Jeremiah Invented: Constructions and Deconstructions of Jeremiah 9780567659248, 9780567448514

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Dedicated to the memory of a brilliant colleague and dear friend, A. R. Pete Diamond (1950–2011)

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Mary Chilton Callaway is Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Fordham University, New York. A. R. Pete Diamond (1950–2011) taught Old Testament at Santa Barbara City College’s Adult Education Program. Johanna Erzberger is Lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Paris in France and Research Associate of the Department of Old Testament Studies at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Barbara Green, O.P., is Professor of Biblical Studies at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, California. Joe Henderson is Assistant Professor of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, La Mirada, California. Else K. Holt is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Aarhus University, Denmark. Amy Kalmanofsky is Assistant Professor of Bible at The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, New York. Mary E. Mills is Professor of Biblical Studies at Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, England. Kathleen M. O’Connor is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. Carolyn J. Sharp is Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut. Louis Stulman is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Findlay, Ohio.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AB ACBI AJA ANET AOTC ATANT BB BibSem BIS BMW BWANT BZAW CBOTS CBQ CRBS EssBib EvT HAT HBM HThKAT IBT ICC Int JBL JBR JSOT JSOTSup KHC LHBOTS LXX

MLR MT NRSV

OAJ OBT OTL OTS OTT

Anchor Bible Academia Biblica American Journal of Archaeology Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Edited by J. B. Pritchard. 3d edition. Princeton, 1969 Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments Biblische Beiträge The Biblical Seminar Biblical Interpretation Series Bible in Modern World Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Coniectanea Biblica Old Testament Series Catholic Biblical Quarterly Currents in Research: Biblical Studies Essais bibliques Evangelische Theologie Handbuch zum Alten Testament Hebrew Bible Monographs Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament Interpreting Biblical Texts International Critical Commentary Interpretation Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Bible and Religion Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Kurzer Hand-Commentar zum Alten Testament Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Septuagint Modern Language Review Masoretic Text New Revised Standard Version Oxford Art Journal Overtures to Biblical Theology Old Testament Library Old Testament Studies Old Testament Theology

xii PAJ PSB SBLDS SBLSS SBLSymS SBS SHBC TQ TUAT USQR VT VTSup WBC WW ZAW ZBK AT ZTK

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Abbreviations Performing Arts Journal Princeton Seminary Bulletin Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary Theologische Quartalschrift Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments. Edited by Otto Kaiser. Gütersloh, 1984— Union Seminary Quarterly Review Vetus Testamentum Vetus Testamentum Supplements Word Biblical Commentary Word and World Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zürcher Bibelkommentare Altes Testament Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

INTRODUCTION: INVENTING A PROPHETIC BIOGRAPHY, THEN AND NOW Else K. Holt and Carolyn J. Sharp

Softly sounded the bells in Anathot when Jeremiah opened his eyes.1

These words, found in a German student’s thesis from the 1930s, might be an embroidered testimony to the interest of Jeremiah the Prophet as a person in the twentieth century. It is striking how important Jeremiah’s biography has been for the understanding of the prophetic book throughout modern (i.e. post-Enlightenment) research. It is as if the prophet as a person of Àesh and blood would serve as guarantor for direct access to the word of the divinity. Thus, understanding the biography became an important part of scholarly research in the book of Jeremiah, especially from the days of Protestant liberal theology in the beginning of the twentieth century and until what could be labeled “the redaction-critical turn” from 1980 onwards.2 Even critical scholars such as H. G. May, who in an article from 1942 identi¿ed large parts of the book of Jeremiah as written by a so-called “Biographer,” understood his identi¿cation of the voice of the biographer as “the ¿rst spade work for a more important task, namely, the recovery of the historical Jeremiah.”3 1. “Leise läuteten die Glocken in Anathot als Jeremia die Augen aufschlug.” The editors thank Prof. emer. Bent Rosendal, Aarhus, for the quote. 2. See Joe Henderson, “Duhm and Skinner’s Invention of Jeremiah,” below pp. 1–15. The inÀuential commentaries by John Bright and J. A. Thompson can serve as examples; John Bright, Jeremiah: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (AB 21; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965); J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980). 3. H. G. May, “Towards an Objective Approach to the Book of Jeremiah: The Biographer,” JBL 61 (1942): 139–55 (155). Interestingly, May understands the “confused chronology” in the book of Jeremiah as “explained by the fact that the Biographer is depicting not so much a ‘life’ as a ‘person’ ” (142). The diction of the alleged biographer, however, as identi¿ed by May comes very close to later scholarship’s deuteronomistic redactor.

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As late as in his magisterial two-volume commentary from 1986–89, William L. Holladay would begin with “A Chronology of Jeremiah’s Career.” He writes: “I have become convinced that the data for a reconstruction of the chronology of Jrm’s career, and for the establishment of fairly secure settings for his words and actions, are attainable. …”4 And even after the common scholarly acknowledgment that the book of Jeremiah was the product of a long literary growth, the search for an original voice of the prophet proper continued as a search for the reciprocal inÀuence between Jeremiah the prophet and the Deuteronomistic movement.5 As recently as the sessions at the SBL meetings of the Book of Jeremiah Group in the 1990s, tempers could boil over about the historicity of (parts of) the book of Jeremiah, ending in serious— academic—clashes between participants and audience. Only a few scholars in the twenty-¿rst century, however, have understood the book of Jeremiah as an historical chronicle in any strict sense, even though many still ¿nd historical study of the book important. This development, launched by Robert Carroll’s inÀuential works from the 1980s,6 can be followed in the two publications which we consider the predecessors of the present volume, Troubling Jeremiah and Jeremiah (Dis)placed.7 With this development has faded also the interest in Jeremiah’s historical biography. But at the same time an interest in Jeremiah as a literary persona has resurfaced among Jeremiah scholars. This interest became clearly observable at the international scholarly conversation that was hosted by the Writing/Reading Jeremiah section of the Society of Biblical Literature over several annual meetings of that guild (2009 in New Orleans, 2010 in Atlanta, 2011 in San Francisco, 2012 in Chicago and 2013 in Baltimore). The essays in the present volume are all based on presentations at these meetings.

4. William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1–2 (2 vols.; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986–89), vol. 1, 1–12. 5. For a still excellent introduction to the Forschungsgeschichte of the ¿rst 60 years of the twentieth century, see Winfried Thiel, Die deuteronomistische Redaktion von Jeremia 1–25 (WMANT 41; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1973), 3–33. 6. Robert P. Carroll, From Chaos to Covenant: Prophecy in the Book of Jeremiah (New York: Crossroad, 1981); Jeremiah: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986). 7. Troubling Jeremiah (eds. A. R. Pete Diamond et al.; JSOTSup 260; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999); Jeremiah (Dis)Placed: New Directions in Writing/ Reading Jeremiah (eds. A. R. Pete Diamond and Louis Stulman; JSOTSup 529; New York: T & T Clark International, 2011).

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The interest in the biography of Jeremiah the prophet, of course, does not emerge ex nihilo. The book of Jeremiah itself shows a manifest interest in the whereabouts and sermons of its protagonist, epitomized in the many narratives of the prophet’s showdowns with the political and religious authorities of his time (e.g. chs. 26–29; 36–39). Furthermore, the so-called confessions8 in Jeremiah reveal the psychological pro¿le of a person in profound religious turmoil. Today, we are not con¿dent that we will ever be able to identify the author of these moving poems; nevertheless, they invite the reader to personalize the voice of the implied author. These features have led scholars in every time to invent the Jeremiah of their time. The newly reinvigorated interest in Jeremiah’s biography of course raises the question: Why has the Jeremiah guild seized on this interest right now? Our interest seems to be part of a widespread, general interest in biographies. Every day new biographies of persons, famous or unknown, are published worldwide; everyday television shows portray important or insigni¿cant men and women; history has become one of the great sources of popular entertainment. From a cognitive perspective, then, are biography and “history”—also in the shape of invented history—part of our inherent proclivity as social beings? Does something in our approach to reality demand access to “history”? Moreover, do we need, cognitively, to “know” the source of the message and does “knowing” the “person behind” add to the credibility and signi¿cance of the message? And, ¿nally, do we as scholars, with our minimalist hermeneutics of suspicion, miss traditional historiography and/or our former historical naïveté, one way or another? Furthermore, from a hermeneutical point of view we should ponder the differences and similarities between historical-critical9 interest in the person of Jeremiah, which was indeed ideological/theological, and the current approach. Which is the more biased when it comes to terms? And can (or should) bias be avoided, anyway? The Essays in this Volume The essays in Jeremiah Invented explore dimensions of a rich variety of historical, ideological, and artistic constructions of the prophet Jeremiah. They do not depend on any joint methodology or ideology; what holds 8. See Kathleen M. O’Connor, “Figuration in Jeremiah’s Confessions,” below pp. 63–73. 9. Or with Joe Henderson, “liberal” theology; see Henderson, “Duhm and Skinner’s Invention of Jeremiah,” below, pp. 1–15.

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them together is that they explore the characterization of the literary persona, Jeremiah the prophet, in the book that bears his name. Contributors here are working at the intersections of historical inquiry, ideological criticism, and reception history. These essays probe dimensions of the persona of Jeremiah as that has been variously construed in contexts ancient and contemporary, exploring the generativity of the Jeremiah traditions as that is refracted through the convictions and anxieties of ancient scribes, modern biblical scholars, and contemporary artists. Joe Henderson’s essay, “Duhm and Skinner’s Invention of Jeremiah,” leads off this collection with a robust interrogation of ideological biases visible in the work of Bernhard Duhm and John Skinner in the early twentieth century. In the source-critical work of those two scholars, historical and literary considerations were pressed into the service of a distorted view that presumed the decline of Israelite religion. Henderson situates Duhm’s and Skinner’s judgments about the historical authenticity and theological value of Jeremiah traditions within the framework of nineteenth-century German liberal Protestantism, tracing the inÀuence of Romanticism as well via the poetics of Johann Gottfried Herder and Robert Lowth. Henderson gives us a richly layered reading of the production of “Jeremiah” according to particular European convictions about individualistic piety and religious inspiration. Mary Callaway’s essay, “Seduced by Method: History and Jeremiah 20,” explores two distinct approaches to this ancient poem: historicalcritical analysis and postmodern interpretation. First, she shows how scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries combined genre considerations, biography, and Romantic theology in their quest for the historical Jeremiah, producing readings reÀective of modernity’s sustained interest in the interiority of the subject as creative genius. Callaway then proposes an alternative reading of Jer 20 as an undecidable utterance that bespeaks the merging of the words of Jeremiah with the concession of his opponents during the Babylonian exile. Declining the hegemony of diachronic thinking about originary meaning, Callaway offers Jer 20 as a polyphonic production that “means” history in a new way. Barbara Green’s piece, “Sunk in the Mud: Literary Correlation and Collaboration between King and Prophet in the Book of Jeremiah,” explores ways in which the interactions between Zedekiah and Jeremiah work narratologically to make visible the political options available to the besieged people of Jerusalem and Judah. Presenting a lively structuralist analysis of seven discrete scenes in Jer 21–39, Green examines

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implications of kingly and prophetic actions, roles, and discourses. She ¿nds that the words and choices of king and prophet move toward a strategic reciprocity of intention, notwithstanding the ostensible contestations and divided loyalties that characterize the mutual engagements of Jeremiah and Zedekiah. Amy Kalmanofsky’s essay, “Bare Naked: A Gender Analysis of the Naked Body in Jeremiah 13,” articulates an incisive gender critique of ways in which shame functions with regard to the naked body of the prophet Jeremiah and the social body of Israel metaphorized as a disgraced woman. Setting the cultural context for her analysis via reference to Mesopotamian art and literature as well as traditions of nakedness in the Hebrew Bible, Kalmanofsky explores ways in which an eroticized vulnerability and powerlessness are imputed to stripped Israel in Jer 13. For the prophet Jeremiah, however, taking off the loincloth signals the prophet’s virility and power to act on behalf of Israel. Thus gendered dynamics of shaming and power are enacted differently as regards male and female nakedness in the symbolic discourse of Jeremiah’s prophecy. The prophetic subtext trades on cultural norms of disgust, using the naked female body’s imputed dishonor to shame Israel into restoring its relationship with God. Kathleen M. O’Connor’s essay, “Figuration in Jeremiah’s Confessions With Questions for Isaiah’s Servant,” probes aspects of the lamenting Jeremiah that serve to mediate the suffering of Israel during and after the Babylonian invasion of Judah. Situating her reading of Jeremiah within trauma studies, O’Connor argues that the life of Jeremiah was evocative and meaningful for members of the post-exilic Judean community seeking to explain their suffering and claim power as survivors. The lamenting Jeremiah does vital restorative work in bringing Judah’s trauma to voice and articulating bitter distrust of the God who failed to protect the community. O’Connor then poses related questions about possible purposes of Isaiah’s allusion to Jeremiah traditions in the ¿guration of the Suffering Servant. Mary E. Mills’s piece, “Deathscape and Lament in Jeremiah and Lamentations,” theorizes ways in which the trauma inÀicted on Jerusalem as urban center is symbolically depicted and inhabited in the texts of Jeremiah and Lamentations. Mills argues that these biblical books construct Jerusalem as a textualized “site” that re¿gures the materiality of loss, collapse, and grief, providing an artistic context in which mourning can be engaged productively and redemption can be envisioned. Jeremiah as a symbolic “deathscape” and Lamentations as a dramatized cry of anguish can be understood as appropriate responses to chaos and

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abjection. On Mills’s reading, the cultural geography of the destroyed city Jerusalem and the ravaged land of Judah becomes a memorial to past horror, but it also works to facilitate healing and promote possibilities for reconstruction. A response to Mills and O’Connor was prepared by A. R. Pete Diamond and ampli¿ed by Louis Stulman when Diamond became too ill to attend the SBL session. “First-Person Figurations of Servant and Suffering in Isaiah and Jeremiah: A Response to Mary Mills and Kathleen O’Connor” sets the stage regarding recent scholarship on Jeremiah’s “confessions,” noting an explosion of scholarly interest in the lament genre. Diamond offers a series of questions on diverse issues such as the role of sexualized metaphorization in the ¿guration of God and prophet in the two books, and whether scholars might more fully engage the implications of the current “aesthetic moment” in scholarly analysis of these books. Stulman then af¿rms the importance of analysis of ways in which biblical texts’ focalizing the gaze on loss can serve to create hope. Louis Stulman’s essay, “Art and Atrocity, and the Book of Jeremiah,” explores the rich variety of ways in which artistic responses to catastrophe can be salutary and catalytic. Painting, music, sculpture, dance, and writing all have proved to be powerful means of expressing fear and suffering but also, of course, provide tools for cultural critiques of violence. Underlining the responsibility of exegetes to be mindful of suffering not only in the ancient setting of Jeremiah but our own contemporary landscape, Stulman urges that our reading strategies take account of the poetics of Jeremiah, the Nachleben of the prophetic book, and the real pain and horror of the world in which we live. Jeremiah’s refractions of disaster, war, and displacement are relevant for all who must engage ambiguity, danger, and pain in their communities. Johanna Erzberger’s piece, “Prophetic Sign Acts as Performances,” draws evocative connections between the sign acts narrated in the book of Jeremiah and contemporary performance art. Proceeding with due caution regarding the risks of anachronism and over-reading, Erzberger builds a case for structural parallels between ancient and contemporary artistic performance as enabling productive interactions among artist, audience, and speci¿c public context. Sign acts and performance art make vivid the political disputes of a given cultural moment, provoking identi¿cation and/or resistance on the part of the audience. Erzberger then moves to consider the textualization of sign acts in the biblical prophetic corpus, noting among its effects the loss of immediacy of the dramatic performance.

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Finally, Else K. Holt’s essay, “Jeremiah the Lamenter: A Synoptic Reading,” explores the richly multivalent layers of meaning that may be produced through an exegetical “reading” of Rembrandt’s 1630 painting of Jeremiah lamenting the fall of Jerusalem. Analyzing the interplay of background and foreground in the painting and Rembrandt’s evocation of intertextual biblical references, Holt goes on to situate the work within political and ecclesial concerns of seventeenth-century Holland. She then frames a question regarding contemporary scholars’ postures toward the suffering depicted in the biblical text, as refracted through Rembrandt’s art. The interdisciplinary framework Holt has constructed allows the biblical text to pose with renewed dramatic force its theological questions about the pathos of the suffering prophet and the justice of God. Directions in Future Jeremiah scholarship These essays invite contemporary readers of Jeremiah to account for their interpretations of the prophet in culturally honest, methodologically sophisticated ways. Figurations of Jeremiah—expository or critical, artistic, homiletical, or other—are produced not only by the reader’s understanding of ancient historical contexts and semantic possibilities but also by overt or subterranean engagements of the reader’s own convictions, norms, perceptual limitations, and artistic sensibilities. What interpreters miss when they read may be as important as what they “¿nd.” The reader who is not interested in politics may overlook ways in which the Jeremiah traditions may be used to express or interrogate hegemonic ideologies. The reader who has never thought deeply about trauma may miss signi¿cant ways in which Jeremiah can serve as a catalyst for healing within communities that have been silenced. The reader who has little understanding of the power of metaphorization may fail to grasp subversive elements of the gendered imagery in Jeremiah’s poetry. The reader who insists on romanticizing the prophet may distort the complex contestations that fracture the social discourses of the book. For ¿nally, it is neither the ghost of the historical Jeremiah nor the ghosts of later Judean scribes but we ourselves who haunt the original setting(s) and the Nachleben of the Jeremiah traditions. Inventions of the prophet will inevitably mirror, directly or obliquely, the cultural concerns of readers’ own times and places. Realizing this, duly sobered by the risks and exhilarated by the possibilities, the critical interpreter of Jeremiah may dare strike out into some new territories not yet de¿nitively mapped. Here are four potential horizons toward which Jeremiah scholarship might fruitfully make its way. Other readers will doubtless glimpse other distant landscapes as well.

