Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: Jeremiah and Lamentations

By A. R. Pete Diamond and David J. A. Clines

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Diamond and Clines' introduction to and concise commentary on Jeremiah and Lamentations. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers.
 
Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context.
 
The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781467453813

Book preview

Jeremiah

A. R. Pete Diamond

INTRODUCTION

Reading Peculiarities Posed by the Book

Israel’s prophetic collections do not make easy reading. Jeremiah provides no exception and, in addition, offers peculiarities of its own.

It starts clearly enough with the third person introduction attributing the contents of the book to one Jeremiah ben Hilkiah—an ancient Judean recipient of divine oracles during Judah’s late preexilic period. In short, Jeremiah was an Israelite prophet (1:5).

But for the modern reader the ensuing fifty-two chapters render the attribution increasingly problematic and of little use as a guide to reading—at least on modern Western expectations and experiences of books that collect the words of … notable personages and religious figures.

For example, chs. 26–46 primarily consist of third person narrative or first person prose speeches. The narratives give us the clearest concrete representations of Jeremiah’s activities set within unsuccessful Judean attempts to prevent the successful imperial strategies of the Neo-Babylonian rulers from incorporating Syria-Palestine into its Levantine Empire. Nevertheless, the rest of the Jeremiah collection consists of poetic and prose speeches rarely so concrete and helpful with respect to social occasion and historical context. How is a reader to manage these variant strategies employed in the representation of Jeremiah’s words?

No chronological or topical scheme seems to govern the structure of the book as we have it. True, the third person narrative clusters around two events occurring in 597/598, and 586/587—stages in the final siege and destruction of Judah’s royal capital, Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the book does not follow a consistent chronologically sequenced narration of the events—episodes appear dischronologized. Use is made of chronologically sequenced material only to violate quickly such temporal evocations. Similarly, the material clusters around common topics or themes—for example, chs. 21–24 offer oracles against national leadership and chs. 46–51 offer oracles against foreign nations—but it does not represent characteristic strategies for presenting Jeremiah’s words. Nor is it obvious why such groupings occur where they do in the book—for example, chs. 30–31 constitute oracles of hope interrupting the apparent narrative flow of the final capture of the royal capital. Or, for that matter, why are other oracles with related themes still to be found scattered elsewhere in the scroll—for example, two collections of oracles against the nations in ch. 25 and chs. 46–51, and periodic restoration oracles in chs. 2–20 and in chs. 30–31.

Even the ending of the collection is not handled decisively. For no sooner does 51:64 announce a conclusion than 52:1–34 contravenes the notice! This is not the first time the reader will have to face false starts and endings in the present arrangement of the collection (e.g., ch. 25 in relation to chs. 1–24).

Past the puzzlement of the larger structure of the scroll, the reader’s travail only increases as his or her familiarity with the details of the book increases. For example, how are we to correlate the third person oblique voice with that of the first person claim as they periodically interchange throughout the collection? Does the prophet shift voice strategy, or do we seek another greater collector of the prophetic reminiscences? Further, what rationale exists for shifting between poetic and prosaic literary speech patterns? Why do some themes appear explicitly only in certain speech representations—for example, the covenant in first person prose speeches—and not others. The biblically literate reader will also notice, amid the interchange of first and third person prose, thematic, stylistic, and ideological associations with the great narrative history of Israel represented by Deuteronomy and Joshua through Kings. How is the reader to make sense of and use this intertextual triangle that exists between Jeremianic poetry and prose and the prose of the Deuteronomistic history? The puzzlement becomes even worse than this!

For it seems clear that the Septuagint (LXX) translation of Jeremiah witnesses to an alternate Hebrew version of Jeremiah with its own literary peculiarities, relocations, and editorial interests. Which Jeremiah should we read?

And why should the Jeremiah scroll offer the modern reader so many inconcinnities?

Unraveling Modern Reading Problems—Some Theoretical Considerations

An author and his or her readers sustain a dynamic, unstable relationship. An author’s work enters the slipstream of the cultural processes from which it has emerged. Authority is ceded to the reading community, who must perform the work of constructing its meaning. The author’s authority derives from its latent rhetorical presence in the form of the work. The meanings of the work emerge from this conversation between authors and readers through the text.

