"... While the Letter [of Jeremiah] is universally acknowledged by scholars not to have been authored by the prophet Jeremiah, determining its actual author, date, and historical circumstances of composition is impossible based on internal criteria alone. Some scholars date it to the 2nd/1st century BCE, for two reasons: (1) The Letter may be referred to in 2 Maccabees 2:1–3, a section commonly dated to the 2nd century BCE. (2) A Greek fragment discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated to the 1st century BCE, has been claimed to contain a small section of Epistle of Jeremiah 43–44. More recently, D. Dimant has suggested that the Letter (like 2 Maccabees 2:1–3 and 1 Baruch) may be related, whether directly or indirectly, to the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C, discovered in fragmentary form among the Dead Sea Scrolls. This would suggest that our text is part of a larger corpus of texts, framed as letters attributed to Jeremiah, circulating in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. How much earlier the Letter may have been composed is more difficult to judge. Some scholars, relying on verse 3, which warns of a long exile of “up to seven generations,” take it to indicate a time of composition prior to 317 or 307/306 BCE, or shortly after Alexander the Great’s conquest. However, given the unlikeliness that the “seven generations” of verse 3 is to be taken literally, and judging from other internal Hellenistic locutions, a date in the 3rd century bce is more likely as a terminus a quo ..."