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1. Within trauma studies: interpreters might theorize more fully the effects of gender and imperial discourse taken together in readings of Jeremiah. In what ways does the text of Jeremiah (re)produce a wounded and disempowered Daughter Zion whose shaming did new harm in the centuries following the composition of Jeremiah and may continue to harm female, male, and genderqueer readers today? How have traumatized communities throughout history reached for or declined the gendering of political power in the book of Jeremiah? How may interpretations of Jeremiah serve as a resource for political resistance of gendered dynamics of abjection and oppression? 2. From a political point of view: how may post-colonial readings of a book which was shaped during and as an answer to imperial subjugation of a national and religious minority add to the dismantling of political self-vindication or defeatism? How can we perceive the persona of Jeremiah the prophet—as a national hero or a national traitor?—and how does our perception inÀuence our approach to today’s world and to the authority of the biblical writings? 3. At the intersection of biblical studies and ethics: interpreters might explore ways in which subjectivities are produced and may be deconstructed by means of characterizations of—and in—Jeremiah. What kinds of subject formation are constructed in the book of Jeremiah by means of the ¿guring of Jeremiah, Baruch, Nebuchadnezzar, Shaphanide leaders, and others? How are those subjectivities implicated in the privileging of certain ways of knowing God, knowing self and community, knowing Torah? In what ways are traditions from Jeremiah deployed for the formation of discerning or faithful subjects in rabbinic tradition, in the New Testament and patristic literature, and on into later historical periods and areas of reception? Much fruitful work might be done in what used to be called “Old Testament ethics,” as interpreters become more adept at considering the complex ways in which epistemologies, embodiment, power relations, and community formation are undertaken in the texts of Jeremiah and their reception. 4. Within literary analysis: interpreters might inquire into how latemodern and postmodern methods of interpreting text and culture can assist with theorizing the role of the Book of Consolation within the plot, poetics, and discursive strategies of the book of Jeremiah as a whole. Patently “foreign” in some respects and presumed late and redactional by many, yet considered by others to function structurally as the center of the book of Jeremiah, the oracles of (mostly) salvation in Jer 30–31 exert a unique pressure on the literary creation that is the book of Jeremiah, and their signi¿cance has not yet been fully appreciated by means of methodological investigations on this side of the postmodern turn.

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These and countless other inventions of Jeremiah the prophet await, for those intrepid enough to strike out in new methodological directions, newly aware of the weight of the gear and maps we already carry with us. The softly chiming bells in the distance may not be the bells of ancient Anathoth after all, but they beckon nonetheless.

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DUHM AND SKINNER’S INVENTION OF JEREMIAH Joe Henderson

It is an unwritten rule that Jeremiah commentaries must include three elements in their introductions: a history of composition, a biography of the prophet, and a reference to Bernhard Duhm (1847–1928). Duhm is rightly hailed as the pioneer of the compositional model that dominated the twentieth century, since his 1901 commentary is the ¿rst signi¿cant presentation of the idea that the authentic writing of Jeremiah should be limited to the poetry of the book.1 On this principle, Duhm divides the book into three main sources: Jeremiah’s authentic poetry, Baruch’s biographical narratives, and later prose additions. This three-part division (the basis of Mowinckel’s Types A, B, and C) continues to provide the starting point for compositional theories today. For Duhm, it provides the starting point for his primary project: recovering the biography of the historical prophet. On the ¿rst page of his commentary, he begins the work of dividing the book of Jeremiah into sources based on their historical value, or more precisely, their value as historical evidence of the life of Jeremiah. His aim is not merely to produce a disinterested account of how the book came to be; he intends to do away with the false picture of the prophet offered by the largest part of the book. In his view, the prophet portrayed by the editorial additions is the embodiment of an abstraction that the later Jews made themselves from the prophets in general…the personi¿ed vehicle of the divine messages; …an automaton that endlessly repeats the same shabby thoughts and phrases… He is, as far as something human remains, not primarily a prophet, but rather a Torah teacher, a scribe, like the redactors, who brings…no new revelation of God.2

1. Bernhard Duhm, Das Buch Jeremia (KHC 11; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1901). 2. Ibid., xviii.

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Duhm will destroy this prophet that the Jews created in their own image by exposing the inauthenticity of the material added by the small-minded redactors. In place of the false Jeremiah of the Jews, Duhm will recover the historical Jeremiah by relying only on Baruch’s biographical account and the authentic poetry as evidence. This evidence will reveal that the historical Jeremiah was a sensitive rural poet whose spiritual insight allowed him to break through to authentic personal religion. “If God had not selected [Jeremiah] for the of¿ce of a prophet,” Duhm writes, “he would have become the greatest lyric poet [Idyllendichter] of Israel.”3 Duhm gives the outlines of this life of Jeremiah in the introduction to his commentary, but his new vision is most fully realized in John Skinner’s 1924 Prophecy and Religion, a book-length biography of Jeremiah following Duhm’s methodological approach. Since both Duhm and Skinner accept the basic historicity of the biographical accounts, their primary contribution to Jeremiah’s biography is the reconstruction of the portion of the prophet’s ministry for which the book offers no datable accounts, the two decades between his call and his ¿rst dated sermon. Duhm and Skinner ¿ll this gap by piecing together a complex biographical scheme from isolated units of poetry in chs. 2–20—a remarkable feat since, unlike the prose, the poetry contains almost no explicit indications of its biographical setting. Duhm and Skinner assign each fragment of two or three verses of poetry to situations in Jeremiah’s life based on a combination of known dates, historical hypotheses (e.g., about the effects of a Scythian invasion mentioned in Herodotus), and the conjectured development of Jeremiah’s religious insight and poetic skill. Skinner’s contribution was a compelling narrative of how the prophet’s increasing disillusionment with all forms of external and national religion drove him to reach a level of individual and interior religion unparalleled before Christ.4 Duhm’s and Skinner’s Gra¿an Project The signi¿cance of Duhm’s and Skinner’s biography of Jeremiah can be better grasped by setting it in the context of their larger project: to bring the study of prophetic literature in line with the hypothesis of Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–1869). Duhm, like others in his time, used the term

3. Ibid., xi. 4. John Skinner, Prophecy and Religion: Studies in the Life of Jeremiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 201–3.

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“Gra¿an” to refer to the approach to Israel’s scripture and religious history best known today through Wellhausen’s “documentary hypothesis” explaining the composition of the Pentateuch. Duhm was an early convert to the Gra¿an position, and the publication of his ¿rst major work, Die Theologie der Propheten,5 in 1875, not only gives him the distinction of being “the ¿rst German apologist for Gra¿anism,”6 but more importantly, the ¿rst scholar to offer a comprehensive re-evaluation of the prophets from the Gra¿an position. Skinner was one of the early advocates of the Gra¿an hypothesis in the United Kingdom. He studied at Edinburgh under A. B. Davidson, whose students, including Robertson Smith, were in the vanguard of scholars who brought the revolution in Old Testament studies from Germany to England.7 Duhm and Skinner bring the interpretation of Jeremiah into conformity with the Gra¿an position by drawing a strong distinction between Jeremiah’s prophetic religion and the legalistic Judaism ascribed to editors responsible for the prose additions. This distinction is an instance of the Gra¿an division of Israel’s religious history into two sharply distinguished periods: the pre-exilic Hebrew religion (characterized by freedom and universalism), which culminated in the literature of the classical prophets; and the post-exilic period of Judaism (characterized by ritualism, particularism, and slavery to the letter of the law), which brought about the decline of prophecy. Wellhausen’s dictum, “The prophets precede law,” neatly summarizes the account of Israel’s literary history that corresponds to his account of its religious history: the decline of the living religion of Israel into the “dead wood” of Judaism.8 Determining whether passages have the characteristics of prophetic religion or legalistic Judaism allows Duhm and Skinner to judge not only their theological worth but also their authenticity. This use of theological

5. Bernhard Duhm, Die Theologie der Propheten als Grundlage für die innere Entwicklungsgeschichte der israelitischen Religion (Bonn: Marcus, 1875). 6. R. J. Thompson, Moses and the Law in a Century of Criticism since Graf (VTSup 19; Leiden: Brill, 1970), 56. Wellhausen’s arguments for the Gra¿an position ¿rst appeared in his articles on the composition of the Hexateuch published in 1876–77. 7. George Adam Smith, “The Late Professor A. B. Davidson, DD. LL.D.,” The Biblical World 20 (1902): 167–77 (167). Skinner’s 1910 Genesis commentary was the standard critical commentary for decades and introduced a generation to the documentary hypothesis. 8. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel: With a Reprint of the Article “Israel” from the Encyclopedia Britannica (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 313.

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criteria to determine authenticity appears in Skinner’s attempt to discern whether the New Covenant passage in Jer 31:31–34 is authentic. He writes, “We may read into the words a view of religion so profoundly spiritual and personal that it is hardly conceivable that anyone else than Jeremiah could have written them. On the other hand they may be interpreted in a trivial and formal sense which would stamp them unmistakably as the composition of a late Jewish legalist.”9 Thus, even though the passage is not in poetic form, it must be judged authentic if it has a profound grasp of internal, individualistic religion. Conversely, if it is concerned with trivial and formal religion (i.e. obedience to a written law or reliance on a national covenant), it is Jewish and thus must be inauthentic. Determining whether the passage is the authentic work of an inspired prophet or the inauthentic work of a legalistic Jew depends not so much on discerning whether its literary form is poetry or prose but on discerning whether its religious view is profound or merely trivial. The sharp contrast between true religion and Judaism that characterizes Duhm’s and Skinner’s Gra¿an perspective is an instance of the general view of history and religion espoused by the liberal Protestant theology that rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. Theologians like Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack taught that throughout Israel’s history, a handful of enlightened individuals had understood the perfect religion best known from the teaching of Jesus. The religious achievements of these lonely pre-Christian geniuses were incomprehensible to their Hebrew contemporaries and lay buried under Jewish tradition until they could be recovered by nineteenth-century German scholarship. According to Harnack’s account of ancient Israel, “The spring of holiness had long been opened; but it was choked with sand and dirt…the rubbish which priests and theologians had heaped up so as to smother the true element of religion.”10 The rubbish was the religious nationalism, crude supernaturalism, dead legalism, and super¿cial ritualism that led to Judaism and later on, to Catholicism. This conception of the Hebrew Scriptures as treasure buried in a trash heap provides the primary rationale for the scholarship of Duhm and Skinner, who saw their work as clearing away the detritus of tradition from the literary remains of the inspired prophet.

9. Skinner, Prophecy and Religion, 320. 10. Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? (trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 52.

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Jeremiah as the Biography of a Liberal Theologian The shaping inÀuence of Protestant liberalism and other contemporary streams of thought is apparent not only in Duhm’s and Skinner’s theory of the compositional history of the book but also in the resulting biography of the prophet. The biography of Jeremiah produced by Duhm and Skinner bears a remarkable likeness to the accounts of crises of faith that were a widespread phenomenon of the nineteenth century in novels and biographies. The nineteenth century brought strong challenges to traditional Christian belief from biblical criticism and natural sciences and provided religious alternatives, drawn from “higher” sources such as philosophical idealism and Romanticism. The crises of faith these challenges brought about in pious young intellectuals are recorded in thousands of novels, biographies, and autobiographies.11 The accounts have many standard elements: pious youth in the shelter of traditional faith; early religious enthusiasm (often evangelical or Tractarian); disillusionment; erosion of traditional beliefs through exposure to modern scienti¿c, historical, and critical studies; painful break from family and church; discovery of deeper personal and moral religion; and steadfast endurance of opposition from church and traditional institutions. In many of these accounts, the crisis of faith comes when the individual becomes acquainted with the works of liberal theology or biblical criticism. In fact, the biographical pattern often appears in the lives of the theologians and historical critics themselves. Protestant theologians whose lives ¿t the basic pattern include Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher.12 The pattern also 11. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth writes, “Beyond the canonical writers of the period [1840–1895], there are hundreds of writers publishing thousands of novels about the crisis of faith” (The English Novel in History: 1840–1895 [The Novel in History; New York: Routledge, 1997], 41). Prime examples of the novel of crisis of faith or the novel of doubt are: The Nemesis of Faith by A. J. Froude (London: John Chapman, 1849); The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford by William Hale White (London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1881); Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry (Mary Augusta) Ward (London and New York: Macmillan, 1888); and The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler (London: Grant Richards, 1903). 12. Wilhelm Dilthey’s monumental biography of Schleiermacher (Leben Schleiermachers [Berlin: G. Reimer, 1870]) is signi¿cant not only for the pattern of life it presents but also for making biography central to appreciating the contribution of the theologian. He argued that Schleiermacher’s signi¿cance could not be understood without reference to his life. See Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21.

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occurs in the lives of prominent biblical scholars, whose embrace of the ¿ndings of historical criticism leads to crises in their personal faith, alienation from family and church, and opposition from the academic and ecclesiastical authorities. For the story of how biblical scholarship led to a personal crisis of faith, de Wette’s life is probably the best known example.13 For the story of rejection and alienation, one thinks the life of Bishop Colenso of South Africa.14 For the story of ¿delity to one’s personal scholarly vision against all opposition, the lives of Heinrich Ewald and Robertson Smith readily come to mind.15 The biography of Jeremiah that resulted from the historical-critical method has a strong resemblance to the lives of the nineteenth-century theologians and biblical scholars who broke with traditional Christianity. Skinner’s Jeremiah is an individual, who in light of the crisis of his age, sought “a deeper foundation of his prophetic relationship with God than the things that were shaken and ready to pass away.”16 This came through a personal crisis of faith that offered Jeremiah the choice either to “despair of religion” or to “¿nd in himself…the germ and pledge of a new religious relationship.”17 What makes Skinner’s story of Jeremiah’s triumph over his crisis of faith strikingly similar to the stories of nineteenth-century liberal theologians and biblical critics is that the parts of Israel’s religion which Jeremiah comes to realize are “shaken and ready to pass away” are practically identical to the parts of orthodox Christianity that liberal theologians and biblical critics came to doubt. The two central crises of faith in Skinner’s biography are Jeremiah’s loss of faith in the Deuteronomic reform and his loss of faith in the sacri¿cial system. In regard to the Deuteronomic reform, Jeremiah does not merely come to see that super¿cial conformity to God’s commands is insuf¿cient. He realizes that the underlying problem is trust in a written word of God; he comes to take his stand against “the illusion of infallibility and ¿nality attaching 13. See John W. Rogerson’s biography, W. M. L. de Wette: Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism (Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1992), particularly his account of de Wette’s semi-autobiographical novel, Theodor oder des ZweiÀers Weihe: Bildungsgeschichte eines evangelischen Geistlichen (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1822). 14. See T. K. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism: Biographical, Descriptive, and Critical Studies (London: Methuen, 1893), 196–204. 15. See, for example, James Bryce’s biography of Robertson Smith, which recounts his “courage…in confronting his antagonists in the ecclesiastical court,” and his triumph over “the party of repression” (“Robertson Smith,” in Studies in Contemporary Biography [New York: Macmillan, 1903], 311–26 [316, 325]). 16. Skinner, Prophecy & Religion, 218. 17. Ibid., 219.

