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The politics of gender and other axes of oppression enter the production of knowledge at many points.

—Elizabeth Potter⁹⁶

Three overarching feminist practices have shaped this commentary: 1) paying sustained attention to gender in the ancient texts; 2) making visible the violence described in and perpetrated by the prose and poetry of Jeremiah; and 3) resisting academic pressure to pretend to objective neutrality in interpretation. For more on feminist engagement of philological issues, see the “Translation Practices” section below.

­Attending ­to ­scholarly ­perspectives ­on ­genderFirst, I bring into the foreground research and interpretations produced by scholars who interrogate gender in ancient texts. Scholars are increasingly attending to gender in traditions of prophecy across the ancient Near East. The Hebrew Bible mentions some women prophets by name—Miriam (Exod 15:20–21; Mic 6:4), Deborah (Judg 4–5), and Huldah (2 Kgs 22:12–20; 2 Chr 34:22) are vitally important in Exodus, Judges, and the Josianic reform, respectively. The Hebrew Bible mentions other women intermediaries briefly: Noadiah is named in Neh 6:14; Isaiah has a child with an unnamed woman prophet (Isa 8:1–4); women prophets are excoriated by Ezekiel (Ezek 13:17–23); and Joel promises that women will prophesy in the last days (Joel 2:28).⁹⁷ Thus we may consider prophecy in Judah to have encompassed men and women practitioners. The masculinity of prophets in Jeremiah need not be assumed as normative even for the Hebrew Bible, much less for the ancient Near East more generally.

­Jeremiah’s ­masculinity Further, the masculinity of the ancient Hebrew prophets involves complex and contradictory identifiers. Amy Kalmanofsky postulates of male prophets in the Hebrew Bible that they regularly face the risk of being “feminized” as prophets working within the essentialist gender binarism that characterizes these ancient texts: “Being close to God … compromises their masculinity by forcing prophets to assume a submissive posture before their male God.”⁹⁸ As Mary Mills has observed, Jeremiah is “excessive” and unusual in ways that challenge expected social norms and, I would add, any traditional narration of the covenantal history of Israel and Judah with Yhwh:

By standing in excess of communal norms, the prophetic body signals what is grotesque—confusion, loss of identity, failed relationships…. Jeremiah’s chaotic life signals the deregulation of familiar patterns of order, moving readers into the field of ambiguity. In the literary profile of a figure of pathos, Jeremiah’s body occupies a space … parallel to that occupied by female bodies.⁹⁹

Rhiannon Graybill has explored loci of instability within Jeremiah’s performance of prophesying. In the poetry of the first half of Jeremiah, the prophet uses language and sounds—especially weeping and crying aloud—in ways that feminize him, for “Jeremiah has none of the stoic restraint of Hosea, instructed to marry a whoring woman (Hos. 1, 3), or of Ezekiel, ordered to perform all manner of humiliating acts (Ezek. 4–5).”¹⁰⁰ Jeremiah is given to waves of feeling, such that “Jeremiah’s voice is peculiar” and hysterical, especially in the confessions, this constituting “a meaningful break with cultural norms of sound and speech” for males in ancient Near Eastern cultures: “The prophet’s repeated crying out represents the overwhelming affective force of suffering. It also feminizes him.”¹⁰¹ Graybill asserts that “sound, and hysterical sound in particular … opens a space of queer possibility in the text,” for “the prophet’s use of sound destabilizes and unsettles the gendering of his body.”¹⁰²

Corrine Carvalho, too, writes that “Jeremiah’s gender is called into question through his interactions with God and the community,” and further, writ larger than the persona of the prophet alone, “gender distortion and reversal in the book are part of a larger rhetorical strategy to depict the defeat of the city as a disruption to every social category.”¹⁰³ Carvalho points to these elements: the lamenting of Jeremiah as a normatively female activity that “locate[s] him within a liminal space” as regards gendered agency; Yhwh’s interdiction of marriage for Jeremiah (Jer 16:1–2) as striking at “the core of his gendered identity” as a man; and the overpowering of the prophet by Yhwh, decried by Jeremiah in 20:7, as signaling that Jeremiah “takes on the passive, acted upon, stereotypical female role in ancient Israel,” portrayed as “a feminized victim of God’s supremacy” whose unmarried status “highlights God’s exclusive claim on” him.¹⁰⁴ These sorts of feminist readings can be fruitful whether one works conceptually within the essentialist binary categories (normative male and normative female) established by these androcentric ancient texts or instead declines the binarism of the historical categories underlying this discourse, as I do. I would simply flag the risks of inadvertently reinforcing misogyny and reinscribing other distortions of gendered human experience wherever an interpreter uses a gendered metaphor in their own voice—for example, the image of a woman in labor—as telling an unmediated or essential truth about gendered or sexual identity. Carvalho offers a strong reading of feminist hope from the text of Jeremiah: “I choose to read God’s subversion of male patriarchal privilege in Jeremiah as revealing how God subverts all structures of human pride.”¹⁰⁵ The position of the present commentary is that such interpretations can be fruitful indeed—precisely as resistant readings rather than as historically grounded explications of an essentialist theological anthropology or view of gender that should be reproduced today.

Queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952–2009) contests the injurious distortions and constraints effected by patriarchal and heterosexist norms inscribed within biblical texts and the history of interpretation of same. She warns that queer and other marginalized readers “need to beware of the danger of ending up in confined, narrow spaces of reflection (our little jails) when reading the Scriptures or God.”¹⁰⁶ Althaus-Reid highlights the ways in which approved scholarly modes of translation, philology, and hermeneutics continue to imprison the imaginations and creative work of queer readers:

Queer theologians are also kept in attics or in dungeons … after we have been taught how to do the rudiments of a theology, we discover ourselves in a grammatical dungeon. There, the spelling of a systematic theology and the accent and punctuation systems become over-privileged and, by default, transgressive thinking becomes illogical, illegal or “irrelevant”.¹⁰⁷

In this volume, I strive to pry the bars of the dungeon door apart, as it were, so that entries are made wider—and escapes are facilitated—for feminist and queer investigations of the powerful and disturbing book of Jeremiah. Deryn Guest offers a helpful description of the work of queer theory:

Queer theorists turn their analytical spotlight in two directions. On the one hand, the institutions, discourses and practices that produce, police, and sustain regimes of the normal come under critical inspection. On the other hand, they explore the various non-normative ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality can line up against social expectations and prescriptions.¹⁰⁸

Guest argues that there can be “dissenters and queer practices” even within the fold of interpreters who identify as heterosexual.¹⁰⁹ I am aware that not all queer theorists agree with Guest on that. Nevertheless, as a cis-hetero interpreter, I find myself emboldened by Guest’s position. I hear a generous invitation to affiliate with practices of gender-critical and queer criticism, dissenting from the structures that privilege certain gender and sexuality performances, including my own, over others. There are infinite ways in which readers can queer the constructions of Israel and Judah expressed in Jeremiah and its antecedent literatures, such as Pentateuchal and Deuteronomic traditions. As I have observed of those gathered around Jeremiah as sacred Scripture,

Gender warriors, sexually marginated believers, political prisoners, and refugees from the life-deforming prejudices of the Church: all these and more must dare to claim their subjectivity as beloved Jacob, as cherished Zion. Indeed, the broken and disempowered Jeremiah of the confessions may be a powerful model here. שירו ליהוה שיר חדש: we must sing fierce new songs to [Yhwh], we must shout with Deutero-Isaiah that God is doing a new thing.¹¹⁰

As readers consider the rich possibilities for productive queer theorizing of texts and traditions in Jeremiah, they may find important one feature of prophecy in the ancient Near East—though apparently not in Israel and Judah—that creates space for queer revisions of the figure of the prophet. Martti Nissinen has analyzed gender markers for prophets in a corpus of 142 ancient texts from Mari, Assyria, other locations in Mesopotamia, and West Semitic traditions, as well as one Egyptian narrative. He writes that “eight texts refer to five individual prophets whose gender is not clear, either because the prophet bears the title assinnu, indicating a genderless or ‘third gender’ role, or because the reference to the prophet’s gender is otherwise ambiguous,” and says that of “anonymous prophets whose gender is indicated … twenty-seven are male and thirteen female,” showing the breadth of gender performance in prophetic circles in these ancient cultures.¹¹¹ Nissinen goes on,

