The life of St Baruch
King Jehoiakim, hearing of the scroll, had it cut apart and burned rather than heed it, and Baruch shared in the hostility this drew upon Jeremiah, for the people had no patience for a truth they did not want to hear. When many of the Jews fled afterward into Egypt against the prophet's counsel, Baruch went with Jeremiah into that same exile.
Church tradition holds that Baruch later made his way back toward Babylon, and remembers him as present at the end of his master's life. He is honored for having kept faith with a hard calling at Jeremiah's side, and for prophecies of his own concerning the end of the captivity and the fall of Babylon. His name is carried by a book read in the Church, treasured for its passages long taken as pointing toward Christ's coming, though many now judge that later hands, drawing on Baruch's memory and writing generations after him, gave that book its final form.