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to the written word, as if it were superior to the living voice of prophecy or the dictates of the religious sense.”18 In regard to Israel’s sacri¿cial system, Jeremiah does not merely come to see that sacri¿ce cannot substitute for true devotion and moral reform. He realizes that sacri¿ce is “non-essential” for fellowship with God, and further, that it could never have been commanded by God in the ¿rst place:19 “The whole system, and all laws prescribing or regulating it…lie outside the revelation on which the national religion of Israel was based.”20 Since Deuteronomy contains laws regulating sacri¿ce, Skinner concludes that Jeremiah must have come to reject the book’s claim “to be a divine law imposed on Israel” and tradition’s ascription of “the origins of the most ancient ritual codes to the authority of Moses”; he must have come to believe instead that “such laws…were unauthorized additions to the covenant made with the fathers.”21 In short, the great crisis of Jeremiah’s life is his conversion to the Gra¿an view of the Mosaic Law and Protestant liberalism’s view of salvation, its characteristic rejection of sacri¿cial, or substitutionary, atonement. Building on his doubt that there could be an infallible written word of God, Jeremiah is able to satisfy “the dictates of the religious sense” when he is able to see through the popular illusion that God had ever given Israel any laws concerning priests, sacri¿ces, or a temple. He realizes that the priestly legal materials were not part of the original revelation but were added by later editors and constituted “a perversion of the historic religion of Israel from its native ethical genius.”22 He thus uncovers not only the truth about the compositional history of the laws falsely attributed to Moses, but also the true history of Israel’s religion. (Here, according to Skinner, Jeremiah built on the work of earlier historical critics: Amos, who discovered that “sacri¿ce was unknown” in the wilderness, and Hosea, who held the view that “the desert sojourn was the ideal period in Israel’s history.”23) These historical-critical insights allowed Jeremiah to come close to the pure ethical religion of Ritschl and Harnack, built on his recognition that “a perfect religious relationship is possible without sacri¿ce at all.”24 18. Ibid., 121. 19. The error Jeremiah rebuked was “the notion that Yahwe had ever instituted sacri¿ce at all” (Skinner, Prophecy and Religion, 182–83). 20. Ibid., 182–83. 21. Ibid., 183. 22. Ibid., 184. 23. Ibid., 181. 24. Ibid.

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These observations about the biography of Jeremiah, which result from Duhm’s historical-critical approach to the book, explain Leo Perdue’s characterization of Skinner’s Jeremiah as “something of an Adolf von Harnack.”25 This characterization applies not only to Skinner’s Jeremiah but also to the Jeremiah of Duhm and others who follow his method. The anachronistic nature of their results raises questions about the objectivity of their initial assumptions. One would have good reason to be suspicious of a scholar who pretended not to know how his study of Jeremiah produced the image of a nineteenth-century liberal theologian. It is as if he said: “I took whatsoever gold was found in Jeremiah, then I cast it into the ¿re, and this liberal theologian came out.” A more truthful account would admit that the result was in some measure due to the scholar’s original perception of the prophet. The nature of such an account is suggested by the apocryphal story of how Michelangelo came to carve an angel out of the marble from Carrara. The Skinnerian biographer could say: “In the massive stone of the book of Jeremiah, I saw the ¿gure of a liberal theologian waiting to be freed. Then my task was easy; I simply chipped away whatever didn’t look like Harnack.” Roots in the Romanticism of Lowth and Herder At this point one might reasonably object in Duhm’s defense that this is an unfair characterization of his method since his primary criterion for distinguishing authentic material, metrical analysis, is hardly subjective. It could be answered that Duhm relied heavily on textual emendation to achieve metrical regularity in passages he considered authentic and that those who followed him, such as Skinner and Mowinckel, worked with much looser de¿nitions of poetry. However, there is an even more important consideration that helps to explain why Duhm’s use of poetic form as the criterion of authenticity was so conducive to his theological and historical predispositions. The presumption that poetry is an indicator of authentic prophecy shares a common source with liberal theology’s conception of true religion, historical criticism’s reconstruction of Israel’s history, and the nineteenth-century understanding of prophets as misunderstood geniuses.

25. Leo G. Perdue, “The Book of Jeremiah in Old Testament Theology,” in Troubling Jeremiah (ed. A. R. Pete Diamond, Kathleen M. O’Connor, and Louis Stulman; JSOTSup 260; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999), 320–38 (321).

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9

The seeds of each of these ideas can be found in the Oxford lectures of Robert Lowth published in 1753 as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews.26 Lowth’s lectures are celebrated in the ¿eld of biblical studies for his theory that “parallelism of members” is the de¿ning characteristic of Hebrew poetry. However, it should be noted that Lowth’s relatively brief discussion of poetic parallelism is part of a lecture that aims “to demonstrate that the compositions of the prophets are truly poetical.”27 This demonstration that the prophets wrote in poetry is, as James Kugel rightly observes, “the single, overriding theme to [Lowth’s] book.”28 Lowth’s crowning achievement was his 1778 translation of the book of Isaiah, in which, for the ¿rst time ever, poetry was distinguished by printing parallel lines on separate lines of text.29 In 1784, Benjamin Blayney built on Lowth’s work with a new translation of Jeremiah in which the poetry and prose are clearly distinguished for the ¿rst time.30 Without Lowth’s “discovery” of poetry in the prophetic books, Duhm’s approach would hardly have been possible. Lowth’s demonstration that there is poetry in the prophetic books involved a transformation of contemporary understandings of both poetry and prophecy in ways that laid the groundwork for Romanticism, theological liberalism, and historical criticism. In order to win a hearing for prophetic literature as poetry, Lowth had to overthrow the neoclassical idea that poetry was the product of literary craftsmanship that brought language into conformity with classical models of harmony and decorum. In its place, Lowth propounded the view that poetry sprang from intense experience of an exalted mind. Lowth taught that true 26. The lectures were originally titled, De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones. They were translated into English by George Gregory in 1787, the year of Lowth’s death. See Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (trans. G. Gregory; Boston: Joseph T. Buckingham, 1815): this edition includes the annotations of Johann David Michaelis, who brought out volumes in Germany in 1758 and 1761. 27. Lowth, Poetry of the Hebrews, 252. 28. James Kugel, Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 22. 29. Robert Lowth, Isaiah: A New Translation with a Preliminary Dissertation and Notes, Critical, Philological and Explanatory (2 vols.; London: J. Dodsley, T. Cadell, 1778). 30. In Blayney’s translation, Jeremiah is comprised of about half poetry and half prose, and the division roughly corresponds to the divisions found in modern translations (though with somewhat less poetry). See Benjamin Blayney, Jeremiah and Lamentations: A New Translation with Notes Critical, Philological, and Explanatory (2d ed.; Edinburgh: Oliphant & Balfour, 1810).

10

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poetry was the result of inspiration: “To give force and energy to the devout affections,” he wrote, “was the sublime employment of the sacred Muse.”31 The inspiration of the poetry could be judged by the force, energy, or sublimity of the poet’s experience. Sublimity, a term that Lowth helped popularize, he de¿ned as “that force of composition… which strikes and overpowers the mind [and] excites the passions.”32 Lowth’s new conception of poetry provided a basis for the Romantic revolution in poetic theory, the revolution exempli¿ed by Wordsworth’s description of poetry as “the spontaneous overÀow of powerful emotions.”33 In his attempt to fuse the concepts of prophetic inspiration and poetic inspiration, Lowth rede¿ned not only the nature of poetry but also the nature of prophecy. He grounded his new portrait of the prophets in examples of ecstatic or musical prophecy in the historical books: Saul who “prophesied” when he met with the companies of prophets playing their instruments, the Levitical singers who “prophesied” on their instruments, and Elisha who would not begin prophesying until a minstrel played on a harp.34 “From all these testimonies,” Lowth concluded, “it is suf¿ciently evident, that the prophetic of¿ce had a most strict connection with the poetic art. They had one common name, one common origin, one common author, the Holy Spirit.”35 With this argument, Lowth opened up the path to the evolutionary model of the history of prophecy, which Skinner presents as the “historical view of religion,” a view which, he says, “has had no more brilliant exponent than Duhm.”36 At the same time, by closing the gap between poetic and prophetic inspiration, Lowth made possible a new understanding of revelation as the sublime insights of religious geniuses, a model with great appeal in the following century when increasing skepticism toward older supernatural understandings of revelation left would-be believers looking for alternatives.37

31. Lowth, Isaiah, 253. 32. Lowth, Poetry of the Hebrews, 189. 33. From the 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. See William Wordsworth, The Major Works, including The Prelude (Oxford World’s Classics; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 598. 34. 1 Sam 10:5–10; 19:20–24; 2 Chr 25:1–3; 2 Kgs 3:15. Lowth, Poetry of the Hebrews, 245–48. 35. Lowth, Poetry of the Hebrews, 248. 36. Ibid., 331. 37. On this, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).

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By recasting the biblical prophets as ecstatic poets, Lowth made the lives of the biblical prophets available as models for Romantic poets. In Lowth’s lifetime, poets such as William Blake, Christopher Smart, and William Cowper took up the mantle of the prophet-poet.38 The lives and poetry of these poets in turn provided models for the Romantic poets and “men of genius” in the ninetieth century. The Romantic conception of poetry as the inspired effusions of a prophetic genius meant that the poet’s personality and experiences became central to appreciating the poetry. This explains the proliferation of lives of the poets (or artists, Künstlerromane) and poetic autobiographies during the Romantic period. The best known autobiographical poem of this era, Wordsworth’s Prelude, is subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind. Skinner’s biography of Jeremiah offers a strikingly similar “Growth of a Prophet/Poet’s Mind.” Parallels are easily drawn between central aspects in Skinner’s life of Jeremiah and events in Wordsworth’s autobiography: his idyllic childhood in the Lake District (“the wild and desolate scenery” of Anathoth), his disappointment with the divinity students at Cambridge (prophets and priests), his shock on encountering the immorality of London (Jerusalem), his initial enthusiasm and later disillusionment with the French revolution (the reform of Josiah), and his exultation in the power of his imagination to create a better world (prophecies of restoration). These stories of the growth of the Romantic poetic-prophet are obviously closely akin to the biographies of biblical scholars and theologians related above. In all of them, the great soul of the protagonist breaks through to the higher and personal vision through disappointment with society and disillusionment with the outward forms of religion. The relationship between Duhm’s and Skinner’s biographical reconstruction and their source-critical method can now be clari¿ed. It is no mystery how their method of treating the poetic passages alone as authentic historical evidence produced a “historical” Jeremiah that looked so much like a nineteenth-century liberal theologian or Romantic poet. Their criterion for authenticity was not simply whether a passage was written in poetic form, but whether it displays the literary quality worthy of a Romantic poet. Thus, for example, Skinner judges that the poetry of the book of Lamentations cannot have been written by Jeremiah because the “poetic genius” of its writer is “inferior,” and the poet “adopts the arti¿cial form of the acrostic.”39 On the other hand, 38. Murray Roston shows how Lowth’s recovery of biblical prophecy as poetry was an important inÀuence for each of these three poets. See Murray Roston, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965) on Blake (165), Cowper (104), and Smart (148). 39. Skinner, Prophecy and Religion, 279.

12

Jeremiah Invented

he judges that four passages from Jer 31 whose authenticity has been debated (31:2–6, 15, 16, 18–20, 21, 22) cannot be denied to Jeremiah because of their unsurpassed “originality of conception, vividness of imagination, and depth of feeling.”40 The words that Skinner uses here to describe the excellence of Jeremiah’s poetry could stand as a summary of what Romantic critics valued in poetry.41 The characteristics of Romantic poetry can also be seen in Duhm’s description of the authentic poetry of Jeremiah: The simple form corresponds to the poetical diction, which is never arti¿cial, forced, nor even impassioned, but always natural, appropriate to the thought, popular in the best sense of the word; but for that very reason, it touches, moves, and often shakes us, and in its richness of ¿tting and original images, it betrays the born poet.42

It is no wonder that Duhm’s isolation of what he considered authentic poetry gave him the raw material to construct the biography of Jeremiah, the Romantic poet. The Romantic conception of poetry also lies at the root of the Gra¿an model of Israel’s history, which informed Duhm’s compositional history of Jeremiah. A key ¿gure in this development is Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who was central both to the Sturm und Drang movement (a precursor of German Romanticism) and to German biblical criticism (especially through his close association with Eichhorn).43 Herder’s work, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782), explicitly draws on and develops the work of Lowth.44 Herder turns Lowth’s intuition that poetry 40. Ibid., 302. 41. Duhm distinguishes between the authentic literary works (Dichtungen) of Jeremiah the inspired lyric poet and the inauthentic work of the Torah teachers and scribes, who can only repeat the same “shabby [ärmlichen] thoughts and phrases” again and again because they possess no original inspiration. See Duhm, Das Buch Jeremia, xi. 42. Ibid., xii–xiii: “Der einfachen Form entspricht die poetische Diktion, die niemals künstlich, geziert, nicht einmal pathetisch, sondern immer natürlich, dem Gedanken angemessen, im besten Sinne volkstümlich ist, aber eben darum uns ergreift, rührt, oft erschüttert und in ihrem Reichtum an treffenden und originellen Bildern den geborenen Dichter verrät.” 43. Eichhorn’s awareness of his debt to his friend Herder (whom he met in 1780) is remarked by Cheyne, who writes, “Eichhorn is never weary of confessing that he lives upon Herder’s ideas” (Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 16–17). 44. Originally published as Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1825). Knowing that his readers would be reminded of Lowth’s work, Herder felt compelled to add an introductory overview of his work to demonstrate that what he had to offer was “neither a translation nor an imitation of…the beautiful and

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is an original creation of an ancient Oriental nation into a historical scheme in which the youthful age of poetry is followed by an age of prose, an age in which the original life-giving spirit of poetry and prophecy dries up and its achievements harden into institutions and written codes.45 Herder’s scheme ¿rst appears in systematic form in the work of his pupil W. M. L. de Wette (1780–1849),46 who divides Israel’s religious history into two sharply distinguished periods: the pre-exilic period of Hebrew religion and the post-exilic period of Judaism.47 It is de Wette’s model that provides the basic scheme of the Gra¿an reconstruction of Israel’s history and literature and Duhm’s reconstruction of the book of Jeremiah and life of the prophet. A second element of the Gra¿an hypothesis rooted in the Romantic view of poetry and prophecy is the use of prophetic literature as authentic historical evidence. Lowth and Herder’s conception of the prophetic literature as the product of spontaneous effusions of great men at important junctures in Israel’s history made it valuable as historical evidence of Israel’s religion at the time each prophet spoke.48 Herder’s admirer, justly celebrated work of Bp. Lowth” (Johann Gottfried von Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry [trans. James Marsh; 2 vols.; Burlington: Edward Smith, 1833], 1:51). 45. Herder describes the “ages of man” in a passage that begins with the transition from childhood into youth: “This is the poetic age. When the youth becomes a man, he ceases altogether to be a poet. Political organization makes inevitable the formulation of abstract concepts, and as a result, the age of prose is born” (quoted in Eugene E. Reed, “Herder, Primitivism and the Age of Poetry,” MLR 60 [1965]: 553– 67 [555]). 46. De Wette was Herder’s pupil in the Weimar Gymnasium and sat under his preaching. See Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 468. 47. The Old Testament section of de Wette’s Biblische Dogmatik is titled “Religion des Alten Testaments oder Hebraismus und Judenthum.” De Wette describes the two periods in this way: “Whereas Hebrew religion (Hebraismus) was a matter of life and inspiration, Judaism (Judenthum) is a matter of concept and literalism.” See Wilhelm Martin Lebrecht de Wette, Biblische Dogmatik: Alten and neuen Testaments: oder kritische Darstellung der Religionslehre des Hebraismus, des Judenthums und Urchristenthums (3d ed.; Berlin: G. Reimer, 1831), 114. 48. William Irwin writes, “Vatke’s outstanding contribution to Pentateuchal criticism was his demonstration that the prophets are a primary, and major, source of evidence for religious conditions and practices against which to test the antiquity of the priestly legal system. And when we see that this is precisely the core of Wellhausen’s argument in the Prolegomena, it becomes apparent what it was that he had learned ‘most and best’ [from Vatke].” William A. Irwin, “The Signi¿cance of Julius Wellhausen,” JBR 12 (1944): 160–73 (165).

14

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Wilhelm Vatke (1806–77), pioneered the method of reconstructing Israel’s religious development by using the “prophetic” evidence to evaluate the historical accuracy of the historical narratives and determine the date of the legal material. In this way, the poetic “authenticity” of prophetic writings established by Lowth and Herder is employed by Vatke and other historical critics as a guarantee of the historical authenticity of the prophetic writings. In broad strokes, the Gra¿an hypothesis can be understood as the use of Vatke’s historical method in support of de Wette’s historical scheme. In other words, it is the use of a historical method based on Lowth’s Romantic conception of prophecy as authentic poetry to support a historical scheme based on Herder’s Romantic scheme of the decline of literature from poetry into prose. This is the combination Wellhausen employs when he uses the authentic historical evidence of prophetic poetry to establish a historical framework by which he shows the late development of the legal material in the Pentateuch. It is also the combination Duhm employs when he uses the assumed authenticity of the poetry in Jeremiah as a standard to measure the historical reliability of the prose passages in the book. However, Duhm’s assumption that Jeremiah’s authentic work must be limited to what he deems to be inspired poetry cannot provide independent validation of his historical and biographical reconstructions since his assumption is derived from the same source (Lowth’s proto-Romantic poetic theory) and has the same aim: to recast revelation/prophecy as the inspired religious insights of an exalted poet/genius and isolate it from the uninspired writings of Jews. Conclusion Duhm’s and Skinner’s re-creation of the life of Jeremiah in the guise of a Romantic poet or liberal theologian has not held up well in the twentieth century.49 An important marker of its waning inÀuence was the sustained attack on the “Skinnerian” approach in Robert Carroll’s 1981 book, 49. It is interesting to note that in the past few decades, scholars who still maintain Duhm’s goal of reconstructing the biography of the historical prophet for the most part set themselves in opposition to Duhm’s dismissal of the prose speeches as historical evidence. The result is that their historical Jeremiahs bear a closer resemblance than Duhm’s to the prophet portrayed by the book. The classic example is the work of William Holladay (Jeremiah: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah [2 vols., Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986, 1989]). A more recent example is Mark Leuchter, Josiah’s Reform and Jeremiah’s Scroll: Historical Calamity and Prophetic Response (HBM 6; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2006).

