Читать книгу Jeremiah 26-52 - Carolyn Sharp - Страница 14

The literary quality of Jeremiah is a matter of some dispute. Many readers find the book to be a confusing welter of traditions that is difficult to read. Over against those interpreters who laud the lyricism of the laments of Jeremiah, there are a few who find those poems formulaic and uninteresting. There are readers who celebrate the artful poems in the OAN and those who deplore their literary quality. Robert Carroll can say, “46–51 contain some of the finest, as well as the most difficult, poetry in the book of Jeremiah,” while McKane complains of Paul Volz, “he greatly exaggerates the merits of his sixth-century poet whose work he describes as religiously powerful, intellectually significant and morally sensitive… the opposite of damning with faint praise. It is a fulsome and unrealistic account of the content of the oracles against the nations.”⁶³

Jeremiah^MT has arrived at its final layered form through many different scribal actions and likely some accidents of history as well. Factors influencing Jer^MT as it now stands included the following: 1) preservation of poetic oracles, in some instances in well-shaped dramatic dialogue, in other instances without apparent concern to connect discrete units with contiguous material; 2) amplification of existing texts by means of large swaths of prose narrative and smaller sections of didactic commentary; 3) artful interweaving of earlier and later material, including framing of sections by means of superscriptions and reduplication of some verses (doublets) in later literary contexts within the book; 4) smaller and larger scribal interpolations toward particular literary and ideological purposes, this to be considered as far-reaching and coherent redaction of some major parts; 5) a number of local explicative additions that may have no larger purpose or framework as their horizon beyond responding to the local image or claim that generated the scribal activity.

Leslie Allen offers this image: “The book of Jeremiah is like an old English country house, originally built and then added to in the Regency period, augmented with Victorian wings, and generally refurbished throughout the Edwardian years.”⁶⁴ Allen’s marvelous image may be used as a starting place to explore methodological commitments and particular details in the formation of Jeremiah. As one who works in literary criticism and attends to the logic underlying scholarly arguments about redaction, I believe it is evident that many Jeremiah passages have been constructed from later times and multiple perspectives. Here are my comments as framed by Allen’s governing metaphor.

– The Jeremiah “old country house” may have a foundation that is very old, but we cannot be sure. Just as builders easily and skillfully imitate older styles when adding to houses, renovating particular parts and even creating antique reproductions wholesale, so too ancient Judah’s elite scribes were capable of using a variety of literary styles and genres, archaizing linguistic elements, and tropes quarried from older sacred traditions in their work.

– Builders can refer to the age of stone or other materials, including foundation stones with dates inscribed in them. Yet such materials can be falsified: newer materials can be purposefully stressed or otherwise modified to give the impression of enhanced antiquity. Literary work to determine even just relative dating of construction levels in Jeremiah is harder than such work normally is in building construction. As regards the Jeremiah “house,” arguments for any particular original Kern are speculative and based on subtle tautologies in the arguments. For example: the fact that Babylon is not named in some of the early poetry does not mean that the identity of the foe from the north was not yet known and thus that this poetry must be early. A literary critic could explain that as a rhetorical move intended to increase the terror of the image: the portrayal of a faceless and mythic enemy can be more frightening than an enemy described clearly and pragmatically. Alternatively, the literary datum that Babylon is not named in the first few chapters of Jeremiah might be part of an intentional arc of increasingly heightened suspense as the book unfolds.

– Where Allen stipulates that his “country house” was built in the Regency period (roughly 1811–1820), I would argue that the main structure of the Jeremiah “house” may represent what later builders thought was Regency style, which is not the same thing, and further, there is no way to know for sure how much time had elapsed after the actual Regency years before the house was constructed.

– In the Allen analogy, wings were added to the house in the Victorian period (1837–1901). If we conceive of the Dtr-Jer prose as an analogous set of extensions: I would argue that the additions drastically overbalance the main structure and that their defining features have been worked at regular intervals, in different scales, throughout the main structure as well. The additions are not discrete add-ons attached, as it were, to the north and south sides only. Later promise oracles and other additions, such as material in Jer 30–31, might be small in size but are eye-catching in their stylistic anomaly when compared with the rest of the house.

– As one who works in ideological criticism, I would add to Allen’s analogy this observation: there are traces left in the architecture of bitter disputes and even fisticuffs among different building groups, not only across time but possibly even in the same time period. Some dismantling has happened, as well—not just building and renovating. There are signs that cracks and fissures have been spackled over. Subtle gouges remain in the woodwork.

