5. _Jeremiah, Book of. Arrangement:_ "The absence of any chronological order in the present structure of the collection of Jeremiah's prophecies is obvious at the first glance; and this has led some writers (Blayney, Pref. of Jeremiah) to the belief that, as the book now stands, there is nothing but the wildest confusion--'a preposterous jumbling together' of prophecies of different dates. Attempts to reconstruct the book on a chronological basis have been made by almost all commentators on it since the revival of criticism; and the result of the labors of the more recent critics has been to modify the somewhat hasty judgment of the English divine (Blayney). Whatever points of difference there may be in the hypothesis of Movers, Hitzig, Ewald, Bunsen, Nagelsbach, and others, they agree in admitting traces of an order in the midst of the seeming irregularity, and endeavor to account, more or less satisfactorily, for the apparent anomalies. The conclusion of the three last-named is that we have the book substantially in the same state as that in which it left the hands of the prophet, or his disciple Baruch." (Smith's Bible Dictionary, p. 1261.) 5. _Jeremiah:_ "The author of the prophecies of this book was the son of Hilkiah, a priest, and a native of the priestly city of Anathoth, situated three miles north of Jerusalem. He was early called to the prophetic office (chap. i: 6), and began his career as a prophet in his native place. This he soon left, to prosecute his calling in Jerusalem; and here, in the exercises of it, he spent the greater part of his life. His ministry commenced seventy years after the close of Isaiah's, and extended from the thirteenth year of Josiah's reign to the eleventh of Zedekiah's, i. e., from 629 to 588 B. C., thus embracing a period of forty-one years. It was a life-long protest against the iniquity and folly of his countrymen, and conceived in bitter foreboding of the hopeless ruin they were bringing down upon their heads." (Bagster's Bible Helps, p. 37.)