[As if it’s not difficult enough to read through the book of one major prophet, this commentary tackles two at the same time! But please understand that this study of two books simultaneously focuses only on the literary merits of the works attributed to these two prophets. Most all other religious studies expectedly, examine their theological/doctrinal significance. What struck me in reading these prophetic books is how I had to keep track of who is speaking — YHWH or His mouthpiece, the prophet — sometimes I could not distinguish between the two. Of course the key phrase would be: “Thus saith the Lord.” But then, so many pastors say something of the same sort, “the Lord spoke to me and said this” . . . except they’re not prophets. Again, this is from our MUST READ/MUST OWN resource: The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Highlights and reformatting ours.—Admin1]
- the closer we are to the prophet’s indisputedly original words, largely identified with the poetic material, the father we are from biographical specifics;
- and conversely, the more deeply immersed we become in the details of Jeremiah’s life, the more likely we are to encounter either prose synopses of the prophet’s utterances or stereotyped recapitulations, which are no less integral to the total composition.
The poetic material in Jeremiah is most concentrated at the beginning (chaps. 1-25), middle (chaps. 30-31), and end (chaps. 46-51), and this fact supplies our initial clues to the structure and meaning of the book.
- poetic oracles,
- prose sermons,
- and biographical prose.
- staccato exclamations,
- rapid changes of scene and vantage point,
- frequent shifts of voice and discourse,
- use of invocation, plural command, and rhetorical question,
- a propensity for assonance and wordplay,
- a rich array of metaphors and similes from the natural landscapes and from human crafts and trades,
- and precision of metonymy and synecdoche.
Here we come closest to the mind of the prophet, and it is clear that the book has been constructed to allow the voice of Jeremiah to dominate the beginning, end, and core of the text.
- convey a sense of the prophet’s panoramic purview and his brilliant reversals of mood and tone.
- The book begins with a starkly simple commissioning scene (a bold contrast to Moses’ commissioning in Exodus 3 and to those of Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1-3),
- in which YHWH drafts the reluctant prophet (“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee … and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations,” 1:5),
- who is initially shown two symbolic visions:
- the almond branch (shaqed), a symbol of the watchful (shoqed) deity (1:11);
- and the molten caldron pouring destruction from the north (1:13), symbol of the imminent terror from northern peoples who will descend upon the hapless nation—an image that will dominate the whole book.
- The prophet now turns to plead with his audience,
- personifying a God who remembers the former love of his favored people (2:1-3—the influence of Hosea is especially marked here)
- and reciting the milestones of its early history.
- Intermittently he flares up in wrath over—
- the defilement of the Land,
- the faithlessness,
- superstition,
- and folly of the people,
- the futile alliances of their leaders.
- The nation is personified—
- as a wanton woman, lustful in her passion (2:23-24),
- contriving schemes to grasp her lover (2:33),
- lying with paramours on roads and hilltops (3:23).
- Momentarily, the prophet imagines a scene of reconciliation,Visions of doom resurge in 4:3-9, and the wrathful deity is now sketched as the awesome divine warrior of Near Eastern myth (4:11-13).
- first calling to the people to turn back (3:2)
- and articulating their hypothetical heartfelt confession (3:22-25),
- then again in the voice of YHWH promising forgiveness and future blessing (4:1-2).
- In a characteristic etiological flourish, the prophet pauses to pronounce the casual nexus between human and misdeed and bitter punishment: “Your ways and your doings have brought this upon you” (4:18 [AT]).
- Then, suddenly, we are plunged into the moaning despair of one who must witness such devastation:
- despite much geographic specificity,
- are unique to no particular moment of the prophet’s mission
- and, indeed, display much the same feel for the typical and typologically recurrent that characterizes Hebrew prophecy as a whole.
- from Amos and Micah
- the preoccupation with social injustice and the indifference to cultic propriety;
- from Hosea
- the feminine personification of Israel
- and the nostalgia for the days of the Exodus and the Wilderness wandering;
- from Isaiah
- the panoramic vision,
- the sharpness of satire,
- and the gift of paronomasia
- and linguistic musicality.
