Bible shelves it apart from Jeremiah, among the Writings.

Christian Bibles group Jeremiah with Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel under which heading for their books?

The Major Prophets earn the label from the length of their books, not from any ranking of the prophets' importance.

How does the ancient Greek Septuagint version of Jeremiah differ most noticeably from the Hebrew text?

It is much shorter, by about one eighth, and orders its material differently; the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve Hebrew equivalents of both forms.

Learning of a plot against his life, Jeremiah compared himself to which animal led unsuspecting to slaughter?

A gentle lamb is his picture of how little he suspected, and the plotters turned out to be men from his own home village.