Jeremiah

A prophetic book set against the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, from the reign of Josiah through the Babylonian conquest and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Its poetic oracles of judgment are interleaved with prose sermons that many scholars, since the early 20th century, have identified as showing strong affinities with the legal and covenantal language of Deuteronomy, suggesting an editorial hand shaped by the same reform movement. The book survives in two significantly different ancient text forms, a shorter Greek (Septuagint) version and a longer Hebrew Masoretic one, itself evidence of a long and unsettled transmission history. Jeremiah's image of a "new covenant" written on the heart became one of the most influential single verses in later Jewish and Christian thought.