The life of St Jeremiah
He was called to prophesy while still a young man, told that God had set him apart for this task even before he was born, and for the next twenty-three years he spoke against his people's idolatry, warning them plainly of the ruin and captivity their unfaithfulness would bring. That message earned him fierce hostility from Jerusalem's leaders, who at one point threw him into a foul, mud-filled cistern to die; he was pulled out only through the intervention of a court official named Ebed-Melech, though his imprisonment continued afterward for refusing to soften his warnings.
After Jerusalem finally fell, a group of Jewish refugees fleeing feared Babylonian reprisal carried Jeremiah with them into Egypt against his will, and even there he went on rebuking his fellow exiles for turning to foreign gods. Scripture does not record how his life came to an end, but an old tradition outside the biblical text, repeated by early Christian writers including Tertullian and Jerome, holds that his own countrymen in Egypt, worn out by his continued rebukes, eventually stoned him to death there. This account rests on tradition rather than on any certain historical record, and is remembered as such.