The prophet moves around the Land with the certainty of a stage director,
- calling forth the sights, sounds, and exclamations of his tortured era,
- posing legalities and claims,
- mocking the self-exculpations and self-pity of the populace,
- and expressing anguish and despair over their devastation and its aftermath,
- only to call the enemy down upon them anew,
- as new offenses of the people come to mind.
We notice a certain hardening of the prophet’s position, as he moves from the hope of repentance to a sense of the inevitability of retribution. As this happens, we find increasing expression of prophetic and divine pathos—at first without distinction between the celestial and earthly perception; then, as the prophet’s social encounters increase, with the growing sense of the prophet’s isolation from God and man alike.
- standing at the Temple gate (7:2),
- wearing and destroying a loincloth (13:1-7),
- refraining from marriage (16:1-4),
- witnessing a potter at his wheel (18:1-4),
- smashing a potter’s jug (19:1-12),
- holding forth a wine cup of wrath (25:15-17),
- attaching a yoke to his neck with thongs (27:1-4), and so on.
But there is no need to view the prophet’s anguish as purely teleological and didactic, or as a kind of shamanistic dramatization of the torment of an era. The lavishness of prophetic pathos flows more from the breakdown of missionary purpose than from an enactment of it. Even YHWH must confront this unforeseen faltering of his plan. Had Jeremiah remained but a mannequin of heavenly design, a disembodied oracular voice, we would not have sensed as fully the desperation and extremity of the time and place in which he moved.
- The prophet could be revealing his own familiarity with the so-called Ur-Deuteronomy;
- or he could be using phrases that were later imitated by the Deuteronomists;
- or the affinity could rest in commonality of language, era, and heritage;
- or there could have been interpolations by a Deuteronomistic hand in order to claim Jeremiah for the movement.
Though the precise textual relation between the Book of Jeremiah and Deuteronomy may elude us, there is a certain convergence of interest between Jeremiah and the Deuteronomist.
- Both simultaneously affirm and deny the uniqueness ofIsrael among the nations;
- both call the people to strict accountability for their wrongdoings;
- and both reflect a similar sense of historical and divine causality.
That the nation’s fate was to become a proverb and a byword in the discourse of later generations, as Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic portions of Jeremiah would have it, accorded well with the idiom of this most emblematic of prophets—indeed, he, too, was a symbol of ridicule: “I have become a constant laughingstock—everyone jeers at me” (20:7 [AT]).
- There we find reference to Jeremiah’s famous Temple sermon in the fourth year of Jehoiakim;
- to the prophet’s clashes with the Jerusalem leadership during their apparent efforts to reverse the reforms of Josiah;
- and, most significantly, to Jeremiah’s estrangement from his own village of Anathoth as a plot against his life arises there.
- The poetic oracles that accompany and follow this material underscore this biographical interest by presenting the prophet’s laments over his many enemies and ridiculers.
- The narratives that accompany these laments represent the first of the various symbolic actions commanded of Jeremiah (discussed above), and so bring into focus the specific public confrontations that will later be given historical concreteness.
- Only from chapter 20 onward do references appear to specific names of officials and dates, and to controversies of late pre-ExilicJerusalem.
- Up to the point, we experience the issues only typologically—in the homiletic rhythms of preachment and the compressed synecdoche of oracle.
- After that time, the history of Jeremiah’s life gradually comes into full view,
- and the prophet is finally revealed as an engaged historical actor,
- uncompromising but relentlessly committed to persuasion and debate,
- mingling with the highest ruling circles,
- able to mobilize allies among them,
- and, most important, exercising, despite his vulnerability to persecution, considerable public influence, enough to have made himself a threat to the national leaders.
- one arising as an amplification of sermonic situations,
- and the other as part of a more purely historiographic or biographical project.