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From Chaos to Covenant.50 Although the Skinnerian biographical reconstruction has increasingly been left behind, the source-critical theory that facilitated it—Duhm’s assumption that poetic form is an indicator of authenticity—has proven harder to give up. It continues to provide the foundation for the dominant compositional model, which takes for granted that the poetry of Jeremiah must be prior to the Deuteronomistic prose. Those who build their work on this model have not heeded Carroll’s warning that the assumed authenticity of the poetry is a “dogma [that] cannot be established by argument, [but] can only be believed.”51 In a recent work, James Kugel provides a brief overview of Jeremiah scholarship in modern biblical criticism. After noting how Duhm’s inÀuential commentary relies on Herder’s Romantic theory that poetry comes from a younger age than prose, he comments, “These generalizations seem somewhat silly today.”52 He goes on to observe that it is hard to believe that Jeremiah was incapable of writing in the “looser, semi-poetic style of much of the prose” or that later interpolators were unable to compose poetry. “Surprisingly,” he writes, “[Duhm’s] analysis is espoused by many scholarly treatments today.”53 Over one hundred years after Duhm’s commentary, a century of waning support for his biography of the prophet, it is certainly surprising that Jeremiah scholarship continues to build on the foundational assumption of Duhm’s biographical invention.54

50. Robert P. Carroll, From Chaos to Covenant: Prophecy in the Book of Jeremiah (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 7. 51. Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 47. 52. James Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), 577. 53. Ibid., 577. 54. In the preface to a 2004 collection of essays on Jeremiah, Walter Brueggemann writes as part of a summary of most pressing scholarly issues: “The distinction between poetry and prose is an important one, and the linkage between them is more or less unsettled. It does seem apparent at the present time that the prose material with a Deuteronomic accent is a powerful shaping force for the ¿nal form of the text” (“Preface,” in Reading the Book of Jeremiah: A Search for Coherence [ed. Martin Kessler; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2004], ix–x [ix]). Brueggemann’s assessment shows how, with the shift of emphasis to the ¿nal form, Jeremiah scholarship has moved beyond Duhm’s low estimate of the value of the prose but still retains his assumption that it is a late (inauthentic) addition to the poetry.

SEDUCED BY METHOD: HISTORY AND JEREMIAH 20 Mary Chilton Callaway

Jeremiah 20 has enticed readers for centuries. The prophet’s graphic language and harsh accusations have prompted a variety of methodological and theological reactions, ranging from outright condemnation to high admiration. If assumptions determine the direction of a reading, perhaps the present moment in biblical studies can offer a way of breaking out of the somewhat predictable correspondence between method and outcome. This study explores some ways in which the intersection of competing assumptions of historical-critical and postmodern interpretive practices can enrich a reading of Jer 20. The ¿rst section sketches contributions of classic historical-critical scholarship on this text, the legacy that endures, and the presuppositions about history that undergird them. The second section offers an alternative, postmodern reading of Jer 20. The third section explores the competing ideas of history at the intersection of historical-critical and postmodern readings as a fruitful space for reading Jer 20. This is not a call for the overthrow of the old gods, or for rejection of the new ones. Rather, it is an invitation to a more intimate conversation, as biblical scholars at our desks. Sometimes the large-scale methodological crisis in the ¿eld is lived out in a small-scale struggle that happens one day when we are preparing to teach a text that we know inside out, but realize that we no longer believe our own lecture. The Received Tradition of Historical-Critical Exegesis In his 1987 study of the confessions, Pete Diamond frames the question as “the proper interpretive context within which the confessions could be assessed.”1 In a historical-critical exegesis such a context might be the confessions as a unit, the immediate literary context of each confession, a biography of the prophet, or even psalms of lament; each of these would 1. A. R. Diamond, The Confessions of Jeremiah in Context: Scenes of a Prophetic Drama (JSOTSup 45; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1987), 15.

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of course produce a different reading of the same poem. If we expand the meaning of interpretive context to include reception history, Diamond’s model serves well for our task of exploring the assumptions behind different approaches to Jer 20. The developments in historical-critical work on this fraught text, and the postmodern move away from this work, can fruitfully be understood as a story of shifting interpretive contexts. It is helpful to clarify the context against which early historical-critical scholarship was reacting. Traditional Jewish and Christian exegesis from the third century C.E. through the Middle Ages explicitly distinguished a literal (“plain”) sense from three theological meanings. A text could have three or four meanings simultaneously. The ¿rst would be a moral teaching (tropological) directed at the lives of the faithful. Next would be an allegorical interpretation, which for Christians would typically show how Old Testament events and characters pre¿gured the Gospel. Finally, for those advanced in the faith, there might be a mystical (anagogical) sense.2 In medieval Judaism the Kabbalah often found this mystical sense in biblical texts.3 Two brief examples will demonstrate how ancient exegetes sometimes playfully understood the intersection of history and theology. In the third century, Origen understood the troubling words of Jer 20:7 in the service of his own theory of reading Scripture. He describes the narrative context of Jer 20:7 as the prophet’s horri¿ed recognition that the kingdoms and nations against which YHWH had appointed him (Jer 1:10) included Judah. God’s deception was a necessary part of the divine pedagogy that prepared the prophet for his dif¿cult task. For Origen, this deception is also characteristic of “divine deception” in Scripture, which sometimes says one thing but means another. The literal meaning may not be true; only when interpreted allegorically is the divine truth apparent. Jeremiah’s harsh words become for Origen an occasion for teaching about the complicated nature of Scripture, and a warning against reading too literally.4 2. For the four-fold sense of Scripture, see Stephan Ch. Kessler, “Gregory the Great: A Figure of Tradition and Transition in Church Exegesis,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (Until 1300), Part 2: The Middle Ages (ed. Magne Sæbø; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 135–47. For a useful introduction to rabbinic exegesis, see, in the same volume, Stephen Gar¿nkel, “Clearing Peshat and Derash,” 129–34. 3. Moshe Idel, “Concepts of Scripture in Jewish Mysticism,” in Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction (ed. Benjamin D. Sommer; New York: New York University Press, 2012), 157–78. 4. On Origen, see M. F. Wiles’ still useful essay, “Origen as Biblical Scholar,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome

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In early Jewish tradition, Jer 20:7 is also used to address dif¿cult religious questions. Pesikta Rabbati is a collection of homilies originally given in Palestinian synagogues for holy days and special Sabbaths, and written down possibly in the eighth century.5 A homily for the Sabbath leading up to the 9th of Ab, the fast day remembering the destruction of the Temple, offers a midrash on Jer 20:7. The story describes YHWH’s plan to lure Jeremiah outside the city walls on the pretext of buying his uncle’s land in Anatoth. This subterfuge is essential to the divine plan, because while the holy prophet remained in the city, his presence protected it from the assaults of Nebuchadnezzar’s army. So loyal is Jeremiah to his people that YHWH has to resort to deception to get him out. When Jeremiah sees the smoke of the burning city rising in the distance, he cries out, “You have deceived me!” For Jews who had witnessed destruction in their own communities, Jer 20:7 poignantly evokes haunting questions even as it af¿rms the power of the holy man. Even God had to use deception to outwit Jeremiah’s loyalty to his people! For both Origen and the author of Pesikta Rabbati, the plain sense is an indispensable beginning, but the important truths of Scripture are found in other readings. In opposition to traditional exegesis, the approaches that began in the sixteenth century and Àowered in the nineteenth privileged the “plain sense.” In the early nineteenth century, scholars of Jeremiah aimed to write a historically accurate biography of the prophet in accordance with the canons of academic history. History for early historical-critical exegetes meant events and realia that existed outside the text, independent of its judgments. A biography of the prophet would therefore provide a reliable historical framework in which to understand the prophetic oracles and private prayers. Consequently, one of the primary tasks of early historical-critical exegetes was to identify authentic words of the prophet and to relate them to events in the prophet’s life. In 1840 Heinrich Ewald appears to be one of the ¿rst to isolate ¿ve poems in which Jeremiah speaks in the ¿rst person to vent his emotions about his lack of success as a prophet, and to treat them as a group. Ewald does not (ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 454–89. See also Joseph Trigg, “Divine Deception and the Truthfulness of Scripture,” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy (ed. Charles Kannengiesser and William L. Petersen; Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity; South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 147–64. 5. The standard English translation, with helpful introduction, is still William G. Braude, ed., Pesikta Rabbati: Homiletical Discourses for Festal Days and Special Sabbaths (2 vols.; Yale Judaica Series; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

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give the poems a formal designation, but describes them as “outpourings of his heart” (Herzensergießungen). His interpretation for the most part retained the deep ambivalence bordering on condemnation that had characterized Christian exegesis since the third century C.E. Ewald disapproves of Jeremiah’s complaints, but reassures the reader that in such a holy man they are excusable: And if he, a prophet with a soft and sensitive heart and a blameless disposition, who opposed his people only temporarily and out of love and virtuous concern, was swallowed up for a moment into angry and bitter rebellion about being so completely misunderstood and relentlessly persecuted, who would not ¿nd this pardonable? And if he now and then could not withhold a curse of impious force against his murderous enemies, and if, after all that he had experienced, he allowed, in his writing at least, such candid outpourings of his heart (11:18–12:3 15:10f. 15– 21 17:9–18 18:18–23 20:7–18), who would not ¿nd this pardonable?6

In 1840, and in Ewald’s second edition of 1868, Jeremiah’s harsh words were a sign of failure; pardonable and understandable, but nonetheless regrettable for a man of God. For Ewald, the problem was not simply irreverent speech, but allowing his emotions to intrude on the work of prophecy. Jeremiah was the evening star of the dying days of prophecy, at the boundary between Israel’s “pure” prophecy and a late, deteriorated imitation. The injection of what Ewald called personal, subjective elements signaled the degrading of the high water mark of Israelite prophecy in the eighth and seventh centuries. For Ewald, the prophet’s reÀection on his personal experience was an unnecessary distraction from the word of the LORD. In this judgment, Ewald reÀects the assumptions of German Christian scholars of the Old Testament that Israel’s religion after the Exile devolved into the inferior phenomenon of Judaism. Jeremiah’s complaints already signal this decline, but other aspects of the prophet, notably his role in foreshadowing Christ, necessarily kept him with Israel’s great prophets. Ewald’s reading was a rare instance of enlisting Jeremiah in the disparaging view of ancient Judaism that would produce the term Spätjudentum (“late Judaism”). When the second edition of Ewald’s commentary was published in 1868, Julius Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels was still ten years away.

6. Heinrich Ewald, Die Propheten des Alten Bundes: Zweiter Band: Jeremja und Hezeqiel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1840, 1867–68), 71 (author’s translation).

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Within a generation Bernhard Duhm replaced Ewald’s negative characterization with his own positive designation of “Konfessionen.” His new label signaled a radical change in the history of interpretation of Jeremiah. From the homilies of Origen to the marginal notes in the Geneva Bible, Jeremiah’s words had been read as regrettable outbursts that posed theological challenges to faithful Christians. Duhm of course knew how Calvin, who personally identi¿ed with Jeremiah’s experience of rejection, had struggled to explain the prophet’s accusation that God had deceived him. Rejecting the explanation that Jeremiah was carried away by a hasty temper, Calvin had concluded that he spoke the words, “You have deceived me,” ironically. He did not mean it, as he “possessed in his heart a ¿rm conviction of the truth he delivered.” Rather, he Àung them sarcastically in the face of his opponents, as if to say, “Do you think that I think God has deceived me?” in order show that their opposition to him was a challenge to God himself.7 Calvin’s convoluted explanation only highlights his discomfort with Jeremiah’s accusation. Duhm implicitly rejected Calvin’s denial, and Ewald’s apology, instead holding up the offending words as badges of honor. Evoking the language of spiritual biography, this term clearly signaled that these poems offered ¿rst-hand insight into the life, and more importantly the faith, of Jeremiah. Duhm famously distinguished three types of material in Jeremiah: authentic Jeremiah, Baruch’s biography, and late additions by Deuteronomic redactors. Representing almost twenty percent of the scant 280 verses in the book that Duhm allowed as authentic, the “Konfessionen” were clearly a precious resource for understanding the prophet. At the end of his exegetical comments on Jer 20, Duhm offers an excursus that shows how his interpretive framework of constructing a biography of the prophet guided his analysis. The theological problem of Jeremiah cursing the day of his birth is treated as a historical problem: “As a man of genuine, artless feeling, Jeremiah must win the highest prize for these Confessions. A historian of religions nevertheless would af¿rm that Jeremiah did not understand his life sub specie aeternitatis. Jeremiah would not have damned his life if he had believed that his earthly existence signi¿ed only a brief step of his existence.”8 Duhm offers his readers a historical framework in which to understand Jeremiah’s curse, which he implicitly deems inappropriate for Christians. His keen interest in the history behind the biblical texts appears again a 7. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Jeremiah and the Lamentations (trans. John Owen; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 26–28. 8. Bernhard Duhm, Das Buch Jeremia (KHC 11; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1901), 168 (author’s translation).

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few sentences later: “It would be most highly desirable to know the particular cause of this lament. However, Baruch’s brief biography leaves us in the dark about Jeremiah’s life. We must be thankful that Jeremiah himself allowed us to glimpse into his inner life, deeper than any [inner life] in the Old Testament. He is the most personal of all the prophets; yet even in these Confessions he demonstrates that he has not the slightest presentiment that he knows his suffering might serve the good of his people.” In contrast with established patristic and medieval exegesis that read Jeremiah as a ¿gure of Jesus, Duhm’s sober Enlightenment historiography aims to make the prophet a man of his time. Like all exegesis, Duhm’s reading is an alchemy of academic training, personal piety and cultural inÀuences. In spite of his historical caution, he concludes with echoes of the medieval ¿guring of Jeremiah as Jesus: “And thereby no one should be considered less fanatical than this holy man, who well knew derision and shame, even to a miserable death.”9 From our vantage point in history, it is startling that Duhm would write as a historian of religion to point out that Jeremiah lived in a culture without belief in an afterlife, yet was entirely unaware that he was anachronistically reading contemporary emotional sensibilities and patristic exegesis into the ancient Hebrew words. It is by now well known, and easy to see from our historical distance, that Duhm’s reading was shaped by his own historical context, especially the inÀuence of German Romanticism, with its admiration for honest expression of affective interior experience. On the other hand, it is worth noting that Duhm read against the grain of traditional Christian exegesis when he wrote approvingly of Jeremiah’s harsh language. His work highlights the reality that “interpretive framework” is a multi-dimensional reality. One dimension is Duhm’s explicit historical framework of prophetic biography; another is his own historical and cultural interpretive context as a late nineteenth-century German Lutheran biblical scholar. Duhm’s interpretive context of Jeremiah’s spiritual biography was soon broadened to a Religionsgeschichte narrative of the development of personal religion. Adopting the positive evaluation of the confessions argued by Duhm and shortly thereafter by Wellhausen, John Skinner’s inÀuential Prophecy and Religion (1922) uses the discourse of evolution to present Jeremiah to the English-speaking world as a spiritual turning point in the development of humanity’s relationship to God. The confessions in particular give evidence of a radical shift from the older understanding of prophetic revelation rooted in external experience to a new model based on what Skinner calls personal religion. He writes that 9. Ibid., 168 (author’s translation).

