Segment · Episode 130
Is it Canon? — Baruch
Jump to the in-depth discussion
- Baruch
- Letter of Jeremiah
- Jeremiah
- +5
Baruch
Baruch is a deuterocanonical Jewish composition that presents itself as the work of Jeremiah's scribe while reflecting concerns and literary habits from long after the Babylonian exile it narrates. Scholars typically read it as a composite Second Temple text, preserved in Greek and likely assembled in stages from different source traditions rather than as an authentic sixth-century work by Baruch ben Neriah.
Why this book matters
The show returns to Baruch because it concentrates several recurring Data Over Dogma concerns into one short book: pseudonymous attribution, post-exilic retrospective storytelling, layered composition, and the uneven historical memory preserved in Second Temple literature. It is less important on the show as a devotional text than as a case study in how later Jewish authors wrote in the voices of earlier figures, borrowed authority from already-circulating scripture, and folded newer concerns into exile-era settings.
Baruch also keeps surfacing because its manuscript history and canonical afterlife reveal how unstable scriptural boundaries were. The podcast uses it to track how a Jewish work preserved mainly in Greek could travel with Jeremiah traditions, be handled differently in Septuagint, Vulgate, Protestant, and rabbinic settings, and expose the historical processes by which communities decide what counts as scripture and why.
Where to start
Start here for the strongest listening on Baruch.
Quotes from the Data
“Baruch is definitely coming from well after that. There's an awful lot in Baruch that is quoting, alluding to, paraphrasing other parts of scripture, including non-canonical texts and things that are written well after the 6th century BCE. And so most scholars would say Baruch was probably written 1st century BCE, 1st century CE.”
“And scholars suggest that it's divided into 4 kind of general pieces, and the first 2 pieces make up the first half. They go to Baruch 3:8, and this, scholars suggest, may have a Hebrew, an underlying Hebrew source text. So it might have been composed in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. All the manuscripts that we have of Baruch are in Greek. We don't have any existing Hebrew manuscripts.”
“And it says Baruch took the vessels of the house of the Lord that had been carried away from the temple to return them to the land of Judah. But the temple was destroyed, right? It would not be rebuilt until like 519 BCE, so several more decades, right? And so this is probably being written by somebody who knows about the existence of the Second Temple and for whatever reason misunderstood the availability of the temple.”
“And so yeah, Baruch is a Jewish text that primarily is preserved in Christian manuscripts, like the the Septuagint manuscripts of the 4th and 5th centuries CE. Okay. So yeah, it is that, and that's a peculiarity of the development of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.”
All episodes
Every episode currently tagged with Baruch.