Читать книгу Jeremiah 26-52 - Carolyn Sharp - Страница 11

There are competing models for understanding diachronic processes of composition and redaction of the book of Jeremiah. All astute readers agree that the book is in places turbulent and chaotic, this quality generating fascination for the reader eager to follow the twists and turns of theological logic and the dominant streams and contrary eddies of its imagery. An underlying literary structure may be glimpsed here and there, with linkages among smaller larger units of text especially in the prose; some of the more volatile poetic material may be understood in light of that structure as well. But there are also poetic oracles and snippets of prose that add sheer difference and complexity, rather than congruence, to their local literary context and to the larger contours of the book. Some readers find the shifts in perspective, thematic foci, metaphorization, and ideology that unfold within Jeremiah to frustrate systematic interpretation. Others, notably redaction critics who argue for coherent layers through large swaths of diverse material, pursue systematic analysis of linguistic and semantic features. Still other readers delight in what they perceive to be an artful quality like that of a tapestry or mosaic, the Jeremiah traditions taking on richness and depth from the strategic interweaving of disparate threads and the assemblage of smaller pieces even if the purposes and provenances of those pieces cannot be determined fully.³

Traditional source-critical scholarship on Jeremiah has worked in light of a series of assumptions about earlier and later materials that were given influential articulation by Bernhard Duhm (1847–1928) in a 1901 commentary and Sigmund Mowinckel (1884–1965) in a 1914 work.⁴ While varied positions and differences regarding historical dating had been explored in source-critical scholarship for decades, the overarching framework dominating the scholarly reconstruction of Jeremiah at that time is simple enough to describe. Poetic oracles from early in the prophet’s career (dubbed Source A) were expanded by prose biographical material about Jeremiah (Source B) and Deuteronomistic prose additions (Source C). The increasingly complicated book was supplemented, finally, by other materials considered to have been generated in the late exilic and postexilic periods (Source D). Source-critical arguments have been contested, emended, and critiqued in more recent scholarship. For example, a sharp rebuttal is offered by Bernard Levinson on grounds of methodological weakness:

In the case of Jeremiah scholarship, the efforts of Bernhard Duhm and Sigmund Mowinckel to work out the book’s compositional layers have provided the foundations of most subsequent research. So entrenched are the questions asked … that the contours of the text are obscured, along with the reality of its intellectual and theological life…. The harder the models are pushed to explain the evidence, the more they break down into contradiction.⁵

Whatever one’s position as regards preexisting literary sources, it seems evident that the formation of the Jeremiah traditions into the book we have today is the result of expert scribal practices of editing and shaping materials over time, the textual artisans enjoying a significant measure of creative freedom in the process.⁶ Many scholars are convinced that the existence of redactional layers in Jeremiah, and even diverse “editions” of the book, can be proved from literary and text-critical evidence. There is no gainsaying the historical data regarding differing Greek and Hebrew streams of the Jeremiah traditions and ongoing expansion in the MT tradition; as is well known, the Greek tradition of Jeremiah seems to be roughly one-seventh shorter than the Masoretic tradition. How one interprets those divergences, in local instances and in macrostructural theories, depends a great deal on one’s governing premises.⁷

Redaction critics debate numerous larger points and smaller details of the schemata they propose for understanding the compositional history of Jeremiah. Seismic shifts do occur over time in this arena of Jeremiah study, as in every scholarly terrain. Scholars of an earlier generation spoke with assurance of the ipsissima verba of the historical prophet Jeremiah, understood to have been preserved in the early poetic oracles in particular; but this way of understanding an earlier historical core or Kern encrusted with later accretions is no longer the governing model in scholarly conversations. Redaction-critical analyses are compelling for those who find it viable to tie many different sorts of philological and historical evidence, from minor to major in scale, to proposed layers of editorial reworking, these usually theorized to be demonstrable especially on the basis of shared language and congruence of perspective. Superb redaction critics include my feminist colleague in this commentary project, Christl Maier, as well as Rainer Albertz and Hermann-Josef Stipp. Much can be learned from their painstaking work. Other scholars, in whose ranks I include myself, prefer to analyze literary effects of editorial interpolations, these signaled by such clues as irresolvable ideological tensions and awkward shifts of emphasis in the flow of material, without seeking to tie a host of individual verses or motifs too closely to hypothetical layers of editorial intervention conceived as having been worked systematically through large swaths of material.