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Jeremiah Invented the secret of the transmutation lies before us in the “Confessions”… We have seen how the prophetic vocation became to Jeremiah the centre of a new and more intimately human relation to God, which expanded into a life of prayer and communion, in which all that concerned him, his temptations, his perplexities, and the burden of his work, formed the subject of an intimate introspective dialogue between himself and the divine voice that echoed mysteriously through the secret chambers of his soul. It was this reaction of his human subjectivity on the fact of his prophetic call which unsealed within him the perennial fountain of true piety—the religious receptivity of the individual.10

The same term, “subjectivity,” that for Ewald had signaled a regrettable lapse in Jeremiah’s stature as prophet, was now a mark of “true piety.” If Duhm made Jeremiah look like a German Romantic poet, Skinner cast him in the language of seventeenth-century English devotion. His description of a “life of prayer and communion that formed an “intimate, introspective dialogue” between the prophet and his God evokes the religious sensibilities of the metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, epitomized by John Donne and George Herbert. Skinner, a don at Cambridge University, published his book at a time when these poets were being re-discovered and celebrated. Skinner found in Jeremiah’s confessions a turning-point in the development of human consciousness, characterized essentially by seventeenth-century English spirituality. He articulated something at which Duhm had only hinted: Jer 20 should be considered a model of prayer for contemporary Christians.11 The Legacy of Historical-Critical Exegesis From our lofty perch in the twenty-¿rst century it is easy to snicker at Duhm’s naïve projection of German Romanticism onto Jeremiah, and Skinner’s judgment that personal religion is the high water mark of religious history. Yet their readings have a long after-life. Gerhard von Rad’s characterization of the confessions as “a manifestation of the human spirit at its noblest” reÀects the twentieth-century value of authenticity.12 Further modernizing is evident in Wilhelm Rudolph’s 10. John Skinner, Prophecy and Religion: Studies in the Inner Life of Jeremiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, 1948), 222–23. 11. For further reÀection on the cultural inÀuences on Skinner’s and Duhm’s understanding of Jeremiah see Joe Henderson, “Duhm and Skinner’s Invention of Jeremiah,” pp. 1–15 of the present volume. 12. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (2 vols.; trans. D. M. G. Stalker; repr., Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001 [1965]), 2:205. The original two volumes of Theologie des Alten Testaments were published in 1957 and 1960; they

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1947 academic commentary, which introduces Jer 20:7–18 with the heading Seelenkämpfe (battle in the soul). Jack Lundbom’s 1999 Anchor Bible commentary calls it “The Prison Within.” The study of Jeremiah is compelling to many contemporary readers because the exegetical legacy of his interior struggle guides their reading. This enticing aspect of Jeremiah is a product of modernity, which may perhaps be traced back to Ewald’s parenthesis designating six poems that show the regrettable “candid outpourings of his heart.” Ewald in 1840 surely would have been surprised at the outcome of his exegetical work. The positive reading of these laments, and the eager embracing of language that for centuries had caused concern, is a turning point in the history of their interpretation that began in the ¿rst years of the twentieth century. Fascination with Jer 20 and admiration for the prophet’s “depth” and “honesty” is a legacy of the historical-critical method. It is ¿ttingly symbolic of our ambivalent relationship to this legacy that we can neither accept its psychologizing of Jeremiah without signi¿cant quali¿cation, nor can we entirely reject it. However sophisticated we may be about the interpretive framework of late nineteenth-century Germans, once our eyes have been trained to see the genetic similarities between the laments and our imaginations to construct the human experience behind them, so compellingly like our own, we can scarcely read them innocent of this knowledge. It is an irony of history that the methods of historical-critical exegesis have bequeathed a Jeremiah who mirrors his readers more than he reveals the realities of ancient Judah. A second legacy of critical exegesis came with the work of Walter Baumgartner, whose 1917 Die Klagegedichte des Jeremia used the methods of form criticism to argue that the words in Jer 20:7–13 could be mapped onto the traditional laments in the Psalter. The father of form criticism, Hermann Gunkel, in 1906 had shown the antiquity of the lament form, and had suggested that Jeremiah used this form. Baumgartner’s discovery explicitly challenged the understanding of the poem as Jeremiah’s own words from the heart, thereby undermining the portrait of a highly creative poet whose honest prayer marked a turning point in human history. It did not, however, replace that established portrait, but added to its complexity. Baumgartner simply rede¿ned the notion of creativity. He writes,

were soon introduced to the English-speaking world, and the second volume was made available in a shortened, widely distributed form as The Message of the Prophets.

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Jeremiah Invented Often when there is resistance to research on literary types the particular cause is the fear that it might undermine the individuality of the poets. Precisely the opposite should be the case. It is only with the aid of this kind of research that in our case, for example, we can tell where the individuality of the prophet in fact begins; otherwise it is easy to look for it in the wrong place. For it begins only where we ¿nd deviations, in form or content, from the style of the psalms.13

Of the laments in Jer 20 he writes, He made space for the wild pain that ravaged his heart in those complaints and reproaches, parallels to which would be sought in vain in the Psalter. His are the drastic images with which he pictures the deity’s overcoming of him and letting him down. His is the skill of pouring the personal experiences in his life as a prophet into the song of lament mould, thereby ¿lling it with new content.14

Baumgartner changes the discourse of his day about Jeremiah when he writes, “In comparison with this [‘the greatness of his passion, the sincerity and humility of religious experience’], what will it matter if we can no longer regard the pattern of his psalms and a good part of their vocabulary as created by him!”15 Baumgartner does not use individual biographic details as an interpretive context, drawing instead on the broader biographical framework of Jeremiah’s inculturation in sixthcentury Judah. From a historical-critical perspective, this reading of Jeremiah’s laments as culturally embedded in Israel’s worship is a step toward a more accurate understanding of the poems in their sixth-century B.C.E. setting. A third legacy of historical-critical exegesis is the discovery that the sources Duhm had described as late, Jewish, and midrashic, by which he meant unreliable, in fact offer valuable historical evidence. The task of the biblical scholar until the middle of the twentieth century was to strip away these unfortunate accretions in order to allow the true voice of Jeremiah to be heard in the present. The early work of redaction criticism still focused on retrieving the earliest units and understanding how they had been set into their context. Now, however, the work focuses on the ways that exilic redactors deliberately shaped the Jeremiah tradition in response to the needs of their communities. Today some of the most illuminating work is the redaction-critical analysis that identi¿es the dominant voices of Babylonian exiles over against the minority voices, 13. Walter Baumgartner, Jeremiah’s Poems of Lament (trans. David E. Orton; Shef¿eld: Almond Press, 1988), 99; emphasis in original. 14. Ibid., 100. 15. Ibid.

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almost but not quite suppressed, or Jewish communities left in Judah or living in Egypt.16 Although it rests on historical-critical assumptions, this work also signi¿cantly broadens those assumptions by valuing voices that were mufÀed by ancient redactors. “History” in Historical-Critical Exegesis Undergirding the gains of historical-critical work are implicit assumptions about the complex relation between biblical text and history. Unlike the ancient exegetes, for whom history was the plain sense of the text, historical-critical exegetes assume that history is a distinct reality behind the text, to which the text is accountable. The biblical text is a window opening out onto ancient Jerusalem, offering valuable historical information if read properly. For early nineteenth-century exegetes, those portions that could be traced to Jeremiah himself, or to Baruch, present reliable vignettes, essentially transporting the reader into sixth-century Jerusalem. In the mid-twentieth century, the work of redactors is rigorously explored and appreciated, as historical-witness to the shaping of the biblical text.17 Redaction-critical work that reconstructs motives of exilic editors likewise rests on the assumption that the biblical witness offers at least traces of historical conÀicts and competing claims, however submerged in the ¿nal form of the text. Although the optimism of nineteenth-century historians has been replaced by the suspicions of twenty-¿rst-century historians, the assumption that the “real” historical world behind the text is a primary object of inquiry remains central to traditional biblical studies. A second assumption follows from the ¿rst, though it is more subtle. It understands that the external world of biblical characters was very different from that of modern readers, but assumes that the subjective experience of these characters can be mapped onto the modern psyche. Sociological studies of the ancient Levant have illuminated important differences between ancient and modern cultures, for example in the importance of kinship and the role of honor and shame. They give a clear sense of the individual as embedded in an interlocking network of communities, especially extended family and clan. These studies help

16. Robert Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986); Carolyn J. Sharp, Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the Deutero-Jeremianic Prose (OTS; London: T. & T. Clark, 2003). 17. A ¿ne example for Jer 20 is the analysis of D. J. A. Clines and D. M. Gunn, “Form, Occasion and Redaction in Jeremiah 20,” ZAW 88 (1976): 390–409.

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readers understand how the worlds of the Bible were different from ours, but the sociological work stops at the boundary of individual and community. Work on Jer 20 often rests on the problematic assumption that while their social context was different from ours, in their “inner selves” they were essentially like us. In this aspect biblical scholarship is a part of the academy that historical work on the evolving consciousness of the self seems to have bypassed. Classics scholars have been debating since the mid-twentieth century whether Homer’s heroes were fundamentally different from moderns, notably in our perception of ourselves as a uni¿ed consciousness with inner depths.18 Medievalists have been debating whether the heightened sense of history in twelfth-century writers signaled a growing self-awareness different from that in people of the previous era. Early modernists argue that a shift in the understanding of the human person characterized the ¿fteenth century.19 Charles Taylor has shown that our experience of self-consciousness and of inwardness is the result of centuries of development.20 It is easy to see the excesses of German Romanticism and English piety in earlier Jeremiah scholarship, but the assumption that the vein of gold in the book of Jeremiah is the prophet’s inner struggle expressed in the confessions remains a foundational principle of studies on Jer 20. It is, after all, where Jeremiah seems to speak most compellingly to contemporary readers. In many ways this projection of the modern self onto the ¿gure of Jeremiah is innocent; indeed, it can yield genuine spiritual sustenance. Theological truth is not circumscribed by historical truth; readers across the centuries have adapted the peculiar writings of ancient Israel to new modes of thinking to hear the word of the LORD. It is not as a theologian that I object to the assumption of reading Jeremiah as like ourselves, but rather as historian.

18. The debate begins in the 1920s, but a good place to enter it is Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Sather Classical Lectures 57; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), and Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialog (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 19. John F. Benton, “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 263–95; Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 82–109. 20. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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These two assumptions about history underlying the historical-critical legacy are part of the third and most signi¿cant assumption: the text signi¿es a historical reality, one which bears the theological weight of Scripture. This assumption is explicit in Mowinckel’s descending scale of Duhm’s literary categories, from the A material of prophetic ipsissima verba to C material of additions by late, tendentious Deuteronomic redactors. At the turn of the twentieth century the theological truth of the book of Jeremiah was located in the life of the prophet and in the words that could be safely attributed to him. Interestingly, the ¿rst red-letter Bible was published in America in 1901, the same year that Duhm’s commentary was published in Germany. The idea came from Louis Klopsch, an inÀuential Evangelical, whose Christian Herald magazine had a wide reach. Explaining his purpose, Klopsch wrote in his introduction to the ¿rst red-letter Bible, “Modern Christianity is striving zealously to draw nearer to the great Founder of the Faith. Setting aside mere human doctrines and theories regarding Him, it presses close to the Divine Presence…”21 Klopsch’s hierarchy of authority resembles Duhm’s distinction between the words of the prophet and those of his redactors. The audiences were different of course, but both efforts reÀect Enlightenment principles of history. For Duhm and his intellectual heirs, this assumption implies that the literary context of the confessions in the biblical text obscures the true context in which they should be understood, which is the biography of the prophet. To make the interpretive framework a window into the prophet’s inner life makes perfect sense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when interest in the individual psyche dominated not only theology, but also psychology, history, and literature. It yields a reading appropriate to readers of the time, as Origen’s did for readers of his time. A Postmodern Reading If the work of redaction criticism on Jeremiah has been even partially accurate, some of the very men who had persecuted Jeremiah in Jerusalem must have been offered his words as comfort in Babylon; indeed, some of them may have been the redactors. Pete Diamond suggested that rather than removing the confessions from their literary contexts and reassembling them as part of a biography of the prophet, we read them 21. Louis Klopsch, “Explanatory Note,” in The Holy Bible: Red Letter Edition (New York: Christian Herald, 1901), xvi. See also Philip Sellew, “Red Letter Bible,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible (ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 619.

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in the literary context of chs. 11–20 in which they occur. The unit is explicitly framed by the formula, “The word that came to Jeremiah from YHWH.” Further framing is suggested by the use of arur (“cursed”) at the beginning of the ¿rst and last prophetic speech (11:3 and 20:15). In this literary context, Diamond argued, they function as key elements in a theodicy for the exiles, showing how the people’s refusal to hear the prophetic challenge to their comfortable theology had led to disaster.22 This suggestion opens the way for my alternative reading of Jer 20. Assuming that the words were preserved by exilic redactors, consider the possibility that they were used in Babylon by the same men who had tormented and rejected Jeremiah. What if Jeremiah’s anguished lament was preserved because it helped those who had ¿ercely opposed Jeremiah in Jerusalem make sense of what had happened, and gave voice to their despair in Babylon? What would it mean to interpret “O L ORD, you have deceived me” as the cry of the loyal Jerusalemite priests? The theology of Zion’s inviolability and the Temple as the house of YHWH that they had inherited from their ancestors, to which they had devoted their lives, had apparently collapsed. The religious leaders had missed the true word of the LORD in their midst and been led astray by their theology, though it was an orthodox theology upheld by Psalms and by the miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem from Assyrian attack in 701. Upholding the sacred tradition, guarding the faith, they missed the presence of the living God in their midst. Their rejection of blasphemous words from a meshugga (“madman”) turned out to be mistaken. Bereft of the Temple and the holy city, in hindsight some of them understood Jeremiah. The songs of Zion had proved deceptive, and YHWH had spoken through the dangerous meshugga. Who could keep up? A priest of the LORD exiled to the land of Marduk could well pray, “O LORD, you enticed me [i.e. with the glorious Zion traditions] and I fell for it; you were stronger than I, and you prevailed.” How could such a priest have known that for this particular historical moment, Jeremiah was right and the theology of the holy city was wrong? Who of us would know? I am suggesting, then, that the lament in ch. 20 is part of a unit that essentially inverted the words of the prophet so that some of the same kohanim who persecuted him in Jerusalem could ¿nd life in his words when they were in Babylon. The way the unit is framed hints at a drama moving from stubborn opposition to broken-hearted recognition of the truth too late. As noted above, the ¿rst word of the LORD given after the introduction in ch. 11 is arur: “cursed be the one who does not obey the words of this covenant.” The unit ends with a full curse by an unnamed 22. Diamond, Confessions of Jeremiah, 176–88.

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speaker, presumably Jeremiah, on the day of his birth. The shape of the literary unit is the arc of prophecy and ful¿llment: the curse on those who did not keep the covenant does not need to be made by others; it comes from their own mouths when they realize that they had been enticed and deceived by their theology. The idea that various groups co-opted Jeremiah’s words to support their own position after 587 is well established. The letter to the exiles in Jer 29, for example, offers clear evidence of conÀict between groups in Babylon and in Judah, over who is the true remnant. If redaction-critical work is right to suggest that the Jeremiah tradition was shaped largely for the bene¿t of the exiles, though with a minority voice from Judah still preserved between the lines, might this tradition have been directed not only at the few who had believed Jeremiah, but also at the religious leaders who had tried to kill him? Jeremiah’s words in ch. 20 could give voice to those whose belief in their traditional theology had proven to be a deception. In this reading, Jeremiah may well have composed and spoken the words of the lament and the curse in ch. 20, but we have them today only because his enemies preserved them. The text therefore presents us simultaneously with the voices of the prophet in Jerusalem before 587 and of those who tried to silence him, now speaking in his voice. In this way a single text refracts the different experiences of Jeremiah and his enemies, and merges the voice of the tormented with that of his tormentors. This reading, far from opening a window onto the historical Jeremiah, actually makes him recede further into the distance. If we read against the grain of historical-critical layering of the text, we are confronted with a biblical text that collapses different historical contexts into a single moment, and multiplies the “author” into a chorus of competing voices. The Contested Meaning of History At the intersection of the historical-critical and postmodern readings of Jer 20 is a contested understanding of history. In the former, ancient texts yield at least some of their original meaning when their historical context is clari¿ed. Authority is conferred by historical fact: the shape of a lament, the theology of the Temple in the seventh century, the distance from Jerusalem to Anatoth. Historical-critical scholarship has succeeded in supplying a robust interpretive framework of ancient culture in which to interpret biblical texts. Over half a century of studies of ancient Near Eastern prophetic practices, the social location of prophecy and forms of prophetic speech have illuminated the biblical text. These gains are real.

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They equip readers with hospitality to the ancient authors and redactors, especially important when the interests of the text do not coincide with those of readers. They can make us better readers by enhancing what Jonathan Culler called literary competence, “an implicit understanding of the operations of literary discourse which tells one what to look for.”23 The critique of course is that readers often unwittingly project their own “operations of literary discourse” onto a text, and then interpret in terms of these inventions. The history of scholarship on the confessions shows how texts can entice readers to ¿nd what conforms to their expectations. Nevertheless, literary competence in reading the Bible is enhanced by some knowledge of the conventions of ancient Near Eastern literature, which historical-critical exegesis has bequeathed us. Postmodern approaches reject this understanding of history as a reality that we approach ever more closely the more we re¿ne our methods. A vignette from J. A. Thompson’s widely used commentary on Jeremiah helps clarify the problem. In the preface, Thompson recalls his ¿rst visit to the Arab village of ‘Anata, the approximate site of Anathoth. Seeing “a blaze of almond blossoms in every direction,” he feels suddenly transported to the sixth century. He writes, “In fancy I saw Jeremiah toiling across the intervening hills on his three-mile walk into Jerusalem to take up his stand in the Temple courtyard and preach his Temple Sermon.”24 Thompson’s view through the clear window of the text later shows him a man struggling with a familiar conÀict: “Here was a terrible dilemma. He was caught between two powerful urges: the desire to be normal and win the friendship and approval of his fellows or to pursue his duty to Yahweh and lose his friends.”25 In using the words “normal” and “duty” to describe Jeremiah’s desire, Thompson presents the prophet as a thoroughly modern fellow. He was different from us on the outside, but inside, where it matters, he was like us. Visiting the modern village of ‘Anata is an apt image for the contested understanding of history at the intersection of our historical-critical and postmodern approaches to Jer 20. Standing in his native place might give one an experiential bond with the ancient prophet, even an eerie sense that he might appear just over the crest of the hill. Yet the postmodern understanding of history has taught us to be wary of the apparent familiarity that modern historical methods have given us. 23. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975). 24. J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), vii. 25. Ibid., 90.