Both authors and readers come to the work through expectations shaped both by a tradition of literary (oral or written) performances and a tradition of performed works. The performance of the immediate work by author-reader will proceed from these traditions and act back on them, contributing to the performance tradition. In addition, each specific work will in time attract classic performances that surround any subsequent approach to the work by later author-reader generations, materially conditioning expectations and reading strategies. The wider matrices of cultural interests and desires circulate material, psychosocial, and political needs through the work and continually fuel transformations of it in the eyes of the communities of the author and the reader. Transformations occur both as to substance and import—what the work is as well as what it means. Communal focus on the social performance of the work is most intense for works perceived as symbolically pregnant to contemporary cultural interests—in short, where a specific work or collection of works consists of verbal cultural icons.

Thus when the modern reader enters the symbolic space of Jeremiah, both it and we are heavily encumbered. The scroll offers us Jeremiah, a prophet. The scroll presents itself as containing prophecy. From these representations stem our difficulties as modern readers. For what, in fact, is a prophet? And what, in fact, is a prophetic book?

Expectations encumber the evocations of the terms prophet and prophecy. Religious readers from communities who have directly inherited Jeremiah as part of their sacred scriptures (Jews, Christians, or Muslims) will differ in their engagement with this intensely religiously constructed role and rhetoric from religious readers shaped by traditions of teachers who bring enlightenment or shamans or wise elders teaching the ways of the spirits. So, too, will it be for the secular reader, and on and on.…

Jeremiah has migrated culturally and historically from its originating ancient Near Eastern context to an increasingly diverse set of communities around the globe, each with their own sociocultural needs and desires. It will not be easy to read the scroll of Jeremiah for and in such a context—if it ever was a work for easy reading!

We Read in Pockets

Conscious of Jeremiah’s textual migrations, critical biblical scholarship has positioned itself in alignment with a peculiar reading strategy termed historical critical. It seeks to construct the meaning of biblical texts by reconstructing the original cultural arena in the horizon of ancient Israel in which it was produced. The task has had the salutary effect of sharpening our reading objectives—and our difficulties!

For, like it or not, we have no direct access to the historical figure of Jeremiah or his cultural matrix. Our primary witnesses remain heavily interpreted traditions whose cultural projects differed from those of the biblical scholar. Israel’s prophetic collections come to us as heavily used literary artifacts. In the form we have received them, they already offer interpretative representations rather than raw cultural transcripts (if any such could actually exist!). We access all the available contemporary comparative sources, from annals to inscriptions to potsherds, but in the last analysis we are thrown back on the primary verbal icon itself in the effort to negotiate our reading quest.

Until very recently, the reading strategies employed by biblical scholarship would have been fairly proscribed with the procedures for framing the interpretative task well rehearsed around Jeremiah. In the context of the old post-Wellhausenian reconstruction of Israelite history and religion, Bernhard Duhm had posed the problem of the quest for the historical prophet and his authentic sayings. Under Duhm’s tutelage students of Jeremiah would have analyzed intensively the three macro literary styles in the Jeremianic tradition (poetic oracles, prose speeches, and oblique narratives). A critical scholar would have relied on a familiar repertoire of approaches ranging from form- to tradition- to redaction-critical analysis. The objective would have been the historical reconstruction of the work and words of Jeremiah ben Hilkiah with attendant religious and theological valuations. Whether this portrait was minimalist or maximalist in regard to detail, pessimistic or optimistic in regard to goal, depreciative or appreciative in valuation depended in part on judgments made about the authenticity accorded the Jeremianic scroll. While some scholars might view very little of the book as authentic to the historical prophet (Duhm, e.g., reduced the authentic kernel to 280 verses), others might see most of the book as the product of Jeremiah’s own compositional activity and/or that of a close associate such as the scribe Baruch. Assessing the literary relationship to Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history played a large part in distributing the consensus of scholarship along the points in this debate.

This debate has reached an impasse, as the most recent full-scale commentaries exhibit. Often their readings are so radically different that novices might wonder if they were reading the same Jeremiah!

Current Jeremiah research is engaged in a search for routes through the reading impasse generated by its predecessor—that is, the historicist model for interpretation (meaning is discovered through literary archeology). Historicism’s literary excavation went behind the current prophetic book to elucidate literary genesis, and even through this literary genesis to the historical realities it was believed constituted the work’s subject matter to some degree or another. The interpreter read inside Jeremiah in order to move behind and outside it, so he or she could then turn from that vantage point to construct Jeremiah’s meaning.

