Jeremiah dates his call to the arduous mission of prophet in the thirteenth year of King Josiah (626 B.C.), and he lived till after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., so that, like his predecessor Isaiah a century earlier, his career spans a period of about forty years in a time of great events. Only five years after he began to prophesy, Josiah reformed religion in Judah on the new model of the law-book discovered by Hilkiah (Deuteronomy; see above, pp. 62 f.). Jeremiah, scion of a priestly family native in Anathoth, a few miles north of Jerusalem, which very likely traced its descent from Abiathar, David's priest, whom Solomon deposed in favour of Zadok, was therefore one of those priests of the high places who were hit hardest by the suppression of the local sanctuaries. That his townsmen of Anathoth sought his life (Jer. xi. 18 ff.) has been attributed to their indignation that Jeremiah should dare to preach Josiah's "covenant" to them (see Jer. xi. 1-17). Whatever hopes he may have entertained at first, Jeremiah was not long in seeing that the reform had cleaned only the outside of the cup and the platter, while men fortified their consciences behind the "covenant" against an investigation of the inside. In 608 B.C. Josiah fell in battle at Megiddo against the Egyptian king Necho. After a brief vassalage to Egypt, Judah came under the Babylonian yoke. Jeremiah saw all this; saw, too, Jerusalem twice taken by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar (597, 586 B.C.), the temple burned and the walls razed; and was at last forced to accompany the refugees to Egypt after the murder of Gedaliah. Early in the reign of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah delivered himself of a fulminant oracle in the gate of the temple (Jer. vii. 1-15, cf. c. 26), in which he declared that the Jews' faith in the temple as the palladium of the city was a delusion; unless they altogether amended their ways, God would make the temple a ruin like the ancient sanctuary at Shiloh. Priests, prophets, and people clamoured with one voice for the blasphemer's death, but he hurled back at them a reiteration of his warning. The intervention of some of the magnates saved his life; but another prophet who lacked such influential protection was extradited from Egypt and put to death.