Throughout this commentary, the literary readings on offer should not be taken as an implicit defense of a presumed unity of particular narratives in their historical provenance. Some would frame the politics of scholarship in such a way that there seem to be only two sides: those who accept multiple layers in a biblical text (vigorous dispute of the details is welcomed), and those who defend the “unity” of the narrative. But those are not the only options. In my view, literary criticism offers excellent proposals that clarify our understanding of particular textual tensions, while acknowledging that editorial interventions may have been enacted that can neither be proved nor read in definitive ways qua interventions. The logic of a proposed interpolation may remain unclear; perhaps it was simply preserved without having been intended as part of a larger ideological program. It may be the case that shifts of emphasis, unexpected developments in characterization, and so forth are best understood as literary effects designed to illumine new or deeper dimensions of the plot. Whatever the case, the reader would do well to remember the literary-critical notion of the intentional fallacy, viz., that authorial intention is never truly available to those who engage a work of literature. Shifts and unexpected developments in a narrative may have amplifying, complicating, or other interesting consequences in particular reading contexts, and these can be explored even though it can never be proved that a scribe intended those consequences. Thus, some readers hold literarily-focused interpretation to be more productive than redaction-critical speculation on putative compositional layers. This is not the same as defending the unity of the narrative or as implying that a single author was responsible for the literary production of the text. On that last point, a few scholars do conceive of Jeremiah as having been created, in the main, by a single scribal hand, sometimes identified as the historical Baruch. As regards literary coherence interpreted historically, one should note the arguments of Georg Fischer that the book of Jeremiah, while literarily complex and artful in its use of sources, was created by a single author in the late Persian period.⁸

Scholars of a postmodern bent, led a generation ago by Robert Carroll (1941–2000) and Pete Diamond (1950–2011) and growing in numbers to the present day, have problematized methodological assumptions underlying historical empiricism and contest totalizing claims about the origins, structural features, and ideological purposes of the Jeremiah traditions.⁹ Claire Carroll frames contemporary research on Jeremiah in terms of a dialectical quest moving between two poles: theorizing that honors coherence and theorizing that honors decentering and disorder.¹⁰ Ongoing debates enliven scholarship regarding the extent, goals, and characterization of the authorship and editorial activity that formed the complex book of Jeremiah.

­Scribal ­culture The scribes of ancient Israel and Judah have been understood in recent scholarship to have portrayed the figure of Jeremiah and shaped the contours of the book from the perspective of postexilic reflection. Karel van der Toorn reminds us that technologies of writing in ancient Near Eastern oral environments were very different from those activities in contemporary Western cultures. Collections of prophetic oracles—as well as other discrete units such as aphorisms and laws—may have been organized more by loose parataxis than by an overarching design or incrementally unfolding plot.¹¹ Given this, the literary significance of juxtaposition and other structuring elements should be considered; scholars of the prophetic literature look for catchwords, doublets, and other signs of locally performed linkage as potentially having semantic value. No mere copyists, scribes were erudite composers and editors of texts in their own right. The diligent and imaginative work of teams of scribes was essential for the generation and preservation of prophetic literature that would be intelligible in their social contexts.¹² Of course, the scribes could be critiqued as well as honored for what they expressed and taught; ancient scribal contestations seethe through the Jeremiah poetry and prose. Jeremiah fulminates against (some of) the scribes, “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of [Yhwh] is with us, when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie?” (8:8).¹³ Scribes wrote up economic documents such as trade inventories and deeds for financial transactions (see Jer 32). But they also produced halakic, theological, and political literature, whether that literature was attached to an authoritative name—Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah—or not. They assuredly worked in circles of traditionists. As van der Toorn observes, “the notion of the author as an autonomous agent of creative genius is a historical construct” that reflects early modern European sensibilities.¹⁴ Social and political dimensions of the scribal literature of ancient Israel and Judah are of importance for historians and ideological critics interested in the politics of literary revision. This ancient literature matters also for literary critics interested in the philology and grammar of ancient composition, poetic acumen, and scribal skill in fashioning narratives with drama, suspense, and nuanced characterization.¹⁵

Engagement of the implications of scribalism and scribal technologies in ancient Israel and Judah has proceeded along multiple trajectories. Chad Eggleston reviews four theories of writing visible in biblical scholarship on the scribal composition and redaction of Jeremiah.¹⁶ First is writing as degeneration, texts growing from original oral inspiration to later prosaic expressions assessed as stultifying and tendentious by comparison with oral charism; here Eggleston cites the work of Julius Wellhausen. Second is writing as progress, technologies of recording and reiterating making possible an increasing scribal sophistication. Third is writing as dictation, a perspective which underlines the importance of capturing the quality of originary speech utterance or dialogue; on this, Eggleston cites scholarship on a spectrum from Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932) and Sigmund Mowinckel to Susan Niditch. Finally is writing as deconstruction, a perspective that explores written texts as expressions of contradictions and contestations that can unravel or complexify their own claims; here, Eggleston cites Robert Carroll as an early practitioner of this approach within biblical studies. Contemporary scholarly engagements of scribal culture understand that oral, written, and remembered traditions exist and develop side by side in multiple forms, with many fluid directions of influence, rather than being enacted on a diachronic trajectory wherein one technology supplants another. Of relevance for the study of Jeremiah are four clues to scribal activity highlighted by Eggleston: the “literary conventions of colophons, superscripts, deictic language, and resumptive repetition.”¹⁷ The scribes may have obscured some of their redactional decisions and linguistic choices as they preserved and amplified the Jeremiah traditions. But they also left visible traces that show the intentionality of their work with the heritage of the prophet.