1986 has long been remarked in Jeremiah scholarship as a watershed year for commentaries in English. Major works from Robert Carroll, William Holladay (1926–2016), and William McKane (1921–2004) were published that year. Those three volumes staked out varied terrains within methodological debates in biblical studies.⁶⁵ ­Robert Carroll Carroll’s volume tends toward an agnosticism about many aspects of historical formation, rightly seeing that much claimed to constitute assured results of research in historicist models (especially about the historical man Jeremiah) has been based on scholarly speculation. Carroll chooses to highlight Deuteronomistic and other ideological goals of the material, as he perceives them. In this, he takes a guiding position in what had been the excruciatingly slow and tentative advance of ideological-critical and postmodern insights about the fraught relationship between textual signification and history. Carroll’s claims seem eminently reasonable today: historiography need not be seen as the only appropriate lens through which to read Jeremiah since “it is the interplay of many traditions which carries the teaching and proclamation for the communities to which it is addressed”; “the figure of Jeremiah which is discerned in the text must not be confused with a hypothesized real person”; a rich variety of ideological interests “fracture the monolithic theory of editing and suggest a longer period for the development of the text than is allowed for by many exegetes,” and “these features give the book a greater depth than the flat reading of it as all the work

­William ­Holladayof one man in four decades.”⁶⁶ William Holladay, by contrast, is adamant about grounding the understanding of Jeremiah texts in accordance with specific—sometimes hyper-specific—dates and settings. Erudite about events in the Levant and wider ancient Near East, Holladay regularly draws a historicist conclusion from the intradiegetic setting of a scene in Jeremiah, as if signals within the narrative could constitute confirmation of external events and reveal the intentions of the historical Jeremiah [“Jrm”], Baruch, or another historical figure. Critiqued for methodological naiveté by scholars working in ideological criticism and redaction criticism, Holladay’s volume is nevertheless helpful for imagining the world within Jeremiah. Well aware of scholarly skepticism about Jeremiah as a historical source, Holladay stands firm:

Most of the poetry preserved in the book exhibits a distinctive vocabulary, style, and theology that one may attribute to Jrm, and … the book is largely the work of the scribe Baruch…. The picture of Jrm that emerges from the book is that of a highly distinctive and innovative person; it is not the kind of figure that later generations would be likely to create…. The data of the book can be used to build up a credible portrayal of the prophet, a portrayal against which there are no opposing data.⁶⁷

­William ­McKane William McKane’s two-volume commentary in the International Critical Commentary series admirably executes the text-critical and philological goals of that series. He compares readings across different manuscript traditions, rabbinic sources, and modern scholarly commentaries for virtually every matter of any interpretive significance, verse by verse. His compendium of philological positions is instructive. McKane is aware of dominant redaction-critical theories but is dissatisfied with the arguments, suggesting a more localized model of accretions to Jer^MT over time, imagined as a “rolling corpus.”⁶⁸ His model, valued by many scholars of Jeremiah including myself, is sometimes dismissed in caricature, as if he were proposing that many features of Jeremiah were completely random, by those who defend schemata based on pervasive redactional shaping. To forestall such dismissal, which does McKane’s work an injustice, I reproduce his nuanced and erudite explanation here in detail:

I introduce the idea of corpus along with what might seem to be a counter-assertion that the processes which brought about the final product are only partially understood by us, that our explanations have to be tentative, and that we err when we suppose that these processes are always susceptible of rational explanation, or that they must necessarily contribute to a thoughtful, systematic redaction…. There is more of accident, arbitrariness, and fortuitous twists and turns than has generally been allowed for. The processes are dark and in a measure irrecoverable, and we should not readily assume them to possess such rationality that they will yield to a systematic elucidation…. [Some] expansions … are … scribal rather than editorial. They have exegetical, interpretative, harmonizing functions, and they do not look beyond the small pieces of text to which they are attached, in some cases individual verses. Other expansions … can be associated with a broader editorial intention, but not with an overarching editorial plan or a systematic theological tendency.⁶⁹

As Brevard Childs (1923–2007) has objected, responsible exegesis ought neither to flatten the textual tensions of Jeremiah into an artificial congruence nor leave the text splintered and unreadable:

Recent appeals to synchronic, post-modern readings fail to do justice to the text’s depth dimensions and diverse literary contours. Nevertheless, the crucial exegetical task remains how skillfully to handle the very different kinds of tension present…. Equally unconvincing is a redactional approach which attempts to resolve the problems by endless fragmenting of the text into layers.⁷⁰

­Recent ­commentariesAmong commentaries published in recent years, four may be identified that highlight salient arenas within Jeremiah scholarship. Jack Lundbom’s three-volume commentary (1999–2004) is noteworthy for its sophisticated rhetorical criticism. Lundbom emphasizes the effects of multiple narrative and poetic strategies that give these ancient texts their richness and dramatic power.⁷¹ The commentary by Georg Fischer (2005) offers soundings in biblical tradition history, highlighting the literary and traditio-historical allusions that inform Jeremiah texts. Louis Stulman’s commentary (2005) offers a nuanced account of the relevance of trauma theory and graceful exploration of theological issues. Hermann-Josef Stipp’s magisterial commentary (2019) works assiduously with philological data and macro-structural layers to substantiate his thesis regarding the complex growth of the book of Jeremiah in several stages.⁷² For many historical, philological, literary, and theological temperaments, there exist outstanding resources for the study of Jeremiah. It is my hope that feminist engagements of this biblical book—few in number as of this writing—will burgeon from a wide variety of intellectual commitments and social-contextual perspectives.