Jeremiah Was the Priest God Called to Inspect His Own Ruined House

The Law That Was Not About a House

Leviticus chapter 14 describes what a homeowner should do when a plague appears on the walls of a house: he goes to the priest, the priest inspects, the house is quarantined for seven days, if the plague spreads the stones are removed, if it returns the house is demolished and its stones carried outside the city.

It reads as ancient building code. The rabbis read it as a map of the Temple's destruction.

The phrase in Leviticus is a house in the land of your possession. Vayikra Rabbah, the fifth-century Palestinian midrash on Leviticus, opens the question with a verse from Ezekiel: Behold, I am profaning My Temple, the pride of your strength. The Temple is God's house. The plague on the walls is the corruption that had accumulated within it. The law about the afflicted house was never about a house.

The Owner Who Called the Priest

If the Temple is the plagued house, then who is the homeowner who comes to the priest? Vayikra Rabbah makes this identification without hesitation. The verse from Haggai says: Because of My house that is destroyed. The owner of the afflicted house is God.

This is an extraordinary claim. God is cast in the legal procedure as the householder, the one required by the law to report the affliction, to call in the inspection, to open the building to examination. The procedure that ends in demolition is initiated by the building's owner. God participates in the process by which the Temple falls.

And if God is the owner, the priest He calls is someone specific. Jeremiah 1:1 identifies the prophet as one of the priests of Anatot. Jeremiah is the priest who comes when God reports the affliction on his house.

The Inspection and What It Found

The midrash does not develop the inspection in detail, but the casting does the interpretive work that detail would do. Jeremiah's entire prophetic career was the inspection. He walked through the Temple courts and saw what was there: the altars to other gods, the smoke going to foreign deities, the corruption of the priesthood, the abandonment of covenant. He reported it. He described the stones that needed to be removed.

No one wanted to hear it. He was put in stocks. He was thrown into a cistern. He was told to stop prophesying. He kept going because the law required the priest to complete the inspection, to report honestly, to do the procedure even when the procedure ended in demolition.

He watched the Temple burn. He sat in the ruins and wrote Lamentations. The book that begins How does the city sit solitary was written by the priest who had been called to inspect the afflicted building and had not been able to stop what he found.

The Ark He Hid Before the End

One tradition says that before the Babylonians completed the destruction, Jeremiah went to the mountain where Moses had stood and hid the Ark of the Covenant, the tent of meeting, and the altar of incense in a cave whose entrance he sealed. He told those who followed him that the place would remain unknown until God gathered the people again and showed mercy.

This is the action of a priest who understood that the Temple's stones could be demolished but not the covenant the Temple contained. The law in Leviticus said the stones of a plagued house were to be carried outside the city. The law said nothing about destroying what the stones had housed. Jeremiah carried out the demolition procedure and saved the contents.

He was, to the end, doing exactly what the law required: completing the inspection, supervising the destruction, and preserving what the destruction could not touch.