Introduction 1. Preliminary Remarks “Prophetism taken as a whole constitutes a sort of backbone of the Old Testament…. Now the prophet par excellence, the one who can allow us to surmise to some degree the experience lived by those men and their role in history, is indisputably Jeremiah”—so a French scholar has recently written.1 And indeed the reader finds in the Book of Jer a combination of words attributed to that prophet and of narratives of alleged events in his career that is unparalleled