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One of the most troublesome aspects of postmodern thinking is the rupture of the continuity between past and present that challenges Thompson’s description of his experience in ‘Anata. When we feel like we are transported back to ancient Judah it is still ourselves as twenty¿rst century individuals, experiencing the distance between now and then. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has shown, we bring to historical study a consciousness already formed by the past that we study.26 We can only read the past subjectively, because we are part of the very object that we study. The “I” that stands in the very place where Jeremiah stood is not suddenly a person with the sensibilities of an ancient Judean; it is still a twenty-¿rst century “I,” shaped by centuries of cultural history, that experiences ‘Anata as Anathoth. The text as window into the past often turns out to be not so much a window onto a foreign world as a mirror of ourselves. The postmodern understanding of history as a subjective enterprise is also indebted to the work of Hayden White. In his 1984 essay, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” White provocatively describes history writing since the Enlightenment as a two-step process of creating a narrative of events, and then interpreting that narrative. His insistence on two steps challenges the traditional understanding that the narrative is simply a form of discourse used to represent the raw data of historical events. This traditional distinction between form and content, in which a historical narrative of “real” occurrences can be distinguished from a ¿ctional narrative of “imaginary” events, overlooks what White calls “the problem of narrativity.” The issue is whether historical events can be truthfully represented as manifesting the structures and processes of those met with more commonly in certain kinds of “imaginative” discourses, that is such ¿ctions as the epic, the folk tale…and the like. This means that what distinguishes “historical” from “¿ctional” stories is ¿rst and foremost their contents, rather than their form. The content of historical stories is real events, events that really happened, rather than imaginary events, events invented by the narrator. This implies that the form in which historical events present themselves to a prospective narrator is found rather than constructed.27 26. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall; New York: Continuum, 1988), 265–307. 27. Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23 (1984): 2. See also Mary Chilton Callaway, “Reading Jeremiah with Some Help from Gadamer,” in Jeremiah (Dis)Placed: New Directions in Writing/Reading Jeremiah (ed. Louis Stulman and A. R. Pete Diamond; LHBOTS 529; London: T&T Clark International, 2011), 266–78.

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With the word “constructed,” White challenges the idea that historical events present themselves naturally as a coherent narrative which can be interpreted in various ways, arguing instead that the arrangement of events into a narrative is already an interpretation crafted by the historian. In the case of Jeremiah, this “problem of narrativity” is compounded because the biblical text of course presents not raw data of history, but the redactors’ narratives. When the ancient redactors juxtaposed the poetry of Jer 20:7–14 with their narrative about the prophet’s public humiliation at the hands of Pashur, they created a meta-narrative. Biblical scholars have broadened the narrative to include a life of the prophet constructed from the biblical evidence. Until late in the twentieth century even historical-critical exegetes have tended to understand these narratives as more or less the raw data of history, even if somewhat shaped by political and theological agenda. In White’s words, “The form of the story told was supposed to be necessitated by the form of the story enacted by historical agents.”28 However, as his analysis suggests, this story is not simply a container for historical data, but is already an interpretation of the data, constructed by the historian. The ancient writer selectively engaged only some of the events, omitting others, and gave voice to characters that suited their purpose. In Jer 20, the narrative is doubly constructed, ¿rst by ancient redactors, and later by scholars seeking to provide a coherent historical context for the prophet. In our postmodern reading of Jer 20, diachronic layers of prophet and redactors are replaced with a synchronic multiplicity of voices and narratives. Jeremiah is not necessarily like us at all, we have no access to the ancient world except through our already formed modern consciousness, and even our best exegetical narratives prove to be the creation of our own minds. Jeremiah is a slipping ¿gure who eludes our grasp, and the Word of the LORD resists conforming to our theology. Teaching the Text I conclude this study with two suggestions about how the theoretical high-wire acts that we do as scholars might be of use to those we teach. These readers include university students, members of religious congregations, and the broader public. In keeping with the idea that the contested understanding of history offers a potentially fruitful space at the intersection of historical-critical and postmodern readings, the suggestions are intended to complicate students’ thinking about history, especially in its relation to theology. The idea that ¿nding “the historical 28. White, “The Question of Narrative,” 4.

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meaning” of a biblical passage is not straightforward will not come naturally at ¿rst, but can enrich reading. Seeing the biblical text as already an adaptation of an irretrievable “original” for the exilic community can help laypeople disengage from the default position of equating historical truth with theological truth. Even sophisticated readers can have a surprisingly fundamentalist understanding of history, and complicating this view can bring them more deeply into the Scriptures. In the case of Jer 20, the multiple interest groups represented over time can enrich the passage, especially its laments, beyond a one-dimensional conclusion about “what the text means.” Further, the discipline of retrieving submerged voices can help students learn to read for alterity. The default reading identi¿es with the prophet, but hearing the word from another perspective, especially the enemy, can be instructive. Finally, the ancient exegetes Origen and the authors of Pesikta Rabbati presented at the beginning of this study offer a reminder that biblical texts traditionally had multiple meanings, intended to nourish different aspects of the life of faith. Biblical interpretation need not be a zero sum enterprise that requires choosing one approach over all others. Just as Jeremiah kept his fellow Judeans off balance, the text that bears his name will keep us off balance if we don’t domesticate it.

SUNK IN THE MUD: LITERARY CORRELATION AND COLLABORATION BETWEEN KING AND PROPHET IN THE BOOK OF JEREMIAH Barbara Green, O.P.

Introduction What is being communicated or can be constructed in the section (chs. 20–39) and speci¿cally in its seven scenes where Jeremiah the prophet and Zedekiah the king are drawn to resemble each other while being ostensible opponents? In a general set of some 350 verses, set directly or implicitly during the reign of King Zedekiah, my focus is the seven narrative occasions on which king and prophet confer.1 Jeremiah is drawn to hold up a mirror for the king, to offer him glimpses of his situation with the hope that he can choose better than he is doing (has done, will do). The challenge of the prophet is to enact something that the king can recognize, acknowledge, regret, and choose to move beyond. Jeremiah fails, but that outcome is not inevitable as the pair is shown interacting. I posit that the main progression in this part of the book of Jeremiah is to show survival options, only one of which is desirable: early and quasi-voluntary re-settlement to Babylon. Other possibilities, visible in various ways, are shown to be unacceptable. A single group chooses well (chs. 24, 26, 29), while most do not. Jeremiah continues to work with those who have chosen poorly, who are narrated as though they might still do well, but produced to demonstrate how they did not, with the result that the book’s valorized group is the “re-settlers.” 1. The seven units in question fall between chs. 21 and 39. Though I will name them as discrete, there is no clear order among them; they may be two takes on the same moment, and in some instances one incident rises from another in such a way that it could be considered the same event. Most who comment on this material using literary tools note its resistance to chronology, maintaining that in at least some cases we have multiple views of one event; see, for example, Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 627 and 672–79.

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Due to space limitations, I will summarize the ¿rst six sketches as a set, quickly and suggestively, so as to spend more time on the last and most brilliant of them. The salient point is the strange similarity between prophet and king in terms of both discourse and position, most vividly at the last one.2 I hope to demonstrate how the apparent opponents—the prophet Jeremiah and the king Zedekiah—deeply resemble each other and are in fact comprehensively interlocked. This point will be made by noting their positions, apparently opposite but in fact quite similar; by observing the content and process of discourse—how they engage, apparently as opponents but actually as allies. That their collaboration as described and analyzed does not appear to help either of them, nor does this collaboration vitiate its impact on readers, speci¿cally to suggest the texture of Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry. Development The First Six Scenes These can be named as follows for quick and vivid reference: (1) 21:1– 14, wistful wish Àattened; (2) 27:1–28:16, contested yokes; (3) 32:1–44, land deed needed; (4) 34:1–22, slave reprieve revoked; (5) 37:3–21, disputed departure; (6) 38:1–13, Malchiah’s mud. Position. Jeremiah, who in the ¿rst twenty chapters of the book seems to come and go at will in the environs of Jerusalem, is at the end of that large unit (20:2–3) placed in stocks brieÀy, the rehearsal of a fate that is to worsen. This ¿rst scene, setting an upper frame, is matched at ch. 39, where the fates of both characters collide as they exit the breached city, brieÀy at large but neither fruitfully. Jeremiah’s position moves as follows: He is, throughout, trapped in the besieged city (21:2; 32:2, 24; 34:1), both when the siege seems relieved (37:5, 11) and surely when it intensi¿es (37:8; 39). However, he has two forays out of the city: the ¿rst (land deed needed) is hinted at narratively as he—in response to a question from the king—enacts his redeeming land outside Jerusalem (the question of 32:3–5 generates the response of 32:6–44). The second (disputed departure) is presented as an actual event (37:11–14). In this second instance, his effort to leave is thwarted and interpreted in a way the prophet refuses.

2. Vastly helpful is Mark Roncace, Jeremiah, Zedekiah, and the Fall of Jerusalem (LHBOTS 423; New York: T&T Clark International, 2005).

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Those forays being noted, the rest of the detail on Jeremiah’s position shows him con¿ned: he dons a wooden yoke which, when broken, he vows to replace with an iron collar (27:1–28:17). In the besieged city he is ¿rst at large and then restricted to the court of the guard (32:3; 37:21; 38:28). He is removed from there on two occasions, ¿rst to a more hazardous con¿nement in the Jonathan-house prison/pit (37:16), and then to the Malchiah-house pit where he is dropped into the mud (38:6).3 Sunk in the mud is Jeremiah’s lowest and deepest position (thinking in terms in which in/out and up/down are extremes).4 Zedekiah, by contrast, never appears overtly in any place of con¿nement beyond being in the besieged Jerusalem. At large in the city, he can come and go at will. Oddly, we learn later (51:59) that in his fourth regnal year, Zedekiah went to Babylon. The king also signals his position along a continuum of openness to secrecy in terms of communicating with Jeremiah: sometimes the king openly sends messengers (21:1; 37:3), but ultimately, he needs to set up secret consultations (37:17; 38:14–28).5 Hence the positions of the two erstwhile opponents are startlingly similar when looked at synoptically: free at ¿rst, then increasingly constrained in Jerusalem, intersecting occasionally, resembling each other (if only brieÀy) at the collapse of Jerusalem. Jeremiah physically proclaims to Zedekiah a set of prisons into which he drops and out of which he emerges, as though to show the king what he needs to do. Jeremiah takes symbolically the journeys that Zedekiah refuses while contemplating them. As the city falls, each man escapes brieÀy, but not to the choice he might have had. The king and prophet each decline their best “go somewhat freely to Babylon” option, disappear from our sight in the dispreferred position. The two coincide nearly exactly at 38:5, when the king hands Jeremiah over to four men while saying that he himself is helpless to resist them. At that same moment, the king speaks of living

3. Mary Chilton Callaway, “Telling the Truth and Telling Stories: An Analysis of Jeremiah 37–38,” USQR 44 (1991): 253–65 (257–58), calls this “language of con¿nement.” 4. Else K. Holt, “The Potent Word of God: Remarks on the Composition of Jeremiah 37–44,” in Troubling Jeremiah (ed. A. R. Pete Diamond, Kathleen M. O’Connor, and Louis Stulman; JSOTSup 260; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999), 161–70 (164), sees the nested con¿nements as signifying the effort to contain God’s word, rather than appraising the enactments themselves as meaningful. 5. Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 37–52: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 21C; New York: Doubleday, 2004), 55, notes that it is dif¿cult to catch the tone of Zedekiah: testing? fearful?

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surrounded by foes, a point Jeremiah made of his own position as well (e.g., 11:18–19). We will watch the two come to share sunk-in-themudness shortly (Jeremiah in 38:6 and Zedekiah in 38:22). Additionally and oddly, we can appraise Jeremiah’s positions as being not so persuasive as are Zedekiah’s. That is, Jeremiah’s positions are improved by the king,6 while the king’s position is not helped by anything Jeremiah demonstrates. The king, and not the prophet, is the agent of rescue; the king helps the prophet out—temporarily and repeatedly, not the reverse. Zedekiah does Jeremiah’s job of “helping out,” and the prophet invites it. Discourse Manner. We can also examine conversation between the pair in terms of discourse: its plain-spoken content and its re-used or quoted discourse. There is considerable variation of “verbal staging” in the scenes that lead up to the ultimate encounter between prophet and king.7 The plain discourse: Jeremiah’s discourse is more prominent and quite consistent. To summarize his six speeches in these scenes (comprising nearly sixty verses) is to hear Jeremiah offering two options consistently (21:8 and 38:2 are concise statements of the choice): submit (to the Babylonians now) and survive (21:9b; 27:11; 34:4–5);8 or “dig in and die,” a fate elaborated in far more detail (21:4–7, 9a, 13–14; 27:5–10, 12–22; 28:6–9, 14; 32:28–36; 34:2–3; 37:10). The king, on the other hand, Àails, commanding oracles he does not get (21:2; 37:17), refusing to engage those he is given (21; 27; 34:17). He asks questions whose responses he overlooks (32:3–5; 37:17). He contradicts his own orders (38:5, 10). Plain dialogue proceeds at crosspurposes until the ¿nal meeting of king and prophet, where we will see 6. Roncace, Jeremiah, identifying prophet-king confrontations as a type-scene and suggesting that there are some thirty of them (24) says it is anomalous for the king to help the prophet (64). 7. In two instances, the king and prophet communicate through intermediaries. In both of those cases, a hopeful king asks for a word from God (21:1–2 and 37:3). On one occasion Jeremiah indicates that he had communicated with Zedekiah, though no prompt of the king is noted and we do not witness the encounter (27:12). Another of the scenes involves teams of surrogates (38:1–13). Only three of the exchanges are face-to-face: where the king asks Jeremiah why he talks as he does (32:3–5), where Jeremiah makes his case without having been asked (34:2–22), and where Zedekiah asks whether an oracle has been spoken (37:17–20). 8. Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 21–36: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 21B; New York: Doubleday, 2004) comments speci¿cally on the language here (105–6). Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile & Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 361 says that the “submit and survive” is, in Jeremiah, to be equated with obedience to God’s will.

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that the king has listened better than he appears to have done. They converge, eventually, on the consuming topic of how serious and how long the Babylonian threat. We can see these scenes more clearly where speech and enactment occur, the one mode interpreting the other. Jeremiah constantly dramatizes his words, not simply to elaborate but to re-position them for deeper understanding. In their ¿rst exchange, wistful wish Àattened (chs. 21– 23), Jeremiah casts the oracle of the destruction of the city over which Zedekiah now reigns in company with (non-)dirges for Zedekiah’s four royal predecessors, implying the same for the incumbent: dead and un-mourned (22:10–30). In the contested yokes pericope (chs. 27–28), the prophet wears the yoke he urges others to shoulder, even replacing his ¿rst when it is dislodged. The narrative land deed needed serves as Jeremiah’s reply to Zedekiah’s “why do you say such things?” question, the detail elaborating not so much the re-claiming of the endangered land but the care with which the witnessing deed must be kept—so much time will elapse until it is needed (32:10–16).9 In the fourth engagement of Jeremiah and Zedekiah, slave reprieve revoked (ch. 34), Jeremiah promises Zedekiah (word of YHWH) peaceful burial. But the matrix in which that promise is embedded is Jeremiah’s reproaching Zedekiah for his broken promise to slaves (34:12–22). The prophet reminds the king that God and people had a mutual commitment: God had freed Israel from Egyptian bondage and had speci¿ed that Hebrew slaves were to be released periodically—a promise apparently rarely kept. And when Zedekiah and the elites had promised liberty to the Judean enslaved kin in view of the Babylonian danger, all reneged and re-enslaved them. So the backdrop of false words sets the standard and colors the “release promise,” consigning the reneging king from frying pan to ¿re, or from sacri¿cer to sacri¿ced.10 The ¿fth consultation between king and prophet, disputed departure, shows Jeremiah attempting to leave the city, only to be stopped at its edge, accused of deserting to the Babylonians, arrested and imprisoned 9. I have found no one who anticipates my point that the narrative of land redemption is the response to the king’s question. Cf. Lundbom, Jeremiah 21–36, 499–509, who concludes that the action is symbolic. Gerald L. Keown, Pamela J. Scalise, and Thomas G. Smothers note how awkward the join is, with no relation between question and answer (Jeremiah 26–52 [WBC 27; Dallas: Word Books, 1995], 145–47). 10. Cf. Lundbom, Jeremiah 37–52, 232–43; Brueggemann, Commentary on Jeremiah, 324–26. Carroll, Jeremiah, 642–47, sees the episode as more “midrashic” than historical.