There seems to have been an evolution from the one to the other, and that history of discourse on Jeremiah is preserved in the layout of the book as a whole, where we find a progression—
- from oracle to sermon,
- from sermon to sermonic setting,
- and from sermonic setting to personal and court history.
- of the rescue of Jeremiah from starvation in a mud pit by an Ethiopian slave named Ebed-Melech,
- of the capture of the city and the humiliation and exile of Zedekiah,
- of the defeat of the conspiracy and the stormy aftermath in Judah and Egypt.
It is not a “passion” narrative, as some have maintained.
- If anything, it portrays the prophet’s vindication and rescue;
- and the final setbacks he experiences,
- in his failure to convince the surviving Judean leaders to abandon their conspiratorial course against Babylon,
- serve only to accentuate the folly and perverseness of the very persons he is trying to rescue.
Our clue to the function and significance of the history in the Book of Jeremiah can be found in the return of the Deuteronomic style in the later chapters, especially in 44. There an elaborate, almost ceremonial dialogue occurs between Jeremiah and the Judean exiles in Egypt, in which the prophet affirms that he has been sent as the last in a line of prophets mandated to warn the people “to turn their wickedness, to burn no incense to other gods” (44:5).
- first, because b’ does not seem to end the whole book but only the Babylonian oracles that immediately precede it in chapters 50-51;
- second, because its purported date (see 51:59) is the fourth year of Zedekiah’s reign, not the end of Jeremiah’s career.
Thus, his last mentioned prophecy is not his last delivered.
- Babylonia is presented as Israel’s nemesis throughout the book,
- and she is now the most powerful of nations
- and the symbol of political might as such.
- One other episode in the book is dated to the fourth year of Zedekiah’s reign, namely Jeremiah’s confrontation with the court prophet Hananiah. Curiously, Hananiah’s theme is the fall of Babylon, and Jeremiah expresses reserved on the truth of this oracle, stating that it can be verified only if and when it comes true (27:7-8), and later (27:15) he criticizes Hananiah for having provided false assurances to court and kingdom. Assuming that both chapter 28 and 59:59-64 have a basis in fact, we learn something quite intriguing about Jeremiah:
- that at the same time that he was telling his own people not to expect the immediate fall of Babylon,
- he was telling the Babylonians (at least symbolically—no recipient is designated) that their kingdom would indeed fall.
- seems to have been a secret prophecy,
- not intended for the prophet’s contemporaries back home in Judah,
- and possibly not even for the Babylonians of his era,
- since Jeremiah (51:59) gives Seraiah ben Neriah the scroll of his Babylon prophecies without designating any recipient (though it is to be read aloud).
- This is quite odd, and Jeremiah’s further instructions to Seraiah suggest that the delivery is to be a purely magical act, not intended to persuade any crowd or official—only to notify “Babylon” as a whole Recipients are not to be ruled out, but their locale and identity are unimportant.
- With the delivery of this message, Jeremiah’s ministry is logically complete, even though he has some eight more years of documented preaching.
- the full design of Jeremiah’s mission “to the nations” becomes clear for the first time:
- even the great devourer will be devoured;
- even the great nemesis, which throughout the book has been seen as the spearhead of “the enemy from the north,” has its own enemy from the north (50:41-43).
- prophecies of doom for Israel;
- prophecies of doom for the surrounding nations;
- prophesies of restoration for Israel.
- And behind all motions and changes is the voice of Jeremiah,
- whose book characteristically leaves us in the dark about where he spent his final days—
- a not untypical ending for prophetic cycles (consider Moses’ unknown gravesite, Elijah’s exit in a chariot of fire, Jonah’s silent perplexity before a divine question).
- In Jeremiah’s case the omission creates a sense of the prophet’s freewheeling ubiquity “to root out, and to pull down, / and to destroy, and to throw down, / to build, and to plant” (1:10),
- which can now be seen as an emblem for the double opposition,
- between national and international calamity and between calamity and restoration,
- that informs the design of the book as a whole,
- and which defines the parameters of historical understanding within the Hebrew Bible at large.