Baruch the Prophet

The Holy Prophet Baruch

Prophet · d. 6th century BC

Baruch son of Neriah (7th–6th century BC) was the scribe, disciple and faithful companion of the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote at his dictation the scroll of prophecies that King Jehoiakim burned, shared the prophet's imprisonment and disgrace, and followed him into exile in Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem. The Orthodox Church counts him among the prophets in his own right for the book that bears his name in the Septuagint, whose oracle of the Divine Wisdom — "Afterward He appeared upon earth and conversed with men" (Baruch 3:37) — she reads as a direct prophecy of the Incarnation. His memory is kept on September 28, in the season of his master Jeremiah.

In the Scriptures

Baruch — the name means "blessed" — was the son of Neriah, of a notable family of Judah in the last generation before the exile: his brother Seraiah was quartermaster to King Zedekiah (Jeremiah 51:59). Scripture shows him at Jeremiah's side at every crisis of the prophet's later ministry. In the fourth year of Jehoiakim (c. 605 BC), when Jeremiah was barred from the Temple, Baruch wrote at his dictation the scroll of all the prophecies against Judah and the nations, and read it publicly in the Lord's house at the prophet's command; when the scroll was carried to King Jehoiakim, the king slashed it with a scribe's knife and burned it in his winter brazier — and Baruch wrote it all again, with additions, at Jeremiah's dictation (Jeremiah 36). He witnessed and kept the deed when Jeremiah, in prison during the siege, bought the field at Anathoth as a pledge that houses and fields would again be possessed in the land (Jeremiah 32). A brief oracle is addressed to him personally: grieved and weary, he is told through Jeremiah to seek no great things for himself, but his life would be given him "as a prize" in every place he went (Jeremiah 45). After the murder of Gedaliah, the remnant that fled to Egypt against Jeremiah's counsel accused Baruch of inciting the prophet against them, and carried both men down to Egypt by force (Jeremiah 43:3–7). There the biblical record leaves him.

In the traditions

The later traditions divide over his end. One strand — followed by the OCA notice — has Baruch witness Jeremiah's death by stoning at the hands of his countrymen in Egypt, bury his master, and afterwards return east to Babylon, where rabbinic tradition makes him a teacher of Ezra and places his death; other strands leave his grave in Egypt or in the land of Israel. Jewish tradition honoured him as the model scribe of the prophets; a clay seal impression (bulla) reading "belonging to Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe," published in the twentieth century, has been widely, though not conclusively, connected with him. Around his name later antiquity gathered an extensive apocalyptic literature (2 Baruch in Syriac, 3 Baruch in Greek), a witness to his standing, though these books have no place in the Church's canon or services.

The Book of Baruch

The short book transmitted under Baruch's name stands in the Septuagint — and so in the Orthodox Bible — among the writings of Jeremiah, between Lamentations and the Epistle of Jeremiah; churches of the Reformation class it with the apocrypha, while Orthodox and Roman Catholics receive it. Written as from Babylon to Jerusalem, it moves from confession of the nation's sin to a great hymn on the Divine Wisdom (3:9–4:4): Wisdom, whom no man has found, God "found out... and gave to Jacob His servant," and "afterward He appeared upon earth and conversed with men" (3:36–38). The Fathers read the passage christologically — John Chrysostom, in his baptismal instructions, insists the prophet here speaks not of the Father but of the Son, God become man while remaining God — and the Church sings it constantly: the passage is read as the second Old Testament reading of the Royal Hours and Vespers of the Eve of the Nativity (under Jeremiah's name, since Baruch's book counted as Jeremiah's), and its phrases sound through the hymnography of Palm Sunday, the forefeast of Theophany, and the Transfiguration ("This is our God... He has shown Himself upon earth and lived among men"). The book also foretells the return from the Babylonian captivity and the desolation of Babylon. For this oracle above all the Church names Baruch a prophet of the Incarnation.

Feast and commemoration

September 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil October 11), in all the Byzantine calendars, where he stands second after Chariton the Confessor, whose service holds the day; the prophet receives the commemoration of the synaxarion. His master Jeremiah is kept on May 1. The placement of scribe and prophet in the same autumn season is a happenstance of the calendar rather than a recorded design; the synaxaria offer no reason for the date.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 2

As we celebrate the memory of Thy prophet Baruch, O Lord, through him we beseech Thee: save our souls.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Baruch is painted as the prophets are painted: an elder in chiton and himation holding the open scroll of his prophecy, in the prophets' tier of the iconostasis and in the company of Jeremiah in festal images; the OCA notice describes him as an old man with a rounded beard. His scroll commonly bears the oracle of the Incarnation, "This is our God… He appeared upon earth" (Baruch 3:36–38). The stored image is a seventeenth-century Russian prophets-tier icon from the church of Epiphanius of Cyprus in the Kirillo-Belozersk monastery (attributed to Terentiy Fomin of Vologda, mid-17th century): the aged prophet, turned in intercession, holds a large open scroll of Slavonic text.

Disputed questions

Date and place of death. Nothing is transmitted with certainty: Egypt (where Jeremiah 43 leaves him), Babylon (the rabbinic tradition of his return and his teaching of Ezra), and Judaea all have their claims. He died in the sixth century BC; no year is given.
Authorship of the Book of Baruch. The tradition ascribes the book to Baruch in Babylon; its Greek transmission and composite character have led modern scholarship to treat it as a later work gathered under his name. The Church receives the book as Scripture and reads its central oracle as prophecy; the entry records the critical question without adjudicating it.
Century. The OCA notice says Baruch "lived in the VII century B.C."; his recorded activity (605 BC onward) straddles the seventh and sixth centuries, and his death fell in the sixth. This entry indexes him under the sixth century BC.