Letter of Jeremiah

Doering, Lutz

Abstract

Ep Jer is a text of 72 verses in the Septuagint, usually following Lam, although in some Greek manuscripts the text comes after Bar; in the Vulgate it is counted as Bar 6. Probably composed in Hebrew as an appendix to Jer, the letter furnishes its addressees, imagined to be on the brink of their deportation to Babylon, with instruction about how to relate to idols. Composed likely in the third or second century BCE, the oldest manuscript is in Greek (7Q2) and dates from c. 100 BCE. Apart from its self-presentation as a “letter” in the inscriptio (logically preceding Jeremiah’s letter in Jer 29) and the deployment of second-person plural address, there are no specifically epistolary features. Developing the idol polemic of e.g. Jer 10:1–16, Ep Jer consists of several rounds of denigration and mockery of idols, which are styled as powerless, perishable, and not be feared.