There is good reason to believe that the author of this biography was Baruch, who not only stood in intimate relations with Jeremiah before the fall of Jerusalem, but accompanied him to Egypt (Jer. xliii. 6). It is consequently a historical source of the best possible kind. For the first half of Jeremiah's career this source fails us; and, as we have seen, it is continuous only from the last years of Zedekiah. It is possible that Baruch's association with Jeremiah began in the time of Jehoiakim, and his narrative may have commenced there. Unfortunately this life of Jeremiah has not been preserved complete or intact. The prophecies contained in it led later compilers to introduce other oracles which seemed appropriate to the context, and to supplement the words of Jeremiah by edifying compositions of their own. Their aim, it must constantly be borne in mind, was not to produce a critical edition of the prophecies of Jeremiah, but to make a book effective to impress the truths and motives of religion on their own contemporaries, and with changing times and situations to keep the book, so to speak, up to date. If the words of an old prophet suggested to them a good moral, they wrote it out for him, without dreaming that they were doing either him or morality a wrong, or thinking how much trouble they were making for future historical students. It is exactly the same procedure and the same motive which meets us in innumerable places in the Pentateuch and Historical Books. To stigmatize such interpolations as literary fraud is absurd. These additions are often recognizable by their prosaic preachiness or by their composite imitativeness. Of one kind of prediction the Jews of later centuries could not have enough, the prophecies of deliverance from the foreign yoke and the better time to follow. They not only cherished the hopeful words of former prophets and wrote variations on their themes, but gave expression to their faith and their ideals in their own way. That they often took their inspiration from Isa. 40 ff. is natural. In Jeremiah such promises of a happier future are accumulated in cc. 30-33, which contain, with some oracles of Jeremiah, pieces of various authorship and age, some of them such pendants to gloomy pictures as we have found numerous in Isaiah (e.g. Jer. xxx. 1 ff. to vss. 12-15), others more independent compositions.