In Mesopotamia, devotees of Ištar called assinnu, kurgarrû, sinnišānu, sometimes also called kalû and kulu’u are mentioned in several texts from different periods as representatives of an ambivalent gender. These people feature in different roles including cross-dressing, ritual dance, healing, … lament—and prophecy, as evidenced by texts from Mari and probably also from Assyria. Two assinnus, Šelebum and Ili-ḫaznaya, are known to have prophesied at Mari, while in Assyrian sources the gender ambiguity is suggested by unclear gender specifications in … the tablet SAA 9 1: “Issār-lā-tašīaṭ, a man from Arbela,” “the woman Bāia, a man from Arbela,” and “the woman Ilussa-am[ur], a m[ale citizen] of Assur.”… Perhaps the best word to describe them is “queer,” because that is what they seem to have been even in the eyes of their contemporaries. Their third-gender role was probably not considered “normal”; nevertheless, their permanent difference from other people was divinely sanctioned.¹¹²

Nissinen suggests that the performance of these genderqueer prophets “reflected Ištar’s alterity, emulating her power to transgress sexual boundaries.”¹¹³ This observation may catalyze bold reflections on prophecy by Jeremiah readers interested in feminist and queer modes of interpretation. Jeremiah is forbidden to perform the normative cis-hetero-masculine functions of marrying a woman and fathering children (16:2). While genderqueer prophets are not flagged as such in the Hebrew Bible, the interpreter may honor the ancient Near Eastern context within which Jeremiah was written. Standard and expected are the philologist’s comparison of linguistic cognates across languages and the historian’s analysis of the waves of militarized violence that affected multiple cultures as particular empires rose and fell. Interpreters who wish to engage Jeremiah for feminist and queer readings may go further. We may dare to be bold in how we interpret the divinely mandated refusal of cis-hetero behaviors for the prophet. The freighted silences around Jeremiah’s body, sexuality, and understanding of his gender may be explored using 16:2 as a warrant to decline the assumption of heterosexual cis male identity for Jeremiah. The same may be said for Judah as (constructed) community and (imagined) subject in Jeremiah and other biblical traditions. Ancient Judah was never any one thing historically. Judean constituencies were never monolithic in their socialization or politics. Judeans historically were not arrayed along a theological wire stretched between the binary poles “faithful” and “unfaithful.” Gender and social power were expressed in infinitely creative and variable ways in the communities, plural and pluriform, that made up ancient Israel and Judah across the generations. This point is confirmed over and over again by historiography that is methodologically sophisticated. A point made by Fuchs is relevant here: those of us committed to “postmodern critiques”—and to historical inquiry that is truly excellent—should remain “suspicious of the notion of stable, predetermined, unquestioned collective and representative identities and the politics that are engendered by them,”¹¹⁴ whether those be dramatized within poetic and prose texts from antiquity or enacted in contemporary interpretation.

­Making ­violence ­more ­visibleIn a second feminist praxis, I have sought to make more visible the violence of the Jeremiah traditions. The kinds of violence narrated in this text and performed by means of Jeremiah are many. Foremost within the plot are the terrors enacted by the incursions of the Babylonian army into Judean territory, including the protracted siege of Jerusalem and the resulting famine that wracked the bodies of the besieged Judeans; the mental anguish suffered by those who saw doom approaching and were unable to flee or save their loved ones; the terrible harms done to Judeans by Babylonian soldiers in the homes and streets of Jerusalem when the wall was breached, these harms to have included maiming injuries, sexual violence, summary execution, and drawn-out death agonies from catastrophic wounds. Other kinds of violence performed by means of this text have affected not the inhabitants of Jerusalem within the plot but readers of Jeremiah, including those excluded or shamed by language in these texts, those who believe faithfulness requires yielding to a brutalizing God, and those who do not see their lived experience being brought within the compass of prophetic vision. Rather than offering just a few short paragraphs here regarding rhetoric of violence, I will engage the issue wherever such violence is reflected or performed in Jeremiah. This includes naming the violence of the speech of Yhwh and Jeremiah overtly in the literary structure I supply at the head of each chapter on the OAN. For example: I do not say in faux-neutral terms, “judgment against Moab.” I offer more precise descriptors: “Yhwh taunts a female Moabite survivor” (48:18) and “Jeremiah gloats over exhausted Moabite refugees” (48:45). In my view, for a commentator to use sanitized labels for such oracles would constitute complicity with rhetorical violence.

There are many ways in which translation can become complicit in reproducing violence. Extensive violence is articulated and masked by the words of Jeremiah. Where there can be little doubt about violence underlying neutral-sounding words, I have made that violence more explicit in the target language. Here are two examples:

– The Hebrew verb גלה is said in the lexicons to mean “to exile, to take into exile.” Because the word “exile” may be heard by many readers as abstract and conceptually diffuse, and because the notion of exile can mean also a voluntarily chosen site, geographically real or metaphorical, from which intellectuals and other culture-producers write or create dissident art, I am concerned that the term may serve to mask the violence of what Nebuchadrezzar and Nebuzaradan do to the people of Jerusalem. So I translate verbal forms of גלה in many instances as “forcibly displace,” making clearer what prisoners of war, refugees, and internally displaced persons endure.

