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Introduction
- University of South Carolina Press
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1 Introduction Scope and Stipulations Modern Western thinkers do not believe that either divine anger or human sinfulness fully explain disaster. We understand both national and personal catastrophes to come from complex webs of cause and effect. Kathleen M. O’Connor, “Reclaiming Jeremiah’s Violence” Scope Can a responsible, coherent, compelling book on biblical Jeremiah be composed from the vast complexity of issues that must be addressed in it? How can a classic, gathering shape from the sixth century b.c.e. and then thriving under interpreters for more than two thousand years, be freshly addressed? Can such an ancient religious document pose issues for twenty-first-century readers? I am confident that such a project wants doing and offer it here, challenged by the series in which it appears to construct familiar biblical figures in ways that are fresh, clear, and scholarly but also readable, interesting, provocative, and valuable. To produce such a book, we must proceed with discipline and care, omitting from the discussion certain issues long beloved of Jeremiah scholars. Chief among those will be precise historical reconstruction, both of events presumed in the prophetic book and also of processes of the book’s composition, various links between the book of Jeremiah and other biblical material. Missing as well will be specific engagement with postmodern methodological issues currently absorbing professional Jeremiah scholars that tend to highlight the book’s incoherence and contemporary reception. This volume will also sideline certain theological and religious issues of its day and will not claim to read characters’ psychology. What is left, you may be asking? Jeremiah is available to us as a literary construct, emerging from the pages of the extant biblical book, specifically here from the Hebrew edition.1 We will engage textual Jeremiah and present from our negotiation the literary features of the book bearing his name. Jeremiah language abounds, some fifty-two chapters of it, where the prophet is offered in various ways and from diverse angles. Jeremiah speaks and is spoken with, acts and is 2 introduction acted on. He fails mightily, once succeeds. He is loved, feared. There is literary texture aplenty and no lack of controversy. Jeremiah as a biblical character, perhaps overlapping generally but not coinciding closely with a historical personage, is well-sketched, and becomes a vivid and viable character living on in the tradition . Though likely a good deal of the prophet’s life as presented is fictive, the narrative world against which it is projected—adequately known and generally agreed to by scholars—will suffice for our needs. I will construct rather than claim to retrieve Jeremiah and challenge you to do the same.2 Useful literary methods are not particularly arcane but demand attentive discrimination. We will need to note consistently who is talking—often but not always clear—and appreciate overlapping but not coinciding perspectives. We will attend to other features of character speech: rhetorical choices, imagery, stock and distinctive language. We must watch especially for characters’ constructions of others, opponents in particular. We will track choices of the book’s “outside” (extradiegetic) narrator. We are offered rich detail, more than we can see or use. But without losing the forest for trees or leaves, we will try to catch what we can of the careful etching available if we are skilled, with method made more explicit as we proceed. To be more specific, the narratological model most helpful to guide us is adapted from Jerome Walsh and modified slightly.3 Consider a set of frames, the outer edges being the real authors and real readers. These two sets include actual persons involved in the writing or production of the book and also in its reception , stretching from those for whom the book was intended—that is, postexilic readers whose situation is often and appropriately discerned—through history to ourselves. The frame within that of real authors and real readers marks implied author and implied reader, important here for one main reason: it is easy enough to recognize that the implied author is the book-of-Jeremiah writer, a subset of the real author(s); an implied reader by definition understands that author’s words completely, transparently. Walsh notes, perceptively, that it is precisely the gap between such a wholly compatible implied reader and our less competent real selves that opens points for negotiation and provides the rich range of semantic possibilities. In a third frame, positioned inside the two just named, the narrator voice tells the contents of...