The Personal Lament of the Despairing Yet Obedient Prophet in Jeremiah 20:7–18 Lexi Zambito
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he prophet Jeremiah lived in a time of great turmoil in Judah: the Northern Kingdom had just fallen, and Jerusalem was on the brink of destruction. God sends Jeremiah as a prophet to foretell the impending destruction at the hands of the Babylonians and call the people to turn away from their sins of idolatry and child sacrifice. The people reject Jeremiah, calling him a false prophet and refusing to listen to his predictions. Thus, Jeremiah laments his fate as a rejected prophet in 20:7–18. With provocative imagery of having been seduced by God, Jeremiah describes how he has no choice but to obey God and proclaim His word, even though this makes him the object of scorn and derision from his friends. According to the Deuteronomistic Historian, if you obeyed God, you were blessed, and if you disobeyed God, you were cursed (Deut 6:1–2). Jeremiah feels abandoned by God because, though he obeys God, he is cursed, while his fellow citizens disobey God and live lives of prosperity. This leads Jeremiah to curse the very day on which he was born in a rejection of the call to be a prophet received in the womb. It is obeying God that brings Jeremiah so much anguish, but he has no other choice. Jeremiah feels no remorse for the city of Jerusalem, but laments that he is the one that has to be an object of derision. Jeremiah’s lament in 20:7–18 expresses his despair about his fate as a prophet, worsened by the contradiction between his compulsion to speak the word of God, which brings him suffering, and the pressure to remain silent from his friends, who prosper. Jeremiah is a commoner from a minor priestly family who served at a shrine outside of Jerusalem. The Book of Jeremiah emphasizes that he is destined from the womb to be a prophet, and Jeremiah himself has no say in the matter. There are parallels between Jeremiah and Moses, as Jeremiah initially objects to God’s call due to his lack of
