Jeremiah and God's Plans of Well-being

Afterword and Implications

171 Afterword and Implications Narrative, in short, is more than literature, it is the way we understand our lives. . . . Great literature speaks to the deepest level of our humanity; it helps us better understand who we are. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolitic to the Axial Age It is time to return to the questions with which this book began: Can a responsible , coherent, compelling book on biblical Jeremiah result from a study of the vast complexity of issues that make it up? 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? Since I have summarized each chapter’s material as I have gone, I choose here the challenge to review not so much content but process, methodology, and underlying assumptions grounding the construction attempted here. Let me name five major frameworks that bear primary responsibility for my interpretation of this biblical book named for Jeremiah. First, the basic choice was to cue from and work with primarily literary issues rather than historical ones. Though I have consulted and attended to pertinent historical and sociological data and count on the general reliability of the clash of powers great and small near Jerusalem at the turn of the seventh to sixth century of the previous era, yet I also maintain that the book of Jeremiah recomposes its events fictively, to suit its own purposes. Consistently—whether for good or bad—I have etched the prophet as a literary persona rather than as a historical one and, to an extent surprising to me, have seen the deity emerge distinctively as well. The prophetic book draws suggestively and skillfully prophet and deity working together, shows them blending their efforts toward the persuasion of other character sets. Both YHWH and Jeremiah are shown radically capable of every feeling known to our human species—God is anthropomorphized in this book—and they meet a range of responses from other characters as well. 172 afterword and implications Though they come to work as a team, their shares of the project overlapping, the deity is surely a central figure of the book, receding primarily as he hands over the responsibility of implementation to the prophet once Jeremiah has confirmed his allegiance to the project in his last soliloquy. Other characters are shown with great variety as well: the blatant Jehoiakim and the conflicted Zedekiah, with their more shadowed kin, Jehoahaz and Jehoiachin ; we see Baruch and Ebed-Melek emerge memorably and distinctively; Lady Zion and the men of Judah take on recognizable profiles in the ruminations of others; the Shapan clan provides a cadre of positive figures amid many others.1 Varieties of discourse have provided the main pathway for investigating the characters in this book, with tremendous diversity of utterance. Spoken language and not inferred psychology has provided as the primary data for teasing out these various literary personae. My choice has been consistently to bypass previous influential criticism on form of the prophetic speech—useful though that has been—to work with more flexible literary genres as they actually have impact in this biblical book, rather than as their form may signify in the abstract, across or within biblical books. So we have attended to quotations and questions, to attributed speech and ascribed motivation, considered soliloquy within and speech without, pondered the impact of proverb and proclamation. How the characters have been given to talk and be spoken about has been our primary access to them. Without in any way denying that the book was produced much later than the events on which it spends its time, and surely not disregarding that its insights are the fruits of mature reflection, I have not focused on those compositional processes in this book. The prophetic book spends almost all its actual words on the events before 587, and I have chosen to do the same. The choice, then, has been one of assigning proportion: Some historical work, considerable literary method, and a bold reader entry point. The experienced reader will miss in text, notes, and bibliography some scholarly participants and issues normally attending Jeremiah study. It seemed best to attempt a fresh approach rather than to be led along smoother paths defined by the more usual assumptions. Second, I have discerned while working and hence invested in a basic order for the...