– Jeremiah 38 offers two clear signals regarding sexual violence: Zedekiah’s description of his deep anxiety that Judeans who have gone over to the Babylonians will rape him (38:19), and Jeremiah’s reported vision of the women of the king’s house being “led out to the officials of the king of Babylon” (38:22), a gendered image that implies their fate, too, will include sexual violation. Such atrocities happen to this day when leaders are deposed in conditions of lawlessness. A great many commentaries minimize the sexual violence in this chapter or fail to say anything at all about it. I choose to address it directly, including translating what Zedekiah fears, עלל hithpael (see Judg 19:25) as “rape.”

I had hoped to illuminate the violence suffered by Judeans during the Babylonian invasion and exile through the lens of quotations from the memoir of a Chilean-American writer, professor, and activist who lived for many years in exile: Ariel Dorfman, born in 1942 in Buenos Aires to leftist parents of Russian Jewish heritage. The generative Dorfman reflections I had quoted in these pages did not survive the editorial process, so I commend his 2011 memoir to the reader. That superb work explores dimensions of trauma, struggle, and hope experienced by those forced into living in diaspora; especially relevant are his reflections on writerly creativity as a response to trauma.¹¹⁵ Dorfman says of his memoir,

Because I have lost my country three times in the course of one lifetime, the attempts at self-scrutiny that habitually accompany human existence have, in my case, been forced to grow and ripen through the fragmentation of many arrivals, returns, and departures, complicating the natural intricacies that every exercise in remembering, every memoir, already faces.¹¹⁶

His writing must create a coherent narrative out of complex, fragmented memories over the course of several hope-filled returns to his cherished homeland and flights from Chile to places and cultures that offered relative safety but also dislocation, disorientation, and sometimes the deprivations of poverty. Similarly, the scribes who gave us the final form of Jer^MT knew of at least three forced exiles of notable groups of Judeans (in 597, 587, and 582), and there were surely many other displacements and escapes of individuals and small groups over the tumultuous years of Babylonian colonization that history did not record. How could scribes codify and narrate intelligibly the volatile fractures and deep harms, the fragile hopes and fierce disputes of those years? Memory is a complicated matter, as Dorfman muses. The textual disruptions and layered multivocality of the Jeremiah traditions bear witness to his insight.

­Declining ­the ­fiction ­of ­scholarly ­neutralityThird, I have resisted strong cultural pressure from the academic guild of biblical studies to pretend to neutral historical observation when reading Jeremiah, as if what the text claims, envisions, and enacts with its words were naturally to be adjudged in historically dispassionate terms. Despite the “tyranny of scientism”¹¹⁷ still regnant in the guild, scholarly objectivity is a chimera. No scholar works from a neutral position as regards how they have been enculturated in guild practices, including the distortions of limited methodologies and the gentle or more insistent coercions of particular institutions, influential scholarly figures, and dominant theories. Feminist scholars across the globe affirm what Fuchs says: “Feminist epistemology understands all forms of knowledge as discursive formations of power relations.”¹¹⁸ Even as I remain grateful for the ways in which traditional scholarship on Jeremiah has shaped my understanding of intellectual inquiry into biblical prophecy, I appreciate Fuchs’s bold call for poststructural dissent: “Feminist biblical studies should not be about accommodation, supplementarity, or coexistence with the disciplinary status quo. Rather, it should open up a radical interrogation of biblical theology, biblical literary criticism, biblical religion, and biblical historical criticism.”¹¹⁹

One way of situating scholars in this commentary will be to note the birth and death dates for the first citation of any scholar no longer living. That practice is designed to assist novices in identifying the era in which a scholar had been formed professionally, so they can explore further the social context of a particular figure if desired. My practice of supplying these dates is intended as a gesture of resistance toward any implication that the pronouncements of well-known figures in biblical studies are somehow timeless or more authoritative than the opinions of lesser-known or emerging scholars.

