Jeremiah and God's Plans of Well-being

Notes

179 Notes Introduction 1. There are two early editions of the book of Jeremiah, one Hebrew and one Greek, with unusual discrepancy between them. Consult Terence E. Fretheim, Jeremiah , and Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1–20: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (hereafter Lundbom, 1–20), 57–62. 2. See A. R. Pete Diamond, “The Jeremiah Guild in the Twenty-First Century: Variety Reigns Supreme,” for a trenchant discussion of the impasse reached by biblical scholars on whether, to what extent, and how we may gain precise, reliable historical detail from a book like Jeremiah, or if the character is fictional and the quest to retrieve him ill-considered. 3. Jerome T. Walsh, Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation, 6–9. 4. A useful discussion of these factors can be found in Barbara Green, “This Old Text: An Analogy for Biblical Interpretation.” 5. These events receive substantial and responsible attention in Göstra W. Ahlstr öm, The History of Ancient Palestine from the Paleolothic Period to Alexander’s Conquest ; J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah; and Lester Grabbe, “The Lying Pen of the Scribes? Jeremiah and History.” 6. There is vast discussion on virtually every aspect of Josiah’s reform. For briefer summaries by historians, consult Ahlström, Ancient Palestine, 764–81, Grabbe, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? 204–7. For fuller treatments from a variety of methodological perspectives, see Marvin Sweeney, King Josiah of Judah: The Lost Messiah of Israel; Uriah Kim, Decolonizing Josiah: Toward a Postcolonial Reading of the Deuteronomistic History. 7. It is impossible to achieve certainly about numbers of exiles and those that remained. For a consideration of the biblical material provided, consult Miller and Hayes, History, 480–81. 8. For a general survey of this vast issue, see Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. Scholarly disagreements are many but mostly more nuanced than what will engage us here. 9. Smith, Origins, 77–80, observes, for example, that Israel does not pick up on the family aspect of its likely parent religion, nor on the deity as lord over the realm of 180 notes to pages 9–15 the dead. Yahweh emerges with no divine peers, fewer divine subordinates than was typical, no sex, no death, no kin. 10. Consult Martii Nissinen, ed., Prophecy in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context: Mesopotamian , Biblical, and Arabian Perspectives; David L. Petersen, The Roles of Israel’s Prophets, 9–19; Hans M. Barstad, “Prophecy in the Book of Jeremiah and the Historical Prophet,” 87–100. Chapter 1: Womb and Workshop 1. See William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah Chapters 1–25, 26–31 for a standard exposition of this form-critical feature. 2. I will use angled brackets to offer my paraphrases of character speech, leaving quotation marks for precise quotations. 3. Though it is early to pin down specifically the referent on this foe, for a useful discussion, see David J. Reimer, “The ‘Foe’ and the ‘North’ in Jeremiah.” 4. Louis Stulman, Jeremiah, 37–39. 5. For a nice chart of this set of resemblances, see Brent A. Strawn, “Jeremiah’s In/effective Plea: Another Look at ‫נעד‬ in Jeremiah I 6.” 6. Stulman provides this information efficiently in Jeremiah, 41–45. See also David L. Petersen, “The Ambiguous Role of Moses as Prophet.” 7. Carolyn J. Sharp, “Embodying Moab: Jeremiah’s Figuring of Moab (Jer 48) as Reinscription of the Judean Body.” 8. Lundbom provides these appraisals in 1–20, 121–22. 9. See Lundbom, 1–20, 67–68. 10. Lundbom, 1–20, 57, drawing from the summary at the end of the Hebrew Masora , notes that Jeremiah extends to 21,835 words. 11. Lundbom is a pioneer in Hebrew rhetoric. In 1–20, 68–101 and 121–40, he lists and describes the tropes, providing as well a brief glossary of some of them in Jeremiah 37–52: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (hereafter Lundbom, 37–52), 586–94; he also presents these features as a set in The Hebrew Prophets: An Introduction , 165–207, and notes them throughout his commentaries. See also Yehoshua Gitay, “Rhetorical Criticism and the Prophetic Discourse”; Roland Meynet, Rhetorical Analysis: An Introduction to Biblical Rhetoric. 12. Lundbom, 1–20, 122–27, names these and provides some examples. 13. See Lundbom, 1–20, 127–29. I add...