Who the “weeping prophet” was, why he's remembered that way, and what his book is about.
Jeremiah was a prophet active in Judah from roughly 627 BC until after Jerusalem's fall to Babylon in 586 BC — one of the longest prophetic ministries recorded in the Bible. Called by God as a young man (Jeremiah 1:6, where he protests, “I am a child”), he spent decades warning Judah's kings and people that their unfaithfulness would lead to disaster, while being repeatedly rejected, imprisoned, and even thrown into a muddy cistern for it.
Jeremiah's book is unusually personal — he records his own grief, frustration, and even anger at God over his difficult calling, in passages scholars call his “confessions” (for example, Jeremiah 20:7–18). He's traditionally credited with writing Lamentations, a book of poetry mourning Jerusalem's destruction, which cemented his reputation as a prophet defined by sorrow as much as warning.
Jeremiah is a large, sometimes non-chronological collection of prophecies, sermons, and personal narrative. Its central message: Judah's persistent unfaithfulness will bring judgment through Babylon — but judgment isn't the end of the story. God promises restoration and a “new covenant” written on people's hearts (Jeremiah 31:31–34), a passage later New Testament writers connect directly to Jesus.
Beyond Jeremiah 29:11, the book contains some of the Old Testament's most quoted lines: Jeremiah 1:5 (“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee”), Jeremiah 17:9 (“The heart is deceitful above all things”), and the new covenant passage in chapter 31.
Jeremiah has more words than any other book in most English translations, even more than Psalms in some counts, though Psalms has more chapters.
Jeremiah 36 describes an early scroll of his prophecies being burned by King Jehoiakim. Jeremiah simply dictates it again, with additions.
Unlike many prophets, Jeremiah personally witnessed Jerusalem's destruction in 586 BC — the disaster he'd been predicting for decades.