Textualization and the Book of Jeremiah

Textualization implies the emergence of the concept of a “text” as a specific object that needs to be handled in a specific way: an object that is conceptualized as part of a tradition of reading and interpreting—indeed, an object that is constituted by the desire to preserve and make available a specific utterance (irrespective of whether that utterance was originally produced orally or in writing). Written texts therefore are the results of the desire of an individual or a community to establish a tradition for a speech act that the individuals or the community intend to preserve. As is the case with oral texts, written texts can give rise to ritualized or otherwise significant uses of the text-object. This is the key to the understanding of prophetic collections in the Bible, and especially in the book of Jeremiah. While “tradition” (Überlieferung) is the aim of textualization, that tradition comes in various shapes and forms. The growth of prophetic books is an excellent illustration of Konrad Ehlich’s analysis of the characteristics of textualization and its purposes, especially with regard to the fact that prophetic oracles were, in ancient Israel and Judah, textualized for the purpose of being preserved and performed and of serving as the basis for Fortschreibungen.

Playing with Death

The task of identifying a single rationale for the violence on display in the book of Jeremiah may end with a coherent answer, but perhaps not a satisfactory one. That violence serves a reforming purpose seems satisfactory to theological readers in search of theodicy, as well trauma analyses that find the violence problematic but understandable. Other interpreters of Jeremiah, such as feminists and postcolonialists, struggle with the gratuitous and seemingly arbitrary nature of the violence. While not an attempt to rationalize the violence, this chapter engages the arbitrariness of the violence through a systematic analysis of four targets of violence in the book of Jeremiah: the prophet, the feminized Israel/Judah as adulterous wife, foreign nations, and the earth. By distinguishing these separate targets, the chapter examines how gender, sexuality, nationality, and speciesism intersect in the enactment of the rhetorical violence in the book. These delineations also set the stage for a central claim of the chapter, that of exceptional violence. Building upon Carl Schmidt’s notion that exceptional violence stems from exceptional vulnerability that requires the state of exception to use unrestrained violence, the chapter considers how the violence as narrated in Jeremiah not only performs this exceptionalism but also has exceptions. By examining who/what dies from the violence in the book, the chapter points out how the politics of death is played out upon different targets.

The Double Text of Jeremiah Revisited

From the time of the Church Fathers, it has been recognized that the Greek translation (LXX) of the book of Jeremiah is shorter than the received Hebrew text (MT). Modern assessments of this textual situation have viewed the LXX as between one-eighth and one-sixth shorter than the corresponding Masoretic text of the book of Jeremiah. Since manuscripts have been found at Qumran that seem to confirm the antiquity of the shorter LXX recension, many explanations for this editorial discrepancy have focused on the phenomenon of editorial expansion within the Masoretic tradition. This chapter presents a range of counter-evidence demonstrating that the LXX has been subjected to a sustained process of editorial concision.

Jeremiah and Prophetic Authority

The book of Jeremiah provides a fitting opportunity for dealing with the issue of prophetic authority. While many scholars are inclined to focus on the ways in which the book of Jeremiah construes prophetic authority, to lay bare the patterns that turn Jeremiah into the authoritative mouthpiece of YHWH, in stark opposition of those who speak falsehood, the author’s query in this chapter is different. The author’s key interest is in prophetic authority as a sociohistorical phenomenon. What did the interaction of prophets and their public look like in late monarchic Judah? And how was authority bestowed on a prophet?

Jeremiah

This chapter explores the various dimensions of the narrative portrayal of Jeremiah as a traumatized prophet. The author proposes that the book of Jeremiah could be considered as an extended trauma narrative with the prophet as one of its leading characters, seeking to make sense of the exceedingly traumatic events associated with the Babylonian invasion and exile that threatened to subsume Jeremiah and his fellow Judeans. Particularly what have been called the Confessions of Jeremiah (Jer 11:18–20; 12:1–6; 15:10–21, 17:14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–13) seem to be particularly suited to be read in terms of the rhetorical strategies identified by Laurie Vickroy, according to which characters in trauma narratives are shown to react to wound-inflicting circumstances. The author argues that these various dimensions of Jeremiah as Traumatized Prophet are not only central to an understanding of the book of Jeremiah, but also may help readers, both then and now, deal with the reality of trauma that includes the various options for sense-making amidst trauma.

Language Variation in the Book of Jeremiah and Its Cultural and Social Background

Syntactic-stylistic analysis of the linguistic variation in the book of Jeremiah points to the cultural/sociohistorical context of the different text groups. The poignant, emotional style of Jeremianic poetry (Mowinckel’s A corpus) is marked by the often extremely high frequency of short clauses, and the low incidence of subordinate clauses and noun groups (similarly in most texts in Jeremiah 30–31; 46–51). These features characterize the “lean, brisk style” of spontaneous spoken discourse/oral literature. Noun groups and subordinate clauses are highly frequent in the narrative corpus (B) and parenetic prose (C), whereas short clauses are far less frequent, as characteristic of the “intricate, elaborate style” of written texts. Where these corpora reflect the scribal desk, corpus A is close to the oral arena. Detailed analysis shows, however, that all corpora are open-ended. These considerations suggest an initial oral-written symbiosis in the prophetic performance and the commission to writing of the prophetic utterances. In the scribal milieu of the Babylonian/Persian era, a new class of religious formulators took up the prophetic tradition and reformulated it in the complex style characteristic of the scribal desk.

Jeremiah Interpretation in Subaltern Context

This generation has witnessed a great interest in the study of the book of Jeremiah. Unfortunately, much of this scholarship is unreadable for the church and for ordinary readers because it mainly concentrates on diachronic questions, neglecting pastoral-theological and sociohistorical ones. Yet, the voices one hears in the book of Jeremiah are deeply in touch with the historical realities of the seventh-century bce as well as twenty-first-century situations of poverty, war, injustice, and corruption. The best way to accomplish such interpretation is by acknowledging the valuable tools conceived by the experts of the book of Jeremiah and using these tools in a language understandable to ordinary readers today in their varying contexts.