Along the path of this historicist quest, research has periodically shifted the general answers given to our two fundamental questions: What is a prophet? What is a prophetic book? This has materially affected the kind of historical figure Jeremiah ben Hilkiah might reasonably be expected to have been as well as judgments of probability about the character of prophetic writings. Preoccupation with prophets as oral speakers of inspired utterance—whether as mantics, ecstatics, visionaries, or highly rational/ethical reformers—largely obscured our ability to read the prophetic scroll in its extant form. The goal was deconstruction of the present work into its reconstructed oral speeches. As tradition- and redaction-critical approaches to analysis came more to the fore, however, they made possible a more positive assessment of the literary transformation of prophecy and the genius of the tradition bearers—whether of prophetic writers, Jeremianic disciples, or Deuteronomistic schools. Nevertheless, the solution of the problem of the scroll in its final form continued to elude since the textuality of prophecy was still framed largely in historicist categories. Reading Jeremiah properly is a matter of reading it along the path of its literary development. The text before us explicitly and/or implicitly has been judged to be unreadable. While degrees of coherence-incoherence might be debatable, nearly all recent commentary agrees that a clear plan of literary organization and thematic development is not discernible.

Given the continued absence of direct, nontraditional historical data about Jeremiah ben Hilkiah and the paucity of objective control over our hypothetical reconstruction of Jeremiah’s compositional history, the present consensual impasse in the historical-critical project for reading Jeremiah should be labeled a stalemate.

Jeremiah—Textuality and Interdisciplinary Discourses

Paradigm shifts are under way for modern biblical studies. Spurred by the limits experienced in traditional historicist models of interpretation and aided by renewed interdisciplinary dialogue, experiments with new interpretative strategies of biblical literature are under way. This commentary on Jeremiah is carried out in the spirit of these explorations and reorientations. A particular debt should be acknowledged to the reformulations and debates in the wider fields of modern literary theory, semiotics, and aesthetics, along with other renewed attempts to trace out social theories of literary symbols labeled vaguely with the rubric of postmodernity.

This commentary takes seriously the task of assessing Jeremiah as a social and literary symbol. Therefore, Jeremiah is viewed as symbolic space invested with the devices and desires of the late Davidic Judean monarchy, the latter’s client community, and the diasporan communities laying claim to the material and symbolic inheritance of that old regime in the aftermath of its political destruction. And we ask, What do the performances of Jeremiah—prophetic figure and prophetic scroll—do with and to the myth of Israel and its patron deity, Yahweh? I use the term myth in its loosely defined anthropological sense of a culture’s sacred narrative.

Internal Setting: Time in the Scroll

As already mentioned, the first three verses of ch. 1 provide a chronological starting point dating the span of Jeremiah ben Hilkiah’s mission from the thirteenth year of King Josiah to the eleventh year and fifth month of King Zedekiah, when the royal city fell to its Babylonian assailants. Jeremiah’s literary mission spans, then, from c. 627 to 586/587 BC.

The attempt to match this introduction with the contents of the rest of the scroll is instructive. In the next twenty chapters no such clear chronological notices appear at all. The reader must rely on creative ingenuity and elusive allusions to known, datable historical events. If one can be sure that the ambiguous foe from the north represents Neo-Babylonian forces, then the oracular materials are already post-Josianic. The lack of Josianic references (except in 3:6) in chs. 2–10 induces some to doubt the accuracy of the beginning date for Jeremiah’s mission in the Josianic reign though nothing in the first part requires us to have a complete anthology of Jeremianic oracles from each period of the prophetic mission.

The next clear chronological references occur in the thematic block chs. 21–24, with references variously to Zedekiah (21:1, 588/587), Shallum (22:11, i.e., Jehoahaz, 609), Jehoiakim (22:18, 609–598), Jeconiah (22:24, 597), and back again to Zedekiah (24:8, clearly dated after 598/597). Ch. 25 returns the reader to the fourth year of Jehoiakim (v. 1, April 605–April 604), synchronized to the Babylonian ruler’s first regnal year (April 604) in order to summarize the mission of Jeremiah to this point as spanning a period of twenty-three years.

