JEREMIAH, THE LETTER OF

also called The Epistle Of Jeremias, apocryphal book of the Old Testament, in the Roman canon appended as a sixth chapter to the book of Baruch (itself apocryphal in the Jewish and Protestant canons). The work is supposedly a letter sent by Jeremiah to Jews exiled to Babylon by King Nebuchadrezzar in 597 BC, but it is not a letter, nor was it written by Jeremiah. It is a polemic against the worship of idols, developed around a verse in The Book of Jeremiah (10:11), stating that false gods shall perish. Possibly composed about 300 BC by a Jew living in Babylonia, the text suggests by its intensity that idolatry threatened fidelity to the God of Israel. The author's primary target was probably the Babylonian deity Tammuz, an agricultural god whose cult was associated with orgiastic fertility rites. Although the letter is extant only in Greek, certain linguistic and stylistic elements point to an original composition in Hebrew or Aramaic.