Fairy Tale Spotlight: Baruch [Book Review]

"Baruch" or "The Prophecy of Baruch" is a book found within the "Douay-Rheims Bible," which is one of the Catholic Bibles. It was written by Baruch who was... kinda like a secretary for Jeremiah. And if this book is to be believed, he was also a prophet himself.

In many ways, this book feels like an extension of the books by Jeremiah that were in the King James Version that I read earlier. This book is a powerful, heavy-hitting piece of literature about how stupid people in the Old Testament were... and why they deserved to be taken over by Babylon. That said, it does end up being slightly redundant.

But I was particularly curious about this one. I was surprised to find out that Baruch even had a book. In fact, it was this book that made me want to dust off the extra books from the Catholic Bible. It didn't really disappoint. I liked it. He definitely had the angry spice of the guy he worked for.

What I didn't expect was that he was considered a prophet too. That's a little weird. A prophet working for a prophet? I am a little bit skeptical. Could it be that he was just parroting the things he was hearing from Jeremiah? There's nothing wrong with that, if that's what he was doing, but that wouldn't make him a prophet. Either way, I don't actually know. This paragraph was more speculative than anything.

There were a couple things that popped out to me. There was a passage that suggested that one of the sins was that parents were eating the flesh of their children for some reason. This is seriously difficult to imagine, but it's not below the sinful people of the time. They were also burning their babies alive, so I rather think it was probable.

The book also talks about the giants that walked the earth. He mentions that they were experts at war. God did not like them and made it so that they would perish. I always like it when these giants are mentioned.

There was also an interestingly written prophecy of Christ. He speaks of Jesus in the past tense as if he has already shown up and walked among us. This is actually not incorrect if he is really receiving the message from God himself, since God has a different perspective of the whole story of humanity. The tense of this reads like this: "Afterwards he was seen upon the earth, and conversed with men." Note that this was written within the Old Testament.

The final chapter of the book seems to be a letter from Jeremiah about how stupid it is to worship lifeless idols. It's pretty straightforward and logical. A good read, all in all. I recommend "Baruch" honestly. It's about a 30 minute read, and no reason to skip something so severely written. Good stuff.

This blog was written on April 29, 2022.

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