Chronological notices will occur from this point on in the scroll with more frequency, though in dischronologized sequence: chs. 26 (Jehoiakim), 27 (Zedekiah), 30–31 (undated though it assumes that deportation has occurred), 32–33 (10th year of Zedekiah), 34 (Zedekiah, Jerusalem experiencing a temporary halt in the Babylonian attack), 35 (Jehoiakim), 36 (4th year of Jehoiakim), 37–38 (Zedekiah with resumption of the final siege), 39 (11th year, 4th month, 9th day of Zedekiah), 40–44 (Gedalian governorship after the fall of Jerusalem), 45 (4th year of Jehoiakim), 46–51 (largely undated except for 46:2 [the battle of Carchemish, 609], and 51:59 [4th year of Zedekiah]). Ch. 52 summarizes the fall of Jerusalem, providing a chronology for the final siege that was narrated in various parts of chs. 26–39. Three deportations of Judaeans are synchronized with Nebuchadrezzar’s regnal years: the seventh (597), the eighteenth (587/586), and the twenty-third (582/581). The third deportation is not narrated. The final verses (31–34) leap ahead to the accession year of Amel-marduk (c. 560), correlated as the thirty-seventh year of the exiled Judean king, Jehoiachin.

While the introduction broadly situates the contents of the book in the last forty years of Judah’s existence, substantial portions of it cannot be located more specifically within this period. Chs. 2–20 largely resist concrete chronological and historical specification. Other portions fall outside and postdate this time frame even though they are represented as the words of Jeremiah (chs. 30–31; 40–44; 52:31–34). The expectations of a thorough sampling of Jeremiah ben Hilkiah’s words from each portion of this forty-year period are not met. Dischronologization represents a significant tactic of time management from chs. 21 to 51!

External Setting: The Time of the Scroll

The time of the scroll is not the time in the book! On the principle that the scroll, as we have it, cannot have been written earlier than the last datable event recorded in it, attention returns again to 52:31–34. A voice presents itself here that cannot be dated before 560 BC. Is this narrative voice the same one encountered in 1:1–3, or is it only an appended voice? In the latter case, other parts of the Jeremiah collection could be earlier but need not be. In the case of the former, we still are offered no fixed point for the compositional completion of the scroll.

The reconstruction of Jeremiah’s compositional history remains highly contested in contemporary scholarship, with the major proposals at an impasse. Maximalist models take their cue from Jeremiah 36 and recapture the bulk of the scroll’s composition in the lifetime of the historical prophet and his scribal associate, Baruch. Minimalists question the authenticity and reliability of the first person and third person prose upon which the maximalists depend, positing instead compositional agency among diverse exilic and/or postexilic editorial elite. Compromises between these two theoretical poles have also been made, viewing the point of origin of the Jeremiah tradition within the historical lifetime of the prophet but extending in literary development far beyond the prophet to diverse and disconnected editorial agents.

Why not take the internal chronological representations and authorial allegations at face value? Authorial practices in the first millennium BC render such an assumption ill advised—an act of literary naïveté. For performance strategies ranging from anonymity to pseudonymity accompany those making explicit historical attributions and authorial claims. Further, literary cultural practices in the Near East exhibit the dynamic interchange and intertextual dialogue between performances by cultural elite and those we would today label folkloristic performances of non-elite social locations. Processes of legend and myth formation intermingle with realistic annalistic histories and autobiographical fictions. Even a surface survey of the literature of Second Temple Judaism provides ample illustration—Jeremiah ben Hilkiah and Baruch receive significant legendary amplification, symbolic enhancement, and even inversions of role. Put with this the connections of style, theme, and form that exist between Jeremiah and the Deuteronomistic history, along with the issues raised by the alternative Jeremiah represented by the Septuagint, and the impression of numerous nonidentical editorial-authorial hands seems hard to resist, though able critics of such reasoning are represented in the critical debate.

A face-value approach to the authorial representations of Jeremiah commits an error of commonsense judgment when it treats the world represented inside the text as a literal, correspondent representation of the world outside the text. The relationship between these two worlds is more complicated, convoluted, and oblique. They may correspond. They need not. Face-value naïveté fails to take seriously enough the problems of textuality.

Recourse to some of the analytical categories current in contemporary literary theory adds precision to the problems of textuality offered by any work. Narratives and narration, whether of prose fiction or other dramatic forms such as lyric or epic poetry, in addition to the dramatic personae (the characters) that populate the plot, utilize other imaginative constructs equally dramatic in function which need have no real correspondent to historical persons outside the world of the text. I think here of narrators and the audiences whose visage they hint in trace forms at the margins and between the lines of the work or of implicit authors and readers standing at further remove in the work. The latter figures of representational imagination and projection need not be identical or identifiable with actual historical authors, editors, audiences, and readers. And even where overlap can be shown, the vested interests projected into the performance of the work may imaginatively and creatively elaborate the representation of such personae unchecked by the real, historical characters. For example, how are we to discuss carefully, after all, the historicity of the George Washington who chopped down the cherry tree!