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(37:13–14)—charges he contests.11 Finally, the prophet’s being allowed to be dropped into Malchiah’s mud and then rescued from it (38:1–13) make tangible the verbal contest accompanying it: Are Jeremiah’s words harmful or not? Who is powerful in the city? Jeremiah speaks and then enacts to activate what might otherwise have been missed. Zedekiah appears at ¿rst to speak without enactment. But in fact, both characters enact: if Jeremiah has numerous small moments of ingress to and egress from con¿nement, Zedekiah persistently enacts the outcome he wants to be true, proceeding as though the Babylonians were not a serious threat. It is not too much to suggest that “literary Zedekiah” causes the fate of Jerusalem by “digging in” to the fate he refuses to see. Finally, there is a maze of quoted speech voiced by king, prophet, and their surrogates.12 Layered quotation provides a strategy for suggesting both similarity and difference: characters resemble each other as they share speech, and varieties of re-accentuation distance or contrast them. Again, our pair can be seen ostensibly at odds but quite startlingly conÀated. We will consider three places where they quote, asking what topics are handled by quotation, how the discourse is truthful or not, what interpretive insights the language bears, and the perceptible effects of it, at several levels discernible by a reader. In land deed needed (32:3–5), Zedekiah quotes Jeremiah’s general dispreferred position (“dig in and die”) to make several points: The quote is generally accurate in two senses: it is what Jeremiah says and it is what ultimately happens (chs. 39–42). More complex and germane is Zedekiah’s deeper question: Why Jeremiah should say such things and why they should happen. These points lie at the heart of the prophetic book: agency of the deity, role of the prophet, fate of the king. We can next speculate about why Zedekiah chooses his 11. Various scholars note the lack of realism: in a siege, how does Jeremiah leave the city? Lundbom notes that details are arranged “in a fashion not corresponding to the march of events” (Jeremiah 37–52, 51). 12. Regarding quotations: I am not here discussing the many places where Jeremiah quotes what God has given him to say. Thomas W. Overholt notes that Jeremiah (the book) has a far higher occurrence of quoted speech than do other books and says Jeremiah the character is distinctively characterized by such a practice. See his “Jeremiah 2 and the Problem of Audience Reaction,” CBQ 41 (1979): 262–73 (262–63). I use the siglum for paraphrases.

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“why do you talk like this?” question with its quotation, and how he may receive the prophet’s response-story (land deed needed) with its claims about the seriousness of the Babylonian threat and the urgency of time. We might urge him to hear: Will “Uncle Zedekiah’s” land be saved for his “nephew Jehoiachin” as apparently Uncle Hanamel’s will be for nephew Jeremiah? Can the nephew’s early departure from the city—or the uncle’s journey to where the nephew is con¿ned—redeem the uncle’s need?13 Yes, but not effectively in the uncle’s lifetime. As to effect: as we witness the interaction, there is no immediate narrative indication that the king is open to the persuasion the prophet tenders, though we will learn that the king has heard more than it seemed, perhaps adding to his culpability. The narrative slave reprieve revoked is more oblique, with the crucial language alluded to as though familiar rather than being quoted, a sort of implied quote. Jeremiah brings traditional legal words of slave release (34:8–11, 13–17) into relationship with the general non-compliance of Israelites/Judeans over time and speci¿cally to the action of the king in the midst of the siege.14 Jeremiah charges that Zedekiah re-used the legal language, ¿rst to obey it and then to renege when circumstances changed (34:8–11). That is, when the siege seemed serious the king and elites liberated slaves; when the siege seemed less intense, all took their slaves back.15 The surface questions: Is the quoting valid? No character— including the king—contests it. Is the legal practice urged here condign with the king’s situation? Scholars seem agreed that Zedekiah’s act is unique in terms of biblical practice; but Jeremiah’s aligning it with the general liberation practice, if unusual, seems well-suited to the point he 13. On literary analogy, see Roncace, Jeremiah, and also Nancy C. Lee, “Exposing a Buried Subtext in Jeremiah and Lamentations: Going after Baal and … Abel,” in Diamond, O’Connor, and Stulman, eds., Troubling Jeremiah, 87–122 (111–13), for a sketch of how this narrative strategy works and some examples of how characters loom in resemblance to others at particular moments (e.g., how Jeremiah and Jehoiakim recall and resemble Isaiah and Ahaz or Hezekiah). Analogy is useful, especially when it is not simply impressionistic and ephemeral but sustained over time. 14. William Holladay, Jeremiah 2: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah Chapters 26–52 (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), 238–39, offers legal texts (Deut 15:1 and 12 and also Exod 21:2 and Lev 25:40–41), while noting that the quote is actually a blend of these passages, offering a welter of intertexts with their possibilities. 15. If, as scholars speculate, the king and his elites freed slaves in times of stress so that their chances for survival would be improved, we see a similar thing explicitly with the situation of the king and the prophet in 37:21–22.

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wants to make about broken promises. Before this conversation, the king may not have supposed that his deed was related to the general law of slave release, that link being offered by the prophet. That is, we, reading, are “socialized” into Jeremiah’s connection, which may not have been obvious until he made it. The effect of the re-used speech (quotations explicit and implicit) is to establish the king as unreliable and allow the prophet and deity to slide into that same role as they share the reneging strategy of the quotation. Jeremiah hints that God will be as faithful to a promise as was the king, then offering a promise manifestly not to be counted upon. The utterance receives intensi¿cation when the king intermittently enacts his unreliability in the matter of Jeremiah’s freedom/ captivity (e.g., 37:20–21). The deity and prophet join the king here—all being liars. In the Malchiah’s mud episode, the king’s men overhear Jeremiah’s preaching, which the narrator summarizes as though from what the four construct: Jeremiah has said, “Thus says the LORD: ‘Those who stay in the city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence; but those who go out to the Chaldeans shall live; they shall have their lives as a prize of war, and live.’ And ‘This city shall surely be handed over to the army of the king of Babylon and be taken’” (38:2–3). The quotation is generally accurate, and true in that shortly it will be ¿lled full. Why has the prophet continued to say such things is the next concern of the men who quote him: motivation and effect. They appraise ¿rst effect and then motive (38:4–5): the prophetic speaker is accused of malevolence, his words weighed as lethal. Their ¿rst claim about speaker intent is urgent in the whole book, surely in our material. The impact of the speech on the soldiers in the city is impossible to know, but we witness its effect on the four who—repeating the words—¿nd them so dangerous that the speaker must be silenced. Their view persuades the king as well, who, however, had not acted on his own when he’d heard these words before. Into the verbal fray steps foreigner Ebed-melech to oppose this construction and persuade the king that his surrogates are wrong, making controversial precisely what we need to assess: Is the prophet speaking against the city, his words evidence of a malevolent intent? The quotation and its fresh setting, brought forward to the king again by Ebedmelech, counter-accuses the four men of malevolent motive and lethal effect—imprisoning Jeremiah until he die of starvation in a besieged city. The quotation picks up a new layer of signi¿cance as it enters a third mouth, so to speak. The layered language puts the spotlight once again on whether the king is reliable, is a man of his word, will free a prisoner and stick to it, so that he not die of neglect and starvation in the

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bottom of a pit, sunk in the mud. The king accepts Ebed-melech over against the claim of the four, contradicting as well his own assertion of 38:5.16 The servant acts to save both the prophet and the king, bridging them in his gesture. The complex battle of quotations we have so brieÀy considered may be summarized: in virtually every instance, the topic is the duration of the Babylonian threat, with its attendant question of what YHWH plans for Jerusalem and its inhabitants. The threat from the Babylonians is either not serious or long-term (claim Zedekiah and his people); or alternatively, it is both grave and enduring (say Jeremiah and Ebedmelech). Whose words save and whose destroy? Who is speaking truthfully and who is not? Can YHWH contemplate doing such a thing as destroy the city and those trapped in it? Is Jeremiah telling the truth over against other competing voices? Is there a way out for the king, and for the prophet? Who is rescued and how? Summary of Six Snapshots. Earlier able to come and go at will, each becomes con¿ned in a besieged city, with their plights worsening as the cordon tightens; Jeremiah’s multiple places of particular con¿nement seem more obvious, but the king is as trapped as the prophet. Each describes himself as surrounded by erstwhile friends who are in fact foes. Linked sometimes by messengers, we see the pair several times, heads together, conferring as though colleagues. The topic absorbing them is one: How serious and durable is the threat from Babylonian besiegers? We also see each with complex loyalties: Zedekiah is by de¿nition God’s man and by one-time arrangement, Nebuchadnezzar’s. Jeremiah is clearly God’s man and suspected of collaboration with the Babylonians, a false charge, perhaps, but gaining credence when Nebuchadnezzar’s men exercise special care for him after the collapse of the city. Each needs the other to help him out of the trap in which each is con¿ned. They are locked into matched vulnerability. Perhaps surprisingly, each attempts to help the other, with the king having greater success than the prophet. That is, we see the king helping the prophet out of a pit more often than we see the prophet helping the king to an exit. Another way to view this collaboration is to say that so long as one of them remains trapped, the other stays with him, or that the king’s refusal to leave constrains the prophet.

16. Ebed-melech is both bound (his foreign status) and free (his action) as he mediates. Roncace, Jeremiah, 85–86, comments usefully on facets of this minor character.

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Listening closely, we hear them share words to a surprising extent. Though Jeremiah seems blunt, consistent, and to the point while Zedekiah denies and delays, in fact both the king and his surrogates quote the prophetic words they hate, testifying to and reinforcing their signi¿cance while trying to counter and silence the words. The prophet treats the king’s inability to hear seriously by a constant stream of efforts to engage him in every genre imaginable. We hear the king, consigning the prophet to the Malchiah-house pit, remark on his own inability to act freely (38:5). And, when having consigned the prophet’s feet to the mud of that pit, he will shortly ¿nd out that he is in much the same position. Most provocatively Ebed-melech acts to release both of the “prisoners” in the same moment: the king from consigning the prophet to certain death and the prophet from dying. The Seventh Scene: 38:14–28 We now arrive at the ¿nal encounter of these contending and collaborating characters so mutually implicated in each other’s fates.17 Position. First we see them conferring face-to-face at the third gate of the temple, to which Jeremiah has been released and Zedekiah apparently comes unhampered—or constrained only by the intensifying siege of Jerusalem. Jeremiah arrives, narratively speaking, fresh from his lowest position, sunk in the mud at the Malchiah-house pit, both placed and freed at Zedekiah’s word. Jeremiah has suffered his worst and will not be dropped in there again. Zedekiah, about to learn that his own feet are also trapped in mud, has his worst position ahead of him, a fate inevitable once he no longer engages with Jeremiah. So as the two ¿gures cross here, each needs something from the other and each is vulnerable to the other’s possible actions. As they confer and bargain, their ostensibly uneven captor/captive positions blur so that they resemble each other in their need for reciprocal help. Discourse. As before, we look at speech plain-spoken, quoted. The king opens (38:14–15)18 with a compound request, spoken more plainly by him than we have heard to date: The prophet parries: The king counters half of this prophetic rejoinder (38:16), sign of his determination to proceed, reinforcing his request with an oath: But he also con¿rms Jeremiah’s assertion by withholding any promise to obey. The king’s oath purports to be a promise of safety for the prophet, but can Zedekiah deliver on this word, since we heard him say in 38:5 that he cannot count on landing a word effectively? We have seen the king break his word to freed slaves, have witnessed royal indecision on the handing over of Jeremiah, when pressed. But still, having grounded his own position and offered insurance to his interlocutor, Zedekiah does not, in our hearing, actually make a speci¿c request—provocative gap. But we ¿ll in the question from what the pair discuss and from earlier requests: It is the question for each: It is what the king wants to know, with which he needs help. It is also that with which the king will shortly remind the prophet that he ought to be concerned. We glean verbal evidence that he has in fact listened to Jeremiah’s previous plainspeak—both a good and a bad sign. The king’s capacity to have heard what the prophet is saying might have helped him but ultimately renders him more culpable when he refuses to heed it. Jeremiah offers the same choice as before (38:17–18): causing defeat, destruction of the city by ¿re, and capture of the king and heirs. Is Jeremiah’s language reliable? Is this proffered option still viable? Historically it is impossible to say. Literarily, we have hints: Jeremiah has already enacted a departure from Jerusalem that was thwarted, misrepresented and distorted, resulting in accusation, arrest, imprisonment. We have not yet seen the prophet able to save the king. Who can assist the other effectively? Neither, it will turn out. But in any case and in a moment of great apparent candor, Zedekiah explains why he cannot do what Jeremiah counsels (38:19). First we note that he has in fact considered it, even if to reject it. This is an amazing moment in the long Jeremiah book, with the king in effect reducing the whole matter of Babylon vs. Judah and Jerusalem to his own fear of what might happen to him at the hands of the people of Judah who have done already the very thing Jeremiah has been urging, some sort of quasivoluntary submission to Babylon. The king cannot act because he fears abuse at the hands of those who have done what Jeremiah says he must do—place himself in the power of Babylon. The prophet stands before the king, abused for his own controversial actions. Again, character overlap. The ethical/moral/spiritual question

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posed, ultimately, is whether dreadful fear will deter integrity or not. Jeremiah has made one response in his life, and the king stands poised at his own de¿ning moment. For an instant, again, they nearly coincide. But the king backs off (and some feel the prophet does too!). That is, Zedekiah looks in the mirror at Jeremiah, sees a man abused by kin and foes, declines to risk inviting what Jeremiah’s life embodies. We may construct language for the king: That is, again in literary terms, the main disincentive for this whole catastrophe is the king’s fear of the trap he has put himself in, speci¿cally in his relations with Babylon and Egypt which have made what he fears inevitable. Jeremiah then (38:20), perhaps fatefully, pushes this candidly poignant utterance aside—as has often been done to his own words—and replies, again with his best advice: The prophet paints for the king a scenario given him by God (38:21–23), he says, a proleptic vision of what has not yet happened to the king but, presumably, is about to happen (though we will not witness it in this form).19 Jeremiah says: Prophet and king face off at what is, is, arguably, both climax and nadir of their relationship. The wifeless and childless prophet calls forth the reproach of the king’s family to taunt or upbraid him for failing to do what Jeremiah wants him to do. But, as before, the prophet is ineffective at this crucial moment and distinctive opportunity. Astonishingly, this intense and candid exchange breaks off to wind down quickly. Zedekiah makes no response to what Jeremiah has uttered except to insist that it not be made public. That is, without engaging the content of the scenario projected, the king moves to disaster containment (38:24): This is yet another remarkable gap or silence on the part of the king, inviting our interpretation. Perhaps we read the king as so shocked by what he is shown that he must suppress it from others’ hearing and from his own consciousness. Jeremiah, I suggest, has used language so powerful that, instead of providing the king an incentive, frightens him into the very corner he was emerging from. Each, having been vulnerable, is exposed. 19. Lundbom calls it a vision (Jeremiah 37–52, 77); Brueggemann wonders whether it is a lament or a taunt song (Commentary on Jeremiah, 290).

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Each retreats. The king takes the initiative to seek cover for both, opens an escape hatch they can both take—back into their prisons. Zedekiah says (38:25–26): The king quotes his of¿cials, apparently knows just what they’ll say, and he tells Jeremiah what to say, quoting him as well from a previous narrative moment (37:20): Do we, does the Jeremiah of our constructing, hear that as a threat as well as a promise? Is Zedekiah’s also a his a veiled ?20 Does Jeremiah lose integrity here, as a number of commentators say?21 I suggest the prophet’s silence cannot bear so clear a construction, for Jeremiah now falls silent—a rare moment in this long book. He makes no reply to this royal offer, perhaps circling back to his opening remark at 38:15: His discourse shuts down, and so far as we can see, he falls into the plan that Zedekiah makes for his own royal protection, for their mutual protection. And the narrator lets us infer (38:27–28) that Jeremiah complied, since he was given the favor Zedekiah told him to say they had been discussing: no return to his worst pit, but no real reprieve, either. Summary of Scene Seven. We see the positions of the king and prophet coinciding more closely than ever before while they confer as nearequals at the third gate of the temple and share sunk-in-the-mud-ness. The scene ends with neither able to make a real escape, though each seems to improve his worst possibility. Jeremiah does not go back deep in, and Zedekiah pushes away the vision of his kin, reproaching him as they all fall to the Babylonians. Each has basically one move left: to exit to the non-preferred choice. Their mutual need and mutual vulnerability is intensi¿ed. The king is candid in a way unprecedented and thus becomes vulnerable; the prophet must rely on the king’s word, which we and he have seen repeatedly is not worth much. But these two come as close to helping each other as 20. Roncace shows how deceiver and deceived roles toggle in the person of the king (Jeremiah, 98–100). Lundbom explains it as a veiled threat (Jeremiah 37–52, 78). 21. Roncace so charges: see Jeremiah, 55 and 111–13, for two different sorts of arguments; Callaway too holds the prophet responsible for misrepresentation of truth (“Telling,” 257). I disagree: the king, anticipating the language of his of¿cers, crafts an utterance that quotes Jeremiah on an earlier occasion. The king also intonates the complex utterance as a promise and threat and hands it to Jeremiah, who does not, in our hearing, take it up. There is not suf¿cient clarity to say Jeremiah dissimulated. Jeremiah’s utterance of what the king told him to say is ultimately unveri¿able.

