Introductory Words (Jeremiah 50:1).
‘The word that YHWH spoke concerning Babylon, concerning the land of the Chaldeans, by the hand of Jeremiah the prophet:
The importance of these words is underlined by the fact that Jeremiah wrote them with his own hand (‘by the hand of Jeremiah the prophet', compare Jeremiah 37:2). It is the prophecy of the downfall of Babylon and all that it stood for, the downfall of all that was anti-God, the downfall of secularism.