11.  Jeremiah was of priestly descent (1:1); but that Hilkiah, his father, was identical with the high priest who found in the temple the book of the law (2 Kings 22:8), rests upon mere conjecture.  Anathoth, his native place, was in the land of Benjamin, about four miles north of Jerusalem.  He was called to the prophetical office in his youth, and exercised it in his native land from the thirteenth year of Josiah to the close of Zedekiah’s reign, through a period of about forty-one years (chap. 1:3); and afterwards in Egypt, whither he was carried by the rebellious remnant of the people (chaps. 43, 44).  His first appearance, therefore, was about one hundred and thirty-one years after that of Isaiah, if we reckon from the last year of Uzziah, and some seventy or more after the close of Isaiah’s prophecies.  During all this time the religious and moral condition of the Jewish nation had been steadily changing for the worse under such kings as Manasseh and Amon; nor could the zealous efforts of Josiah avail to check the swelling tide of idolatry and profligacy.  Sent by Jehovah in such a degenerate age to rebuke the wicked rulers and people for their sins, and to forewarn them of God’s impending judgments, he was necessarily subjected to much persecution.  Isaiah had administered stern rebukes to Ahaz and his people, but he had encouraged them with the hope of successful resistance to the Assyrian power.  But from the Chaldeans, who had succeeded the Assyrians as the ruling monarchy of the world, Jeremiah could promise no deliverance.  In the name of the Lord he counselled submission, solemnly assuring the kings and princes of Judah that their reliance on Egyptian help would end in shame and disappointment (37:5-10).  This brought upon him a load of calumny, insult, and persecution, which he keenly felt, but bore with fortitude, never swerving from the path of strict fidelity towards God.  The prophecies of Jeremiah do not contain so many animating visions of the distant future as are found in Isaiah.  He is more occupied with the sins of his own age, and the heavy judgments of God that impend over his countrymen.  His mission is emphatically to unfold the connection between national profligacy and national ruin.  This he does with a masterly hand, holding up to the world, in the character and fate, of his countrymen, a mirror for all time, in which wicked nations may see themselves and the ruin which awaits them.  The whole compass of profane history does not contain so much clear instruction on this point as is crowded into the few pages of “the weeping prophet.”  If the book of God’s revelation could not have been complete without the ecstatic visions of Isaiah, so neither could it have spared Jeremiah’s vivid delineation of a profligate nation plunging itself into remediless ruin by its iniquities.  At times, however, we find in Jeremiah also joyous anticipations of the good reserved for God’s people in the latter days.  He predicted not only the Babylonish captivity, but its termination at the end of seventy years, and the perpetual overthrow of Babylon and the Chaldean power (25:12-14; 29:10-14).  See also chapters 30-33, where he describes, after the manner of Isaiah, the glory of the latter days.