Canon and Setting

In the Latin and Roman Catholic tradition the Letter of Jeremiah is attached to the Book of Baruch as its sixth and final chapter, so that it does not usually stand as a separate book; in the Greek Septuagint and in the Eastern Orthodox reckoning it is a distinct work, and Protestant Bibles that print the Apocrypha likewise treat it separately, under its own name. It is received as deuterocanonical by Catholics and Orthodox and placed among the Apocrypha by Jews and Protestants, following the Hebrew canon in which it has no place.

The letter is a valuable witness to the long and vigorous Jewish tradition of anti-idolatry polemic, a theme running from the prophets through Wisdom of Solomon and Bel and the Dragon, which served both to fortify Jews living amid the images and cults of the pagan world and to define the community against them. Scholars read it as a rhetorical set-piece rather than a genuine letter, and value it for the vivid picture it gives of the material culture of ancient idol-worship and of the arguments a Hellenistic Jewish writer marshalled against it.