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| Old Testament | | Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox | | Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox | | Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox | | Russian and Oriental Orthodox | | Oriental Orthodox | |
The Epistle of Jeremiah (a better title would be the Instruction of Jeremiah) is an apocryphal book of the Old Testament; this letter purports to have been written by Jeremiah to the exiles that were to be taken captive into Babylon. Most scholars believe that the author was a Hellenistic Jew that most likely lived in Alexandria. This work was written with a serious practical purpose; the author's instructs the Jews not to worship the gods of the Babylonians but to worship Yahveh. It's interesting to note that II Maccabees may be reffering to this letter in chapter 2 verses 1-3. The writer of this instruction warned the exiles that they were
to remain in captivity for 7 generations; that they would there see the worship paid to idols, from all participation in which they were to hold aloof; for that idols were nothing save the work of men's hands, without the powers of speech, hearing or self-preservation. They could not bless their worshippers even in the smallest concerns of life; they were indifferent to moral qualities, and were of less value than the commonest household objects, and finally, with rare irony, the author compared an idol to a scarecrow (v. 70), impotent to protect, but deluding to the imagination. The most striking thing about this work is that Babylon really is meant because modern historians admit that no other nation was known to carry its gods on the shoulders of its people; some scholars point to this as evidence that Jeremiah may have actually written this work. The date of this work is uncertain but the reference mentioned above is disputed by Fritzsche, Gifford, Shrer, and others. The "epistle" was included in the Greek canon; there was no question of its canonicity until the time of Jerome, who termed it a pseudepigraph simply because there wasn't an existing Hebrew original. References- This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, a publication in the public domain.
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