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ever happens. But ultimately, the “nephew” cannot help the “uncle”; their land will be lost, short-term. The king’s discourse is, among other things, characterized as consisting of a question he ought have asked and a reply he ought have given, but he fails at both moments. At arguably the key moment in Jeremiah’s long engagement with the king, his strong language is counter-productive, scaring rather than encouraging Zedekiah, catalyzing exactly the wrong response. In the end, the king dissimulates, if does not quite lie. What he contrives is not fabricated but quoted from Jeremiah’s speech of 37:20. And the prophet, sometimes accused of dishonestly acquiescing to royal dishonesty, allows the quote to stand without re-using or repudiating it. It may not be his most transparent moment, but I don’t think it lacks integrity. The prophet falls silent at the end of the episode, allowing the king to hand him “old language” to use in fresh circumstances, allowing the possibility that neither man can talk straight. Conclusion The point I wish to stress is the ostensible failure of the prophet, but in several ways so as to suggest insight. It seems undeniable that Jeremiah “bungles” his most crucial opportunity. What was required: to weigh situations, calculate outcomes and preach those to hearers unfamiliar with, offended or threatened by such intensity, to convince those heavily invested in alternate outcomes. It is not simply a matter of forcing a choice but of catalyzing one.22 A prophet must make others see as well as hear, help us to contemplate what can be imagined. Jeremiah and his biblical peers attempt this by authorizing God to threaten reprisals or tender rewards. Brueggemann says bluntly: “YHWH’s governance is comprehensive, massive, and irresistible.”23 All must submit in “willing obedience or in disastrous judgment.” Moderns, even committed believers, may draw back from this massive club of overweening agency and violence. “I can’t listen to any more of that violent language,” is a frequent and not unjusti¿ed complaint of Jeremiah readers. But perhaps the narratives makes that exact point: Jeremiah does not succeed in convincing Zedekiah by threats of what God will do if the king does not 22. In his Like Fire in the Bones: Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), Brueggemann offers some examples of what we are being offered by Jeremiah (see pp. 37–39). See also his “Next Steps in Jeremiah Studies,” in Diamond, O’Connor, and Stulman, eds., Troubling Jeremiah, 404–22 (417). 23. Brueggemann, “Next Steps,” 416.

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conform to the prophet’s ukase. We see, rather, that the negative hypothetical uttered by the prophet frightened the king from a choice Jeremiah urgently wanted him to make. At the moment of Zedekiah’s greatest vulnerability, Jeremiah bullied rather than enticed, offered a threatening rather than a consoling image. Instead of preaching to the king’s tiny openness, the prophet pounded on his vast fear. But of course in narrative terms, he was not to know that his last opportunity to save “the drowning” had slammed shut behind him. That there are seven scenes for consideration means there might have been more. Jeremiah can be likened to a survivor of a shipwreck, assisting others into lifeboats without yet taking a place himself. At no moment can he say clearly that efforts with the panicked and Àailing are pointless, that it is time for him to save himself. Even at the collapse of the city, the prophet remains, his ministry continues. Indeed, as the book winds down, Jeremiah appears not to have gained the fruits of this Zedekiah moment that I would like him to claim, unless the larger point is that threats and violence are not effective. Ultimately, in the design of the book, the failure(s) of the prophet draw the more attention to the group of early re-settlers in Babylon, those ¿rst fruits who seem to have responded to the preaching of the prophet and the pleas of the deity, offered by both plans of well-being and not disaster.24 If we change viewing angles, the book argues that neither the monarchy-in-exile nor the indigenous one will survive: neither uncle nor nephew under his own ¿g tree. No community remaining in Judah will prosper tangibly, and no future in Egypt will thrive biblically, even with Jeremiah’s company. The fatal literary embrace of prophet and king helps us to see in theological and spiritual terms. Survival is not ultimately about one king or one prophet but about the whole people. Compelling and consoling? It seems so.

24. See Barbara Green, Jeremiah and God’s Plans of Well-Being (OTS; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013).

BARE NAKED:

A GENDER ANALYSIS OF THE NAKED BODY IN JEREMIAH 13 Amy Kalmanofsky

Like much of the book of Jeremiah, Jer 13 provides perfect fodder for text critics who seek to identify distinct literary units and editorial layers within Jeremiah. The transition from prose to poetry and the seemingly disparate foci convince critics to divide the chapter into as many as six distinct units.1 In this essay, I will not attempt to render the entire chapter into a seamless literary whole. Rather, I cross the prose–poetry divide and offer one way to see literary coherence within the chapter by focusing on the image of the naked body. In Jer 13:1–11, God commands the prophet to put on a linen loincloth. After wearing it without washing it, God commands Jeremiah to remove the loincloth and bury it beneath a rock at Perath. Sometime later, Jeremiah must uncover the rotted loincloth, which reÀects the state of disgraced and soon-to-be-exiled Israel. In the poetic half of the chapter, the prophet speaks for God and addresses Israel directly as a disgraced woman. In Jer 13:22 and 26, Jeremiah threatens to lift up her skirts to reveal her genitals.2 Though the prophet must cover his, while Israel must expose hers, both passages evoke the 1. In his commentary, William L. Holladay perceives Jer 13:1–12a, 12b–14, 15–17, 18–19, 20–27 to be literary units. See William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1 (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 393–417. William McKane identi¿es the same literary units as Holladay in his commentary A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah. Vol. 1, I–XXV (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 285–314. Jack R. Lundbom divides the chapter differently and considers Jer 13:1– 11, 12–14, 15–17, 18–20, 21–23, 24–27 to be units. See Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1–20 (AB 21A; New York: Doubleday, 1999), 665–91. 2. Jeremiah 13:22 reads: “When you say to yourself, ‘Why do these things happen to me?’ For your great iniquity, your skirts will be lifted up and your genitals violated.” Jeremiah 13:26 reads: “I will pull your skirts over your face and your shame will be seen.”

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image of the naked body, particularly the exposed genitals,3 and invite a gender critique. I use Jer 13 to address questions related to the Bible’s general orientation toward the naked body, as well as the way the Bible relates speci¿cally to the gendered naked body. ReÀecting the Bible’s general discomfort with nakedness, Jer 13 presents the clothed body as the ideal. Both the naked male body and the naked female body are associated with Israel’s disgrace. Yet, I argue, Jer 13 reÀects the broader Mesopotamian culture and presents and utilizes these bodies differently. Whereas Jer 13 contextualizes the male body within a narrative that requires its exposure, it directly presents the frontally exposed female body as a disturbing image. By dressing and undressing, the male prophet performs a symbolic action which incorporates his naked body. Identifying with the clothing, Israel witnesses this act and understands its disgrace. Yet the prophet is not disgraced through the symbolic action. His body communicates a message to the people about their shame, but it does not shame him. In fact, it conveys a powerful message about the naked male body, which, if clothed, resembles the divine body clothed in the glory of Israel, as Jer 13:11 expresses: “Just as the loincloth clings to the loins of a man, thus the whole house of Israel and Judah cling to me, says YHWH, to be my people, for fame, praise, and glory.” In contrast, the naked female body in Jer 13 is not part of an action that requires nudity. Rather, it is an image presented in this chapter beside the laboring woman, the spotted leopard, and the Cushite, all part of the prophet’s rhetorical repertoire. Jeremiah’s use of this image reveals the visceral power of the naked female body to shock, shame, and even arouse his audience. It suggests that the Bible perceives and utilizes the naked female body differently than the naked male body. Before addressing the differences between depictions of naked female and male bodies in Mesopotamia and Jer 13, I consider the Hebrew Bible’s general orientation toward nakedness. Nakedness famously appears in the Bible’s ¿rst narrative and is associated with Eve and Adam’s act of disobedience and their consequent altered state. Before Eve eats the forbidden fruit, the Bible notes in Gen 2:25: “The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.” Immediately after consuming the fruit, Gen 3:7 records: “Both of their eyes were opened 3. Throughout the Bible, nakedness implies the particular exposure of the genitals. See Athalya Brenner, The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire & ‘Sexuality’ in the Hebrew Bible (BIS 26; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 42. The phrase “to uncover the nakedness” is a euphemism for sexual activity that, according to Brenner, becomes a “technical term for incest.”

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and they knew that they were naked. They sewed ¿g leaves and made for themselves loincloths.” Like Jeremiah, though with a different word (=:%), Adam and Eve cover their genitals. By eating the fruit, they have de¿ed God and feel naked. Feeling exposed and vulnerable, they hide so that God will not discover them. But of course God does, and demands to know how Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness. After punishing all responsible, God then exiles Adam and Eve from the garden. Before sending them out, God makes clothing out of animal skins and dresses them. This narrative lays out the Bible’s general attitude toward nakedness. Initially, nakedness is not a compromised or undesired state. It reÀects Adam and Eve’s intellectual, sexual, and moral innocence. Yet, in the more familiar post-sin world, nakedness is associated with human vulnerability, self-consciousness, and shame.4 As Michael Satlow observes, nakedness in the Bible “signi¿es poverty and vulnerability.”5 Clothing, as Athalya Brenner notes, symbolizes culture.6 From this point forward, the Bible considers nakedness, whether male or female, to be inappropriate, particularly in a ritual context, which, according to Brenner, is an expression of culture.7 Exodus 20:26 prohibits anyone from exposing their nakedness when they ascend the altar steps.8 Exodus 28:42 commands Israel’s priests to wear linen underwear for the purpose of 4. Mieke Bal points out that it is the awareness of nakedness in the Genesis narrative, and not nakedness itself, that induces shame; she writes: “But awareness and shame are not immediately related. The ¿rst mention of shame, however ambiguous, is made by the man in 3:10 when the man replies to Jahweh that they hid because they were naked. It is Jahweh’s appearance, not nakedness itself, that gives shame” (“Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character [A Reading of Genesis 1–3],” Poetics Today 6, no. 1 [1985]: 21–42 [31]). 5. See Michael L. Satlow, “Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity,” JBL 116 (1997): 429–54 (447–48). 6. Brenner, Intercourse of Knowledge, 42. 7. Although no explanation is given as to why the priests must cover their genitals, Brenner posits: “Nakedness is a shameful state in culture. Thus representatives of culture should be especially careful about their clothing: this, presumably, is why [male] priests’ clothing are prescribed with elaboration (Exodus 28 and 29); and they should wear linen pants while climbing the altar stairs to of¿ciate so that their genitals, their ‘nakedness’ (!#:3), is not exposed (Exod. 28.42)” (Intercourse of Knowledge, 42). 8. This prohibition may be a polemic against the ritual nudity practiced throughout the ancient Near East. Gods and Goddesses of the ancient Near East were often displayed naked to indicate their fertility and power and priests and worshipers were naked for certain rituals such as sacri¿ces and initiation rites. See Larissa Bonfante, “Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art,” AJA 93 (1989): 543–70 (545).

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covering their nakedness. Michal condemns her husband, King David, for exposing himself while escorting the ark to the City of David in 2 Sam 6:20. What appears to have been a common practice in ancient Israel (or at least a common motif in its art and literature) of stripping defeated enemies conveys the vulnerability and shame of exposing nakedness that are evident throughout the ancient world. Ancient Near Eastern iconography preserves images of naked soldiers defeated in battle9 and the Bible records similar practices. Samson kills and strips thirty Philistines in Judg 14:19. In 2 Sam 10:4, the Ammonite king Hanun cuts the beards and exposes the buttocks of David’s servants. Jeremiah’s removal of his loincloth in Jer 13 may predict how Babylon will capture and strip Israel. In Isa 20, the prophet strips as a sign to the Egyptians and the Cushites that Assyria will capture and strip them. If stripping, as these images suggest, indicates vulnerability and defeat, then clothing the naked indicates care and honor. Throughout the Bible, the clothed body marks an individual’s personal and professional status and well-being. The poor must be clothed (Isa 58:7). A captive woman must be stripped of her foreign garb before she can marry an Israelite (Deut 21:10–14). Priests wear special dress, and the high priest has unique clothes and adornments (Exod 28). Jeremiah’s linen loincloth may be part of his priestly costume.10 By clothing Adam and Eve before sending them into exile, God indicates that, though angry, God continues to care for them. Throughout the prophetic texts, God displays similar concern for the nation Israel. Just as God dresses Adam and Eve in animal skins, God dresses and provides Israel with ¿nery that conveys Israel’s unique status among the nations and, as Jer 13:11 suggests, reÀects God’s glory. In elaborate detail, the prophets describe God’s adornment of Israel in the passages that personify Israel as God’s wife. For example, in Ezek 16, God discovers the naked baby Israel abandoned in a ¿eld. He covers her 9. In her study of the representation of women in Mesopotamia, Zainab Bahrani observes: “The tradition of depicting both live prisoners and dead enemy soldiers undressed begins in Uruk-Jamdat Nasr seal carvings (c. 3000 B.C.E.) and continues into the ¿rst millennium B.C.E. By the Early Dynastic period in the mid-third millennium B.C.E., this iconography of death and subjugation appears to have become customary” (Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia [London: Routledge, 2001], 60). Despite the prevalence of these images, Bahrani suggests the iconography does not represent an actual practice of stripping defeated soldiers in battle. Rather, Bahrani views these images as comprising a visual trope of defeat. 10. Jeremiah 1:1 identi¿es Jeremiah as a priest from Anathoth.

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nakedness and dresses her in embroidered garments, linen, and silk. He adorns her with gold and silver bracelets and rings, and a splendid crown (Ezek 16:10–13). Despite God’s lavish care, Israel is ungrateful. In fact, she grows too con¿dent in her beauty and does not recognize that God provided her with the means to be beautiful (vv. 15–17). Angry and hurt, God punishes Israel by stripping her of her ¿nery and exposing her naked body (v. 39).11 Naked Israel painfully learns that it was God who provided her with the clothing and the jewels. Basing their arguments on passages from Ezekiel and Hosea, as well as Jer 13, commentators suggest that stripping was the typical punishment for an adulterous wife. A husband removes the garments he provided and only he has the right to remove, thereby symbolizing that he no longer provides for, protects, or claims his adulterous wife.12 Despite the prophetic depictions of stripping adulterous wives, nowhere does the Bible legislate stripping as a punishment for adultery. Leviticus 20:10 and Deut 22:22 condemn an adulterous man or woman to death without legislating that they must be publicly stripped. The ritual inÀicted upon a woman accused of adultery described in Num 5:11–31, does not demand that a guilty woman be stripped. Similarly, Deut 22:20–21 legislates stoning but not stripping for a woman who is found not to be a virgin upon marriage. Since the depictions of stripping adulterous wives appear in prophetic texts within a metaphorical context, I contend that they are best understood metaphorically, as part of the marriage metaphor,13 and rhetorically, 11. God punishes Israel similarly in Hos 2:11–12. 12. Commenting on Ezek 16:39, Moshe Greenberg notes: “The angry threat of Hosea 2:5—‘lest I strip her naked and leave her as on the day of her birth’… presumably reÀects more closely what happened to such a woman: her husband (or males of the family) inÀicted the punishment, symbolizing the withdrawal of all her husband’s goods and gifts from her.” Greenberg cites ¿fteenth-century B.C.E. Nuzi documents about a divorced wife who leaves one husband for another for support. See Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (AB 22; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 287. Similarly, Deborah W. Rooke writes: “These examples, then, portray the uncovering of female nakedness as a punishment for sexual immorality that was inÀicted upon women by the men who claimed ownership of the women’s sexuality, and indicate that men expressed such ownership by the provision of materials to cover the woman’s nakedness (presumably a way of speaking of a husband’s duty to provide for his wife, as reÀected in Exod. 21.10)” (“The Bare Facts: Gender and Nakedness in Leviticus 18,” in A Question of Sex? Gender and Difference in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond [ed. Deborah W. Rooke; HBM 4; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2007], 20–38 [28]). 13. Peggy L. Day similarly argues against using the prophetic texts as evidence for a historical reality; she writes: “The problem with regarding these texts as

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as part of the prophet’s arsenal. These texts reÀect the Bible’s general association of nakedness with vulnerability and shame, and support the perception of the clothed body as ideal. Jeremiah 13 and other prophetic accounts of stripping female Israel communicate a powerful theological message through their use of the naked body. Clothing symbolizes God’s care and protection, but also God’s presence. To be stripped of clothes is to be stripped of God and to be rendered vulnerable and impoverished. Naked Israel no longer wears God’s glory and bene¿ts from God’s protection. Naked Israel no longer has a relationship with God. God makes this clear when he warns the prophet about promiscuous Israel’s grim fate in Hos 2:5: “Lest I strip her naked and set her up as on the day of her birth. I will make her like a desert, like the parched land. I will kill her with thirst.” Hosea associates Israel’s naked body with the desert—a landscape void of God. Before she knew God, Israel was naked in the desert in need of God’s protection. Now, rejected by God, she returns naked to the desert to die. Similarly, God justi¿es his punishment of Israel in Jer 13:25–26 (('16¡+3 ('+#< '=6