Jeremiah
c. 650–c. 570 BCE · Ancient Israel
“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.”
The lineage through Jeremiah
Inspired(2)
who Jeremiah shaped
- Melville named his captain after the wicked king of Kings on purpose — Peleg tells Ishmael, "He's Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"
- The whole apparatus comes with the name: the prophet Elijah's warning, the dogs-licking-blood death, even Ahab's "ivory" leg echoing King Ahab's ivory house
- The Israelite king who defied God and was destroyed for it is the blueprint for the monomaniac who hunts the whale to his doom
- Donne didn't just allude to Lamentations — he translated the whole book into English verse, "The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the most part according to Tremellius"
- It's a near-line-by-line rendering, worked from Tremellius's 1579 Latin, sitting in his collected poems beside the Holy Sonnets
- The book's language of ruin and lament feeds the same grief Donne turns on his own soul in the devotional verse
Famous Quotes
“Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?”
“It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”
“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
About Jeremiah
The 'weeping prophet' who warned Judah of Babylon's coming destruction. Active during Jerusalem's final decades, he witnessed the catastrophe he predicted and authored both the prophetic book bearing his name and the elegies of Lamentations.
Jeremiah, Ranked
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