The Bible consists of a group of books of divine origin that constantly teaches the importance of wisdom for living, because it is the use of this spiritual knowledge that divides people into two different groups: the sensible people and the foolish. The practical application of this divine knowledge to daily life is what makes people children of God and brothers and sisters to one another; wisdom is not a theoretical science but a profoundly practical one, and the law of Moses is an expression of this uncreated wisdom of God. Wisdom is the knowledge of the correct means to live.
And this special knowledge of the divine was not forgotten by the prophet Jeremiah, who was surely familiar with the sapiential books of Solomon, like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Wisdom, and thus some of Jeremiah's oracles seem to recall the literature of the great sages of Israel.
And so the Book of Jeremiah begins with a vision of the prophet concerning the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah. The prophet preached during the reigns of Josiah, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah, kings of Judah, and must have witnessed the prevailing chaos of those times.
As a prophet, in his oracles he denounced the infidelity of the kingdom of Judah to its God, and in particular the corruption of its ruling classes; for this reason Jeremiah suffered persecution from his own people, Jeremiah saw his life endangered many times, such as when at the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign he was arrested in the courtyard of the Lord's house for prophesying.
And so the prophet Jeremiah, in one of his oracles, gave the Lord's judgment on the inhabitants of the kingdom of Judah with these words: "My people are fools; they do not know me. They are senseless children; they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil; they know not how to do good" Jeremiah 4:22. With this oracle, Jeremiah taught that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah suffered destruction for rejecting God's wisdom because ultimately those who do this are worshipping death. Wisdom and error, as paths, have their own retribution.
It is for all these reasons that Jeremiah was a suffering prophet; while he lived, his words could not change the destiny of destruction of Jerusalem, although later, with time and after his death, his words served as inspiration to the exiles in Babylon.
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