Jeremiah & the Priesthood
Who exactly was Jeremiah? Well, we’re told at least three things about him in his prophecies’ first two verses:
he was a priest;
he lived in Anathoth; and
he was the son of a certain Hilkiah.
Below, we’ll consider these facts in a bit more detail.
Let’s start with Anathoth. To a casual reader, ‘Anathoth’ is just a name. But Anathoth wasn’t just any old city; it was a highly significant one. It was allotted to the descendants of Aaron, i.e., the descendants of Israel’s high priest (Josh. 21.13ff.). As a result, it was where Eli lived. That’s why when Solomon deposed Abiathar the priest—who was the son of Ahimelech, the son of Ahitub, the son of Phinehas, the son of Eli (I Sam. 14.3, 22.9ff., 22.20, 23.6, 30.7)—, he sent him back to his ‘estate’ in Anathoth (I Kgs. 2.26–27). The city of Anathoth even (uniquely) came to acquire the suffix ‘-iah’ (i.e., a Yahwistic suffix), hence it’s referred to as ‘Anthothiah’ in I Chronicles 8.24.1
In sum, then, we could reasonably expect Jeremiah to have some kind of connection to Aaron’s descendants.
That might, however, be a bit of an understatement, because Jeremiah is said to be the son of ‘Hilkiah’, which was the name of the high priest in Jeremiah’s day. (Hilkiah was the high priest in the 18th year of Josiah’s reign, by which time Jeremiah had already begun his ministry: II Kgs. 22.4, Jer. 1.1.)
Jeremiah might not, therefore, have been any old priest. He might have been a legitimate heir to the priesthood. If so, it would make good sense of at least a couple of important features of Jeremiah’s narrative: first, Jeremiah was well known to the most senior priests of the day (e.g., Pashhur: Jer. 20.1) and couldn’t easily be bumped off; and, second, Jeremiah was protected by a certain Ahikam (Jer. 26.24), who turns out to have been the son of Hilkiah the high priest’s right hand man (II Chr. 34.14ff.).
It would also cast Jer. 11’s events in a dramatic light. Jeremiah’s prophecies didn’t go down very well with ‘the establishment’. A number of people devised a plot to kill him. And these people weren’t a random band of thugs; they were ‘men of Anathoth’, i.e., priests (Jer. 11.21–23). They could plausibly have been relatives of Jeremiah’s with a specific reason to kill him (quite apart from his prophecies), viz. to eliminate a potential heir to the priesthood and procure it for themselves, to make sure Jeremiah’s name was not remembered while theirs continued (Jer. 11.19).
If so, it would sharpen the parallels between Jeremiah and Jesus. Jeremiah was a green and fruitful tree—the tree Israel should have been—, and yet he became the victim of a conspiracy in Jerusalem, led like a lamb to the slaughter by those who wanted to take possession of his inheritance (Jer. 11.16, 19). And the same was true of Jesus, a greater green tree, felled by a fallen priesthood. In both cases, however, the conspiracy failed. The names of Jeremiah and Jesus would be remembered, while the names of their enemies—mere ‘men of Anathoth’ and ‘chief priests’—would not. Worse still, Jeremiah and Jesus’ enemies would live to see what would happen ‘in the dry’ (Luke 23.31) when Israel’s vineyard would be taken from their hands in ‘their day of visitation’ (Jer. 11.23, Luke 19.44).2
In the context of a genealogy, a person’s ‘sons’ can sometimes include cities (in order to show they lie within his clan’s territory). For instance, Shobal is described as the ‘father’ = ‘founder’ of Kiriath-Jearim (I Chr. 2.50ff.), and satellite villages can be described as ‘daughters’ of a parent city (Num. 21.25, Josh. 15.45, Judg. 1.27, etc.). Consequently, the ‘Anthothiah’ of I Chr. 8.24 could be Aaron’s Anathoth. And it likely *is*, because whenever Anathoth occurs in a list, it’s listed alongside Almon-aka-Alameth (עַלְמוֹן/עָלֶמֶת), which are probably alternative names for the Elam (עֵילָם) alongside Anthothiah in I Chr. 8.24.
Thanks are due to Dirk Jongkind for the inspiration behind the present post.