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­Feminist ­convictions ­that ­shape ­interpretation Commentators must choose that on which to focus. Space constraints mean that commentaries that pay attention to every text-critical issue, including minutiae, must devote less attention to sophisticated literary interpretation, by which I mean not speculation about preexisting sources and redaction—an older sense of “literary criticism”—but nuances of characterization, pacing and other dimensions of plot, the dramatic use of dialogue, the play of ambiguities and ironies, and so forth. Some philologically-focused commentaries have not engaged developments in translation studies and newer methods such as feminist criticism, failing to recognize that such methods offer much to help remedy narrow androcentric perspectives and views that are limited in their analysis of race, ethnicity, and class dimensions of texts and social contexts in antiquity and in the history of interpretation. Philological and historical analyses are sometimes performed as if their choices were being made in a neutral space, uncolored by interpreters’ implicit understandings of language, gender, power, and cultural difference. This can leave major aspects of textual signification, historiography, and social ideologies uninterrogated or poorly explained. For example, norms of masculinity purveyed by ancient texts have not been critically engaged by biblical scholars in much depth until fairly recently. The intersectional interrogation of ideologies and effects of scholarly practices is urgently needed, for as Gale Yee observes, “intersectionality has not made a significant dent as a conceptual framework in biblical studies, except … among scholars of color.”⁸⁵ Feminist, womanist, queer, and other scholar-activists affirm the importance of this work. Reflecting on social injustice generally and epistemological elitism within the academy in particular, trans activist theologian Robyn Henderson-Espinoza reminds us of the importance of

recognizing the structural fallacies of supremacy culture, because when there is a culture of any supremacy, it creates hierarchies of dominance…. We all—even those who are bound up in supremacy culture—must find a way to be free. Part of the lie of oppression is that the social hierarchies in place need to be in place.⁸⁶

Commentary-writing has been severely circumscribed by certain epistemological and methodological hierarchies within Western credentialed biblical studies. Esther Fuchs has reviewed the variegated landscape of feminist work, identifying two approaches that are held in dialectical relation: a first feminist approach “seeks to clarify the foundations of the field … establishing a genealogy of knowledge, and an evolutionary trajectory or a history of feminist ideas,” while a second feminist approach “deals mostly with interrogations, destabilizing and disrupting foundational paradigms, and seeking to supplement or displace them.”⁸⁷ My aim is to position this commentary recognizably within the discursive arenas of historical, literary, and ideological-critical biblical studies while vigorously interrogating the limitations of the genre of commentary, supplementing and occasionally displacing the standard foci in Jeremiah studies as I perform this work in feminist terms.

­Goals ­of ­my ­feminist ­workSeveral goals have been important for my ongoing feminist work in biblical studies and have shaped my approach in this commentary. I strive:

a) to honor all subjects, attending to those whose experiences and truths are erased, silenced, or distorted in patriarchal and other violent rhetoric, whether rhetoric of the biblical texts or of later commentary on those texts;

b) to interrogate relations of power, those expressed in overt or implicit gestures within biblical texts and also those performed via assumptions underlying methods of interpretation, the pressures of reception history, and scholarly norms for what counts as viable analysis;

c) to reform community, especially by opening spaces for new visions and the fierce contestation of harms perpetrated over the centuries by those gathered around these sacred texts.

To achieve these goals, I critique and destabilize ideologies of subjugation described in biblical texts or enacted in interpretation through uninterrogated patriarchal cultural ideation and conceptual structures that legitimize militarized colonization.⁸⁸ This work involves exposing oppressive uses of power, including suppression of the reality of harms experienced from antiquity to the present day by women, girls, and gender-expansive persons, and harms experienced by men and boys. I work to facilitate the movement away from gender essentialism, which impoverishes persons of every gender, and I strive to contest race and class hierarchies, which replicate the commodification of bodies and imaginations to serve the material gain of particular elites. In this commentary, I avoid simplistic binaries as regards gender and other dimensions of embodiment, social relations, and political experience. I have sought to craft nuanced commentary that does not rely on the stentorian pronouncements and summative categorizations that have been besetting flaws of this scholarly genre in the modern period.

Biblical prophetic truth-telling is creative, subversive, and emancipatory, declining the ideological distortions and abuses of power that are constitutive of systems of oppression. Prophetic discourse can itself be coopted by injurious powers—we see this not only in the “false prophets” excoriated by Jeremiah, but in the Dtr-Jer prose that eviscerates Judean compatriots and blames them for their own trauma. At its most effective, prophetic truth-telling is not venomous; it does not brutalize those who should be persuaded to turn from their injustice or become wiser about their unwitting complicity in systemic harms. Rather, prophetic truth-telling should be stirring and invitatory, critiquing what is flawed in a way that clears space for new insight, offering the audience a clarion call to deepened wisdom and renewed action for justice in mutuality. I aim for my feminist commentary on the prophecy of the Jeremiah traditions to do the same, while remaining mindful that there will always be dimensions of this work that may not go far enough.⁸⁹ Relevant here are three characteristics of the feminist public theologian as articulated by Juliana Claassens:

1. As a “constructive visionary,” the feminist public theologian should “help people see light in places of darkness…. called to name the reality of the darkness, but also to see beyond it. In a counter movement, she is to bring about compassion and justice and resistance and resilience where there is none.”⁹⁰

2. The feminist public theologian should “deal honestly and constructively with the reality of the deep wounds and the scars caused by racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia, which, if left unattended, may fester.”⁹¹

3. The feminist public theologian is “to journey with those in pain and hear the other into speech. In an act of shared vulnerability, the feminist public theologian is called to acknowledge the other’s reality.”⁹²

Below I describe the feminist hermeneutical practices enacted in the pages of this commentary. Where a point may seem to be only historical or literary in nature and not feminist as such, I will explain the feminist valences and values involved; it is a feminist practice to make transparent the scholarly commitments and values that guide one’s interpretation. We should remember that all historical and literary analysis may be claimed as relevant for the feminist project. Philology is significant for feminist inquiry. Archaeology is relevant to the feminist project, as Carol Meyers has shown in her rich oeuvre of field-shaping work.⁹³ Wendy Brown has trenchantly observed something true of scholarly inquiry in the humanities, in the sciences, and beyond: “The forms of power that produce gender or produce class are themselves saturated with that production—they do not precede it.”⁹⁴

Biblical texts are “saturated” with performances of gender and power. Those performances have been reinforced, resisted, translated literally and metaphorically, and (often) experienced without much critical awareness throughout the history of interpretation, including the history of scholarship on those texts. Yet the practice of identifying one’s scholarly convictions and practices remains far from standard in Western biblical studies and is all but unknown in the genre of commentary, apart from the expressly feminist Wisdom commentary series. I have striven to make this volume more forthcoming in that regard than is the norm. Daunting indeed is the attendant vulnerability in the endeavor—not just my feelings of vulnerability as author, but the bona fide vulnerability this volume may experience in reviews by critics. Yee writes, “Thinking ‘intersectionally’ is an invitation to rethink the main assumptions and paradigms of our field to reveal the interconnections of various forms of power.”⁹⁵ Such rethinking is risky, not only because dominant scholarly perspectives ignore or dismiss it, but also because those engaged in this work will perform it imperfectly. Each of us has more to learn about structures of oppression; each must become wiser about the ways in which our vision has been occluded. However risky intersectional rethinking may be, it is necessary for excellent interpretation of biblical texts, for bending toward justice the subcultures of the guild of biblical studies and dismantling systems of injustice in which biblical scholarship has been complicit.