Core to the mandate of the IECOT/IEKAT commentary series is the exploration of newer ways of reading. Newer methodologies are by no means constrained to historical analysis of authorial intention. Many biblical scholars still write as if the notion of the author’s intended meaning had not been problematized by literary theorists beginning in the 1960s. Many learning contexts of undergraduate and graduate-level biblical studies fail to acknowledge that the quest for authorial intention has been dramatically reconfigured in light of late-modern and postmodern critiques. The genre of biblical commentary has traditionally proceeded with philological, historical, and literary analysis, moving through the material verse by verse, pericope by pericope. This detailed work is important, and in these pages, I have engaged with delight in this mode of analysis. But a commentary should also frame larger ideological trajectories and literary structural features relevant for the entire book. In her introduction to the feminist Wisdom commentary series, Barbara Reid notes,

From the beginning, feminists have understood that interpreting the Bible is an act of power. In recent decades, feminist biblical scholars have developed hermeneutical theories of the ethics and politics of biblical interpretation to challenge the claims to value neutrality of most academic biblical scholarship…. They have developed hermeneutical approaches that reveal, critique, and evaluate the interactions depicted in the text against the context of empire, and they consider implications for contemporary contexts.¹²⁰

In my feminist explication of Jeremiah, I offer two structural features designed to help the reader wrestle with larger implications of the ideologies performed in this ancient text.

­Epigraphs ­from ­feminist, ­queer, ­and ­postcolonial ­sourcesThe first structural feature is a series of epigraphs at the heads of Translation sections and Integrative Reading sections. These epigraphs draw on the expertise of scholars of translation, feminist and queer theorists, and postcolonial scholars to assist the reader in understanding complex dimensions of Jer 26–52 as the product of particular philological and semantic possibilities (in Biblical Hebrew) rendered into another language (English or German), as the product of ancient norms of masculinity and ideologies of gender, and as the product of experienced and remembered traumas engendered by Babylon’s militarized colonization of Judah in the sixth century BCE. By juxtaposing citations from traditional lexicons, grammars, and syntax reference works with insights from feminist translation theory, postcolonial criticism, and queer theory, I seek to create a multiform translation that gestures toward an opened and subversive scholarly space for engagements of Jeremiah. This volume joins the river of feminist work that has shaped and challenged and energized me for over three decades. In this work, I stand with Hanna Stenström as she says: “We claim the right to combine certain elements of diverse traditions of historical-critical scholarship with other elements, for example feminist theory, in order to create new forms of scholarship, which may grow into a stream of tradition as complex, diverse, paradoxical and full of tensions as any other.”¹²¹

­Through ­a ­queer ­lens A second feminist practice, enacted in the Integrative Reading section of each chapter, entails drawing parallels between narrations of experience, imagery, and discourse in Jeremiah, critical insights from queer studies, and public dimensions of the experiences of queer and gender-nonconforming persons living within and beyond the constraints of cis-heteropatriarchy. There are infinite ways in which queer and queer-allied interpreters can lay claim to traditions within Jeremiah. David Tabb Stewart offers this overview of queer hermeneutics:

Queer interpretation of the Bible (1) collects interpretations and questions rather than reducing interpretations to a singular “correct” answer—it interrogates; (2) looks for the nonheteronormative and the gender fluid; (3) resists (hetero)normativity and questions boundaries and categories—it is “norm-critical”; (4) strains toward privileging uniqueness—it is “anti-essentialist”; (5) resists academic norms by making room for playfulness and humor, both “camp” and “drag”, and eschews a single definition of “queer”, and so (6) is a collection of “family resemblances”, (7) saving spaces for the queer-not-yet-thought-of and the queer-to-come.¹²²

Even texts that are grim reminders of loss can be useful in this work. Sara Ahmed writes, “Keeping the past alive, even as that which has been lost, is ethical: the object is not severed from history, or encrypted, but can acquire new meanings and possibilities in the present.”¹²³ Readers can wrestle with metaphors, work creatively with the identity of speakers, foreground moments of hope, and refuse what we find distorted or inimical to the flourishing of our communities. In this “Through a queer lens” series, my goal is to hold a space for all such engagements. The normative practice of commentary proceeding in linear fashion, verse by verse and line by line, is not the only way to understand how texts should be explicated in ways that are resonant for the imaginations of readers and communities of reception. Other ways of performing scholarly commentary are possible, as is evident in rabbinic tradition and in the rich history of reception of the Bible in art and literature. Dube has made the bold claim, “The biblical story itself invites its readers to identify with it and to act it out in history…. The biblical story is an unfinished story: it invites its own continuation in history; it resists the covers of our Bibles and writes itself on the pages of the earth.”¹²⁴

