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The Bible Year

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 27, 1916

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 93, No. 37.

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The Bible Year

Assignment for July 30 to August 5

August 1: Jeremiah 36, 45 to 47.
August 2: Jeremiah 48, 49.

The Book of Jeremiah

“There can be little doubt that the book of Jeremiah grew out of the roll which Baruch wrote down at the prophet’s mouth in the fourth year of Jehoiakim. Chapter 36: 2. Apparently the prophets kept written records of their predictions, and collected into larger volumes such of them as were intended for permanent use.”—Canon Cook.
For a general survey of the book, it may be divided as follows:—
1. Introduction.
2. Chapters 2 to 11. Thought by some to have been the prophecies written by Baruch after Jehoiakim burned the first roll.
3. Chapters 12 to 24. Warnings to the Jews.
4. Chapters 25 to 28. Prophecies on the fall of Jerusalem.
5. Chapters 29 to 31. The Babylonian exile.
6. Chapters 32 to 45. History of the two years before the fall of Jerusalem.
7. Chapters 46 to 51. Prophecies against foreign nations, especially Babylon.
8. Conclusion. This, evidently a chapter added to “the words of Jeremiah,” is by some attributed to Ezra. Compare 2 Kings 24:18-20; 25.
Another method divides the book into four general sections containing the prophecies uttered during the reigns of Josiah, Jehoiakim, Zedekiah, and Gedaliah.
As a whole, the book abounds in striking symbols and signs and figures of speech. Its assurances of our heavenly Father’s kindness and “everlasting love,” its warnings and appeals, are peculiarly applicable to the present day.

Our Ignorance of the Bible

“One thing is undeniable: knowledge of the Bible is far less general now than it was in the days of my childhood. That amazing familiarity with the sacred Book with which John Richard Green credits the people of England in the days of the Commonwealth had persisted until my boyhood among the sons of the Puritans and the Scotch-Irish in New England and in New York State. It was not universal, but it was general. The kind of tests by which college students and students in secondary schools are frequently in these days made to display an ignorance of the Bible which is astounding could have been passed with credit by the majority of country boys and girls sixty or seventy years ago. But this thorough acquaintance of earlier generations with the Bible was not due to any considerable extent to the public school. All that we learned about the Bible in school would have added very little to our store of religious knowledge. It was in our churches and our Sunday schools, but chiefly in our homes, that most of us learned what we knew about the Bible.”—Washington Gladden, in the Atlantic.