Jeremiah and God's Plans of Well-being

3 Resistance—Deity and Prophet as Partners and Adversaries

46 3 Resistance—Deity and Prophet as Partners and Adversaries Chapters 11–20 The book of Jeremiah provides an opportunity to test the potential of . . . a holistic, systemic approach to the Bible . . . with the dual challenges of paying proper attention to its undeniable complexity and of coming, nevertheless , to some understanding of the whole. Mark Biddle, Polyphony and Symphony As we proceed with our reading of the book of Jeremiah and deepen our acquaintance with its named character, we continue to monitor the key issues of his world: how his people handle worship of YHWH and how they all understand the agency of God in the political events of their time. How will deity and prophet address the sense of betrayal of relationship by the people of Judah and Jerusalem , made so prominent in the overture? And how will the events of the lateseventh - and early-sixth-century Levant be adequate—even fruitful—for deeper insight about survival for God’s Judah project? How will God and prophet help the people to manage the catastrophe swamping them, so that at least some can survive and thrive? We have witnessed an overture arcing from accusatory and squabbling character voices using rhetoric of shame and blame, caricature and alibi but reaching eventually something more consensual for YHWH, Jeremiah, Lady Zion, and the men of Judah. We followed the prophet as he traversed flashes of insight into and intimations about his role: accusing the deity, scolding the people; searching hopefully for innocent citizens, railing at the hopelessly guilty; imploring God first for and then against the people. We heard him given a series of commands about his prophet role that were simultaneously thwarted, insuring his inadequacy and even failure. But we also saw him arrive with God and people at a moment and place of compassionate resolution. The key question for God and prophet, characters and readers, is what creates that moment and how is it 47 deity and prophet as partners and adversaries constructed, such that it can continue to be mined for insight? Where is a healed relationship and a fresh life together to be found for God and God’s people? How will all players learn of it and help each other? Some, it appears, need to—be able to and agree to—leave the heritage land for exile and will learn to experience there an insight available nowhere else. The question for us as we move forward is how that process happens. We will watch that learning for the rest of the time of this present book. We will approach chaps. 11–20 of the biblical book in two moments, cued by the two macrogenres employed in the material.1 We will look first at twelve collaborative “ministerial” moments in the relationship of prophet and deity, united in efforts to change hearts of posited hearers. These scenes seem designed to share with us, reading, the process by which Jeremiah must first learn and eventually communicate and make persuasive what God shows him. These pericopes are primarily prose. Interspersed with these more collaborative scenes are poetic lament soliloquies, six from the prophet and eight by the deity. In these moments, less mutual and more private, we will listen to these two main characters react, each in himself and occasionally together, to their experience with the people. Though recognizing the prose/poetry distinction as complex and sometimes artificial , I will make the distinction significant, even decisive. The purpose of this present chapter, then, is to deal primarily with the collaborative prose teaching efforts, leaving the detail of the soliloquies to the next chapter. But since the two genres are in fact intertwined, we must note how the ministry efforts trip off the soliloquies, just as we will in the next chapter—while focusing on the soliloquies—name what seems to have given rise to them, what situations mutually experienced YHWH and Jeremiah are struggling to resolve. Hence these chapters 3 and 4 are related, inversely. Though modern scholars remain in disarray over the arrangement of what seems a scramble of elements, I have preferred to take advantage of and to exploit this alternating genre arrangement rather than to override it. A bit more about the prose material as a whole before turning to the individual scenes. Ostensibly, their common purpose is for deity and prophet to instruct Judean addressees as to what behaviors would be better than their current ones. These are all narratives of such scenes from ministry, or more...