­Focal ­texts ­as ­feminist “­hauntings”I had planned another feminist structural feature of this commentary: a series of sixty-one marginalia envisioned as interlocutors for the Jeremiah traditions and for our hermeneutics. Mieke Bal has urged feminist interpreters to “imagine, and ‘image,’ subversive, critical, or alternative visions—to ‘image’ political opposition by means of allusions to well-worn stories that, in a mutual move between contemporary art and the mythical past, revise, re-image, or re-tell those stories we think we know so well.”¹²⁵ In the tradition of feminist analysis of the Gothic in literature,¹²⁶ I had imagined echoes of three focal texts to be “haunting” the traditions in Jer 26–52. “Ghosts” in literature can signal much of relevance for feminist study of Jeremiah: that which is desired (fantasized about) that cannot fully materialize; apparitions from history that display their profound woundedness and refuse to be consigned to the grave; accusers that call the living to account for their death-dealing ways. I summoned evanescent traces of feminist and queer possibility from the ancient times in which they had “died” when scribes made strong patriarchal and heteronormative choices for how to articulate power and relationality in community. I saw this praxis as in line with what Hjamil Martínez-Vásquez calls “taking the silences within the traditional historical discourses and making them speak.”¹²⁷ Ironically, my actual marginalia did not survive the editorial process for this volume. They are truly ghosts: the reader cannot see them. But readers may nevertheless imagine the below focal texts to be persistently promoting feminist and queer resistance to the death-dealing ideologies pervasive in Jer 26–52. I hear these focal texts as whispering their spectral claims across time, space, and cultural difference to new generations gathered around the Jeremiah traditions. I will gladly share the chart of the feminist “hauntings” I had designed for this commentary with any reader who requests it via email (carolyn.sharp@yale.edu).

­Focal ­texts: 31:15, 31:22, and 38:7–13 These three texts can accompany any reader who chooses to listen. Of course, readers are free to choose other texts from within or beyond the Bible to empower them in their engagement of the Jeremiah traditions.

– 31:15: the image of an iconic ancestor, Rachel, weeping inconsolably for her slaughtered children. The verse powerfully presents the intimacy of trauma, its insistent public expression, and the repercussions of loss that echo through subsequent generations. As you read Jer 26–52, remember that it is a vital feminist praxis of solidarity to attend to the agony of those suffering from the grievous harms perpetrated by imperial and patriarchal violence.¹²⁸

– 31:22: a mysterious divine promise that Yhwh has “created a new thing on the earth,” elaborated as נקבה תסבב גבר, “the female surrounds the warrior-male.” The image is used to encourage traumatized Daughter Zion to come home from exile and rebuild (“Return to these your cities. How long will you waver?,” 31:21–22). As you read Jer 26–52, be emboldened by this radical vision. It is imperative for feminists to be brave as we work to overcome obstacles and build communities of justice and peace.

– 38:7–13: a narrative valorizing Ebed-melech the Ethiopian eunuch as one who resists imperial brutality and stands in alliance with Jeremiah in circumstances of threat. As you read Jer 26–52, know yourself to be surrounded by countless others who act for shalom. It is essential that feminist readers rally queer activists and those in solidarity with them to secure the flourishing of marginalized persons. We can find inspiration for this work in Ebed-melech’s bold and transgressive action to protect Jeremiah and safeguard his prophetic vision.

The first focal passage, 31:15–17, foregrounds the wrenching grief of cherished foremother Rachel. Rachel laments the catastrophic losses enacted through war, enslavement, and other modes of domination. Lament here is an expression of grief, but more, it is a feminist act of resistance. Lament contests the ideological distortions and pervasive harms that have riven every community formed under the shadow of patriarchy. Lament declines the legitimacy of rulers’ obsession with power and their tools of systemic violence wielded against all who stand in the way, including against dissidents within their own people. The book of Jeremiah is focused almost entirely on male agents within the plot: their alliances and betrayals, their political decisions, the terror they wreak with their armies. The figure of Rachel does haunt the margins of this text, lamenting the unspeakable losses suffered by communities in the iron grip of the patriarchal drive to power with its ideological distortions and brutal subjugations of the Other. Encountering Rachel in the silences of the text, readers may be emboldened to bewail pernicious aspects of ideologies in Jeremiah in ways that honor the irreparable losses inflicted on women, children, and others under the grim banner of militarized patriarchy.

