Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in Deutero-Jeremianic Prose (review)

In 1901 Bernhard Duhm, a colleague and friend of Julius Wellhausen in Göttingen, published a commentary that used insights from the new scientific approaches of history-of-religions and source criticism to explain the perplexing mixture of prose and poetry in the book of Jeremiah. Duhm proposed three sources, which he arranged in descending order of theological legitimacy: the prophet, whose ipsissima verba are heard in the poetry that employs the kinah (3+2) meter of dirges; Baruch, responsible for a biography of Jeremiah that can be stitched together from narratives scattered throughout the book; and weighing in with the most verses, additions to the words of Jeremiah and Baruch that represent a late and narrow-minded institutionalized religion. Wellhausen's influence and Duhm's own Protestant theology are evident in this scheme that moved from lyrical prophet to inferior nomistic interpreters. Some thirteen years later Sigmund Mowinckel designated the sources A, B, and C, thereby codifying the devolution of Jeremianic traditions from early and authentic to late and tendentious. In addition, Mowinckel drew attention to the similarities in vocabulary, style, and theological Tendenz between source C and the Deuteronomists and posited that this school was responsible for the redaction of the book of Jeremiah. The hands are the hands of Jeremiah, but the voice is the voice of Deuteronomic theologians.

Carolyn Sharp's Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah is a cogently argued and lucidly written work that advances the century-long scholarly conversation about the composition of Jeremiah. Based on a dissertation written under the direction of Robert Wilson at Yale, the work challenges the long-held view that the book of Jeremiah has come to us through the redaction of the Deuteronomic Historians (DtrH). The focus of the book is the composition and provenance of Mowinckel's source C, which Sharp persuasively demonstrates is historically complex and theologically generative. Two aspects in particular make this book worthy of attention. The first is method. Sharp adeptly employs a variety of critical methods to untangle the distinct political groups represented by the significant portions of the prose in Jeremiah. Most notable is the way she analyzes the various ideological functions of traditional language that has heretofore been understood primarily as Deuteronomic. The second is theological insight. Far from dismissing the C material in Jeremiah, Sharp leads the reader to see theological riches in what she coins the Deutero-Jeremianic traditions. "The competing traditionist voices in the Jeremianic prose do not obliterate each other but continually engage and challenge each other, forever calling each other and the reader into an ancient and still urgent conversation about domination and resistance, boundaries of identity and assimilation, destruction and renewal" (p. 167). The distaste that Duhm and Mowinckel had for the "late" additions to Jeremiah was barely concealed and was colored by pervasive German Protestant evaluation of "late" material as legalistic and stultifying. Since Jon Levenson, among others, has demonstrated how this presupposition of the fathers of the historical-critical method have perpetuated anti-Jewish readings by Christian biblical scholars (albeit unconsciously), Sharp's "retrieval" of a late source is a significant contribution to biblical scholarship.

The task is simply stated: "to demonstrate in more detail the contention that the interpretive poles should not be characterized as historical-Jeremiah versus monolithic-Deuteronomistic-redactor" (p. 26). The thesis is that "two distinct political groups can be seen to struggle for theological authority via their portrayals of traditions about Jeremiah and prophets generally in the Deutero-Jeremianic prose; namely, a group based in Babylon after the deportations of 597 BCE that is attempting to claim political and cultic authority, and a group remaining behind in Judah after 597 that counters the claims and related interpretive moves made by the Babylonian gôlâ traditionists" (pp. xiii–xiv). Sharp resists using the term "Deuteronomistic" to describe these groups, as that term is by necessity a literary designation that...