Like most other prophetic books of the Old Testament, Jeremiah is a collection of oracles and other materials. It is an anthology of Jeremiah's speeches and writings, really an anthology of anthologies. It is not like a novel that one may read from start to finish discovering that it unfolds in a logical fashion as it goes.
"No commentator, ancient or modern, has seriously posited a chronological arrangement of its prophecies."32
This book, even more than most of the other prophetic books, strikes the western mind initially as not following any consistently logical order, especially within the body of the book. The difficulty that students of Jeremiah have had in discovering its underlying plan is clear from the fact that commentators have offered so many different outlines of it.33
"When we come to inquire whether any principles of arrangement can be observed in the book of Jeremiah, we have to admit that any consistent principles escape us."34
". . . it is often difficult to see why certain passages occur at precisely the point where they do occur."35