The second focal passage, 31:22, invites readers to consider how the iconic female may contest, surround (סבב), and overcome the militarized masculinity and violent ideologies on display in Jeremiah, which have been ruinous for “cities,” literal and metaphorical, in which women, children, and others have sought to live in safety. Here I respect the ancient text’s use of the fairly rare Hebrew word for “female,” נקבה, in a sense that represents new possibility. The term comes up only here in the biblical prophetic corpus and only a couple of dozen times otherwise in the Hebrew Bible. It is important here, and I will not erase that rare gendered valence of the feminine by moving to more abstract formulations. Yet I do decline essentialist construals of “the feminine,” while including those who construct their lived experience as women tactically, provisionally, or from a position of trans subjectivity. Throughout Jer 26–52, gendered traces of hope may haunt even the most belligerent rhetoric of hate and the grimmest scene of destruction. Encountering the call to this utopian hope, to an unfolding possibility that will overcome dynamics of hierarchical violence, readers may be emboldened to claim as sacred their own actions for peace and resistance.

The third focal passage, 38:7–13, invites readers to imagine moments of transgressive resistance and alliance as they encounter the volatile political and social relationships and conflicts in Jeremiah. The narrative of Ebed-melech valorizes the courage of one whose queer performances of resistance and alliance-building, claimed within the imperial palace, can open up spaces for the misunderstood, the marginal, and the abject within dominant cultures. As Sean Burke writes of another Ethiopian eunuch in the Bible (Acts 8),

Eunuchs … have the potential to function as queering figures…. Ancient discourses produced a social construction of eunuchs that had the potential to deconstruct and to denaturalize ancient constructions of masculinity. Wherever a eunuch is present as a figure in an ancient text … there is the potential for that eunuch to function rhetorically in ways that queer ancient constructions of masculinity. Such queering opens up space for contesting all identity categories, ancient and modern, in order that “transgressive” bodies may be recognized as fully human.¹²⁹

Readers may look for Ebed-melech to haunt Jer 26–52 in two ways that are important for shalom: as one who resists imperial actions that threaten to destroy prophetic vision (cf. 38:5–9) and as one who extends the hand of alliance to those incarcerated in cultural spaces of deprivation and risk (cf. 38:11–13). Reflecting on the story of this eunuch, readers may be emboldened to resist imperialism in all its forms, standing in alliance with Ebed-melech to envision, construct, and guard radical queer spaces in communities that gather around biblical texts as sacred Scripture.

Rachel’s bitter weeping haunts passages of militarized violence, including those passages that celebrate Yhwh’s impending extermination of enemy nations. Readers should not become numb to the horrors wreaked by triumphalist militarism on communities targeted by planned violence. Images of gendered polemic and subjugation in Jeremiah can be haunted by the promise of the “new thing” Yhwh has created via the female surrounding the warrior-male. This may be heard as an invitation to readers to contest, surround, besiege, and neutralize gender injustice wherever it may be found. And as Jeremiah’s sign-acts and political contestations are performed, Ebed-melech, marked in the biblical text as Other via his Ethiopian heritage and his non-normative gender, can be imagined to be nearby, a sign of the queer possibility that is irrepressibly present wherever communities gather. Whether we read for scholarly goals or other purposes, we read always in community—not in a disembodied intellectual space but in the real world, where encounters with texts and their interpretations produce effects in real lives. Fernando Segovia notes one of the crucial gifts offered by Latinx biblical interpreters in this regard, viz., the insistent acknowledgement of community as the context for interpretation: “All posit the community as the foundation, optic, and objective of interpretation—imbued by an overriding awareness of marginalization, a clarion call for solidarity and liberation, and an unwavering appeal to ideals of social justice.”¹³⁰

­Reception history In each chapter, I supply soundings in the history of reception of Jeremiah, aware that it is beyond the page constraints of this volume to do justice to even a single Jeremiah passage and the history of its effects (Wirkungsgeschichte) through centuries of interpretation. Because detailing the artful hermeneutics of ancient and medieval rabbinic commentary is beyond my expertise and discussions of any depth would swiftly exceed the space constraints of this volume, I have left that interpretive arena to others.¹³¹ Here, the reader will encounter observations from early-church interpreters such as Origen and Jerome, along with medieval and Reformation commentators such as Nicholas of Lyra, John Calvin, and Martin Luther. I affirm the critique raised by Shelley Birdsong regarding risks that attend the airing of exegetical and theological thoughts from interpreters whose readings could be supersessionist or outright anti-Semitic. The concern Birdsong raises regarding the volume by Joy Schroeder may be applied to every work that engages with Christian theologians from past eras, viz., that

the patriarchal, anti-Semitic, and bigoted views propagated by these authors will be recycled once again in Christian circles…. It is imperative for those who translate and redisseminate these texts to warn readers against accepting them as divinely or church-sanctioned and thus assumedly credible for continuing such hate.¹³²