Working Hypotheses for Jeremianic Agency

In light of the preceding problems, critical debates, and historicist impasse, a reader might wish to hedge all bets and postulate a point of origin for the Jeremianic tradition in the mission of the historical Jeremiah ben Hilkiah with the present form and substance of those traditions the heavily encumbered artifact of symbolic processes reaching into the postexilic period of Second Temple Judaism. In so doing the reader might surmise a number of discreet historical occasions which have left traces of their influence in the tradition, but many others will remain opaque—for example, exilic Deuteronomists, early postexilic restoration groups, and continuing voices represented by the textual precursors to the Septuagint, Masoretic, and Qumran editions of Jeremiah. Such a hedge has the advantage of temporizing faced with a dearth of external data as well as offering an attractive bare courtesy to the internal authorial representations offered by the tradition. For as the critical impasse illustrates, it is very difficult to say with confidence what portions of the tradition actually were produced by the historical figure, Jeremiah ben Hilkiah. True, a discernible common style and theme in the poetry may provide circumstantial evidence of a distinctive authorial voice; nevertheless, it falls far short of independently proving that that voice belongs to the historical Jeremiah. That conclusion hangs on assumption in view of the gap that exists between style and authorial claim.

Why even offer the barest courtesy? The courtesy presumes some good faith, some measure of reliability on the part of the narrative and editorial framework provided for the tradition. Admittedly, in light of authorial practices in the first millennium, this presumption is a very tenuous one and hardly required by the mere presence of the editorial framework. We have so little hard evidence to go on! On the other hand, to postulate a hypothetical historical core and point of origin in a historical figure, Jeremiah ben Hilkiah, provides the modern reader with some chance of explaining why there was all this symbolic interest in the literary figure, Jeremiah prophet of Yahweh. Yet our modern rational and historicist needs may lead us astray here. For the needs of societies create wholesale verbal worlds, figures, and events without a shred of empirical basis in reality or literal correspondent causes and agents, as folkloristic field study repeatedly dramatizes, as well as our own processes of fictionalization.

After all, how would visitors from a distant time and culture decide what the historical Tom Sawyer was like, if in fact such a person ever existed in late-nineteenth-century America, based on Mark Twain’s book alone. This is precisely our predicament with the book of Jeremiah!

In the last analysis, we have immediate access in Jeremiah only to a literary figure and work—prophet and prophecy. We must read them sensitive to the textuality of history and the historicity of texts, attentive to all the strategies of representation and their intertwined intentions for ideological, rhetorical persuasion. As a result, we may judge better the courtesies we had initially extended to the work. Every reading at last only leads to another.

Textuality and Text Transmission

We have repeatedly mentioned the significant implications for reading Jeremiah offered by the manner of its textual preservation. The basic fact is that the book of Jeremiah as represented by the Masoretic Text (MT) is significantly different from the representation offered in the Septuagint (LXX)—a fact long recognized in contemporary scholarship but newly addressed in modern Jeremiah commentary.

In short, the LXX offers a much shorter and differently arranged scroll of Jeremiah. The greater brevity ranges from the absence of large blocks (e.g., 39:4–13) to individual terms and titles (the title prophet for Jeremiah in chs. 27–28), accounting for the fact that the LXX is about an eighth shorter than the MT. These two features intersect at the center of the book around the oracles against the nations. For the LXX has all of the oracles against the nations gathered here that the MT had separated into two blocks (ch. 25 and chs. 46–51) and in different order. Beyond differences of length and arrangement, the content of the Jeremiah tradition varies within the MT and the LXX. Variant readings range from subtle grammatical shifts to matters of style, word order, and diction culminating in significant alternative presentations of the tradition.

Before the discovery of ancient fragments of Jeremiah in the Qumran materials, progress in the scholarly assessment of this state of textual affairs was hampered. The central issue remained: How many of the LXX differences could be traced back to Hebrew originals (LXXV)? How many reflect idiosyncrasies of the translators? But with the aid of the Qumran material it has been possible to confirm the existence of at least three different Hebrew families of text-types for Jeremiah: one on which the MT is based, one on which the LXX is based (LXXV), and a third that goes its own way. The fragmentary preservation of these manuscript types at Qumran, however, falls far short of providing Jeremiah students with complete alternative versions. Nevertheless, the evidence has moved the debate forward to consider the relative merits of one text-type over against the others, with proposals grouping them