BARUCH (Hebrew «blessed»). — Son of Neriah, secretary of Jeremiah (q.v.), who wrote down his oracles and was his faithful companion during the siege of Jerusalem (Jer. 32:12–16; 36:4–32; 43:3). For his loyalty to the great prophet, God granted him special protection (Jer. 45:5). After the murder of Gedaliah (q.v.), he accompanied Jeremiah into Egypt (Jer. 43:6). He appears to have ended his days among the exiles in Babylon, where he was on the fifth anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem (Bar. 1:1–2). On that date (581 BC), he composed his brief work, which he then read before Jehoiachin, penultimate king of Judah, and the nobles and people then exiled by the river Chebar in Babylon (1:3). Later, messengers, with a collection of money, took the little book of Baruch to Jerusalem so that it might be read by the survivors at one of the festivals (1:6, 14).
BOOK OF BARUCH — First part: after a historical preface (1:1–15a), there follows a moving prayer (similar to Dan. 9:4–20) in which the sins of the fathers and their children now exiled as a just punishment from God are acknowledged, while God’s forgiving mercy, saving power, and supreme wisdom—altogether different from human wisdom—are praised (1:15b–4:4).
In the second part (4:5–5:9), the prophet first has Jerusalem speak to her children enslaved among the Chaldeans, and finally he himself addresses words of comfort to the city, extolling its future glory and proclaiming the redemption of its children.
Chapter 6 (the last) contains a long Letter of Jeremiah, which in the Septuagint follows the Lamentations of Jeremiah.
We possess only the Greek text from which the ancient versions derive, namely the Syriac Peshitta (2nd cent.), the Syro-Hexaplar (7th cent.), and the Old Latin (2nd cent.), which passed entire into our Vulgate.
That the book, despite the doubt expressed by St. Jerome (PL 28, 904), was composed in Hebrew may be inferred from a justificatory note repeated three times in the Syro-Hexaplar (1:17; 2:3): “This (passage) is not found in the Hebrew”; this almost certainly refers to the original Hebrew. Sometimes variant readings are cited from the Greek version of the Jew Theodotion (q.v.), who relied solely on the Hebrew text. Moreover, in the Greek text of the Septuagint we encounter certain Hebraisms (2:6, 11, 26; 5:6) and even erroneous interpretations arising from the Semitic source language; e.g., 1:22: ἐπῳδέσθαι “to enchant or work spells” instead of “to serve” foreign gods (since the Hebrew ‘ābhādh has both meanings); 4:20: “sack of supplication” for “sack of penitence”; likewise 1:10; 2:18, 25, 29. Furthermore, the poetic passages follow the familiar law of Semitic parallelism.