Читать книгу Jeremiah 26-52 - Carolyn Sharp - Страница 10

Jeremiah 26–52 is an ancient record of Judeans struggling to make sense of political and social catastrophe. As the Neo-Babylonian imperial juggernaut approached Jerusalem, readying its warriors to strike at the core of Judean communal and religious life, terror must have settled on the hearts of Judeans like a leaden shroud. Those gifted with prophetic vision, those with priestly responsibilities, and those in political leadership would have been desperate to guide Judah toward responses that could guarantee the protection of their God. Among those swept up in the maelstrom of fear created by this crisis were Ezekiel son of Buzi and Jeremiah son of Hilkiah. Both were priests. Both had experiences of prophetic commissioning, hearing a divine voice that urged them to take up theological and political positions that would be deemed by their compatriots to be radical, offensive, even risible. The crisis they faced would be protracted. Anxieties simmering from the time of the assassination of Judean king Josiah at Megiddo in 609 BCE (2 Kgs 23:29) became acute with Nebuchadrezzar’s first deportation of Judean elites in 597. The sense of political urgency may have been subterranean for a time, as Judeans sought to go on with their lives despite their growing alarm. But it would have percolated insistently during the reign of Zedekiah.

­Jerusalem ­under ­siege The crisis erupted into a deadly state of emergency during Babylon’s eighteen-month siege of Jerusalem from January 588 to July 587. As deprivations during the siege became more severe, residents of the city would have seen the weakening and death of loved ones from starvation. When the Babylonians finally breached the walls of Jerusalem, many would have witnessed or experienced beatings and sexual violation; survivors would have seen the slaughter of family members and neighbors. The horror continued with the Babylonians’ defiling and plundering of Jerusalem, their maiming of Zedekiah and execution of Judean officials at Riblah, and their forced deportation of traumatized survivors in 587. Those Judeans who fled to Egypt would have had the screams of their neighbors still ringing in their ears. Their lives as refugees in Egypt would have continued in the social and psychological ruination of trauma, the days of many surely marked by survivor’s guilt and cultural disorientation. Judah lay in ruins, in every way that ruination may be conceived: the capital city was left undefended, the temple had been desecrated, and the social corpus of Judah had been grievously injured. A few years later, in 582, traumatized survivors eking out an existence in Judah would have to endure a third deportation aimed at snuffing out any lingering sparks of political resistance.

­Prophetic ­responses ­to ­trauma Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and other prophets would mine Judah’s sacred traditions to make sense of all they had witnessed: terrible suffering of Judeans in every sector of society, the brutal dismantling of their country’s political infrastructure and cultural resources, the evisceration of Jerusalem’s economic stability, and more. To undertake this work, the prophets and the scribes who preserved and amplified their traditions would have had to muster all the wisdom, creativity, and cultural acumen at their disposal in circumstances that must have been challenging, whether exilic or postexilic. They strove, sometimes with blistering polemic, sometimes with soaring lyricism, to take account of the past and imagine a future for this decimated community—or better, communities plural, given the realities of some Judeans’ militarized captivity in Babylon and others’ migration to Egypt or another locale. To write scrolls that could take nuanced account of sacred traditions, ongoing and bitter arguments about political responsibility, and contested visions for recovery would have been extraordinarily demanding work for these scribes, even generations after the disaster. The contemporary reader might well balk at the harshness of victim-blaming rhetoric or the narrative strategy of honoring vicious invaders as doing God’s work. Indeed, this commentary will balk over and over again at such interpretive moves, explicating the text from a feminist position that declines violence in rhetoric and lived politics. But we may still be awed by the monumental accomplishment of these prophets and scribes. As Kathleen O’Connor observes, the book of Jeremiah “is a work of resilience, a moral act for the rebuilding of the community from the ashes of catastrophe.”¹

The prose narratives in Jer 26–52 are charged with political conflict, an inevitable result of enormous pressures that were put on the leadership of Judah not only in the Babylonian crisis proper, but in the aftermath when leaders and visionaries had to work, despite their trauma, despite dislocation and cultural disorientation, to devise a way in which Judah could become whole again. The survival of their people depended on a pragmatically sound plan for assimilating the catastrophic losses and injuries that the Judean social body had sustained. Jeremiah 26–52 is a textual site of deep cultural injury.² The reader who examines it closely can see its inflammations and fractures, its wounds barely healed, its long angry scars still in the process of formation when Jeremiah reached its final forms in what became the Septuagintal and Masoretic traditions. Fierce internecine arguments knife through this material. Vitriolic disputes bubble up through dialogues between characters in the story and through uncompromising theological pronouncements made by Jeremiah and his God, making visible a toxic antagonism in the social body of Judah regarding how to respond to the Neo-Babylonian threat and—because much of this material was shaped in the aftermath—how to explain the injury that the Judean body had suffered.

Poetry, lyrical and passionate, is to be found in the Book of Consolation (chs. 30–31) and the oracles against the nations (“OAN,” chs. 46–51). Intense theological and political drama is characteristic of the entire book of Jeremiah. But the drama performed in poetic registers catalyzes differing effects in the implied audience than do the prose narratives. In early chapters of Jeremiah, poetic oracles express the looming punishment of Judah in elliptical terms, heightening suspense for the implied audience. The chaos of potential response to the divine threat is expressed, for example, in the command to the implied audience to run frantically through the streets of Jerusalem seeking even a single person who acts justly, so that Yhwh might relent from punishing Judah (5:1); as the oracle unfolds and Jeremiah himself undertakes the search, it is clear that such efforts will be futile. The inhabitants of Benjamin are to flee Jerusalem (6:1)—the implied audience may feel compelled to run and hide as well from the monstrous foe approaching from the north. By contrast, the prose of Jer 26–52 reads as the product of authoritative voices that have mastered the ambiguities of the earlier poetry, claiming the purposes of Yhwh with robust confidence and referential specificity. Stylistically, this yields the impression that the terrifying uncertainties and chaos that animated the earlier prophetic oracles have yielded to political clarity about the inexorable purposes of Yhwh for harm against the covenant people and the inescapable fate sweeping over Judah, Jerusalem, and Judeans in diaspora in Babylon and Egypt. Within this prose onslaught, the poetry in the Book of Consolation stands as a beacon of hope. These poems’ articulations of hope are not positioned as the final word of the book, as in Amos or Ezekiel. In the structure of Jer^MT, that final word belongs to the artfully vitriolic OAN and the grim scene of the despoliation of Jerusalem and its people in Jer 52. But these oracles serve as an oasis, a way-station for building resilience for the journey, replenishing the spirits of readers making their way through the wasteland (שמה) of a wrecked Judah.