Catholic Commentary
Superscription: The Word Comes to Jeremiah
1In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying,
Jeremiah 27:1 is a superscription dating an oracle to the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign, though the chapter's content clearly belongs to Zedekiah's time, likely a scribal error. The verse introduces Jeremiah's reception of a divine word commanding submission to Babylonian rule, demonstrating God's sovereignty over all earthly kings.
Before the prophet speaks, he must listen—the word comes to Jeremiah from God, not from him, making receptivity the foundation of all truthful witness.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
On the typological level, Jeremiah as the recipient of an unwelcome divine word prefigures Christ himself, who also spoke not on his own authority but from the Father (John 12:49). The Church Fathers, particularly Origen in his Homilies on Jeremiah, read Jeremiah consistently as a figura Christi — one who suffers for speaking truth into a corrupt political and religious establishment. The "beginning of the reign" formula also gestures toward kairos time: God speaks not at moments of human convenience but at politically fraught turning points, precisely when the powerful least want to hear prophetic interruption.
Catholic tradition illuminates this verse in at least three distinct ways.
First, on biblical inspiration and inerrancy: The apparent historical discrepancy (Jehoiakim named instead of Zedekiah) provides a concrete occasion to apply the nuanced Catholic doctrine of inspiration. Dei Verbum §11 teaches that "the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into them for the sake of salvation." This does not mean every scribal or textual transmission is mechanically inerrant; it means the salvific truth intended by the divine author is reliably conveyed. The Pontifical Biblical Commission's document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1993) encourages attention to the literal sense, including the historical-critical dimensions, as the indispensable foundation for all deeper reading.
Second, on the nature of prophecy: The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2584) teaches that the prophets drew their knowledge of God's will not from themselves but from attentive listening — they are paradigms of prayer as receptivity. Jeremiah's reception formula embodies this: the prophet is first a listener before he is a speaker. St. John of the Cross similarly taught that genuine mystical knowledge is always received, never manufactured.
Third, on the prophetic office in the Church: Vatican II's Lumen Gentium §12 affirms that the whole People of God shares in Christ's prophetic office. Jeremiah's model — receiving a hard word and speaking it without self-interest — remains a template for the Church's prophetic witness in every age, especially when that witness runs counter to political power.
Jeremiah 27:1, for all its apparent simplicity, poses a searching question to the contemporary Catholic: where does my word come from? In an age of social media, instant commentary, and opinion as currency, the prophetic formula — "the word came to Jeremiah from Yahweh" — is a rebuke to the impulse to speak before listening.
For Catholics in public life — politicians, teachers, parents, priests — this verse calls for a discipline of discernment before declaration. Before proclaiming what "the Church should say" or what "Catholics must do," there is a prior discipline: waiting for a word that comes from beyond ourselves.
Practically, this means cultivating the kind of silent, receptive prayer that the Carmelite tradition and lectio divina embody. It means asking honestly: Is what I am about to say my own anxiety, my own ideology, my own reputation — or is it genuinely received from God? The scribal confusion in the superscription itself is a quiet reminder that even those who handle the sacred word are fallible and need the Church's ongoing discernment to rightly transmit what God intends.
Commentary
Jeremiah 27:1 — Literal and Narrative Analysis
The superscription of Jeremiah 27:1 reads: "In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying." Every element of this single verse carries interpretive weight.
"In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim" — This dating formula immediately presents a textual difficulty that honest commentary must address. The material in chapters 27–28 clearly takes place during the reign of Zedekiah (cf. 27:3, 12; 28:1), not Jehoiakim. Most modern scholars, following the Septuagint (LXX) and the internal evidence of the chapter, understand "Jehoiakim" here to be a scribal error or assimilation from the nearly identical superscription of Jeremiah 26:1, where the setting during Jehoiakim's reign is historically accurate. The ancient Syriac and Latin Vulgate traditions reflect the same difficulty. Jerome, working on the Vulgate, preserved the Masoretic text as received, while noting the apparent chronological tension with the body of the chapter. Rather than undermining the text's authority, this discrepancy invites the reader to distinguish between the message of divine revelation and the human, historically-conditioned transmission of that message — a distinction fully compatible with Catholic teaching on biblical inspiration (cf. Dei Verbum §11–12).
"The son of Josiah, king of Judah" — The genealogical identification is not mere formality. Jehoiakim (and by extension Zedekiah) stands in the royal line of David, which makes the coming oracle of submission to Babylon all the more devastating. The Davidic heir is being told that Yahweh himself has handed dominion to a foreign pagan king. The full weight of covenant failure presses into the phrase "son of Josiah": Josiah had been the reforming king who renewed the covenant (2 Kings 23), yet his sons squandered that inheritance within a generation.
"This word came to Jeremiah from Yahweh" — The Hebrew verb wayehi ("came to be" or "came") attached to dabar YHWH ("the word of Yahweh") is the quintessential prophetic reception formula. It appears dozens of times in Jeremiah and throughout the prophetic corpus. The formula signals that what follows is not Jeremiah's personal opinion, political calculation, or poetic fancy — it is a word received from outside himself, from the living God. This is the bedrock of Jeremiah's prophetic identity and the source of his suffering: he cannot choose not to speak (cf. Jer 20:9, "there is in my heart as it were a burning fire"). The passive, receptive character of the formula — the word Jeremiah, not from him — is theologically decisive.