The work of dismantling anti-Semitism, misogyny, androcentrism, racism, homophobia, and other oppressive ideologies is crucially important. I offer glimpses into modes of Christian spiritual interpretation in this commentary as a way to signal a vast and complicated landscape for those who wish to explore it further. That landscape—the history of Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures—offers breathtaking vistas and alluring pathways into nuanced accounts of christology, Trinitarian doctrine, and ecclesiology, but obstacles and dangers confront the reader at every turn as well. I have avoided reproducing specific commentary from early, medieval, and Reformation interpreters that could generate new harm as regards anti-Semitism. The deplorable records of many ancient, medieval, and early modern interpreters on that score should continue to be challenged and declined by scholars who work on those oeuvres. There is no way to avoid the pervasive androcentrism and other distorted views of gender underlying much biblical interpretation in Christian (and other) traditions through the centuries, though again, in these pages I have avoided quoting anything that I find overtly pernicious. Schroeder mentions fleeting engagements of Jeremiah by Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1260–c. 1282), and Birgitta of Sweden (c. 1303–1373),¹³³ but the gender of an author does not guarantee a non-toxic perspective on gender and power writ larger, as is evident, for example, when we read Hildegard. Thus Birdsong’s important caveat should be kept in mind.

­Feminist ­paratranslation The twenty-four epigraphs in this commentary should be understood as gestures of feminist paratranslation. According to Ruth Abou Rached, feminist paratranslation comprises myriad possibilities for peripheral framings, explicatory annotations, and other interventions that feminist translators use strategically “to frame a text in its new reception setting,” for example using “prefaces and afterwords as productive sites of commentary where feminist translators can visibly present themselves as co-producers of meaning and as political agents pursuing their agendas in the textual creation process.”¹³⁴ She explains further,

every paratextual space becomes a potentially transgressive site of meaning-making…. blurring the boundaries between the “original”, translation and paratranslation; reconfiguring the translational expressions of activist agency as both textual and paratextual and both discursive and non-discursive; and … revealing both the cross-border processes of resistance and solidarity building and the dangers of orientalist, reductive and neo/colonialist readings.¹³⁵

Some may balk here, murmuring, “Ah, so this is activism, not scholarly commentary.” I cheerfully decline that misguided polarity. This feminist commentary is both scholarly and activist; further, traditional modes of engagement are not more “neutral.” Their proponents simply choose to let aspects of the social contexts of ancient texts and their reception go under-interrogated and under-theorized, especially as regards norms of masculinity, the distortion or erasure of female and other-gendered social formations, and marginalization of those without scribal status in ancient guilds. Traditional commentators are less transparent about the theological, hermeneutical, social, and political norms that have affected their own translational and interpretive choices. Consider the way in which Michal Beth Dinkler amplifies 1 Cor 13:12 to describe benefits of engaging with poststructuralist literary theory:

The poststructuralist literary paradigm can facilitate more fine-grained descriptions of the places where ancient and contemporary cultures converge and diverge. It…. holds scholars ethically responsible for thinking through the complications and implications inherent in our critical claims…. cautioning us against artificially imposing interpretive clarity on texts—acting, that is, as though we “know fully”—when in fact, texts express themselves only “in part.”¹³⁶

Just so, Jeremiah is radically complex and elusive. Its aporia cannot be solved by historical research, poetic analysis, or redaction criticism. The prophetic performances and contestations enshrined in the Jeremiah traditions can never be known fully. Thus our engagements must be multiform and polyphonic. The amplifications and explorations of many possibilities—feminist, womanist, postcolonial, queer, and more—can instruct and equip readers for many dimensions of contextual interpretation across arenas designated in the IECOT/IEKAT series as dia­chronic, synchronic, and integrative. It is my hope that this feminist commentary on Jer 26–52 will help clear space within biblical studies for the burgeoning of modes of interpretation that illumine and challenge the Jeremiah texts and their interpreters in diverse and fruitful ways.