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The task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the workings of gendered agency.

— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak¹³⁷

A guiding priority for this volume is to present the biblical text in a maximally clear and visually understandable format while honoring the witness of the ancient text as that has been represented in the Masoretic tradition and achieving congruence—where I deem that to be important—in my own use of the target language of English. Coherence must be tactically constructed whenever one translates multiple scribal voices in a complex text from antiquity, seeking to make ancient ideologies knowable across millennia and vast cultural differences. Translation inevitably involves slippage. This is all the more true when the feminist, womanist, or queer translator works with what has been suppressed or distorted in the source. Richa Nagar observes,

There is no way out of the messiness of representation. When that messiness involves moving between and across multiple worlds, languages, communities, and struggles—including those that have been systematically marginalised, misrepresented, violated or erased in dominant systems of expert knowledge—then engaging with the messiness of representation requires us to embrace translation as a responsibility, with all its risks and contradictions.¹³⁸

Using my commentary proper with its translation notes, and also feminist, postcolonial, and queer epigraphs, I have striven to render responsibly what I have assessed as aporia, contestations, and erasures signaled in Jer 26–52.

I cannot endorse the naïve and thoroughly discredited view that strict translational equivalence is possible across cultures and centuries. As Maria Tymoczko notes briskly, “old, worn-out Eurocentric views of fidelity and translation as transfer are being abandoned in translation theory and practice.”¹³⁹ Instead, I have aimed for sensitivity to semantic nuances in language and an intellectual openness to a range of possible meanings in local instances, including ironic meanings and valences that might be heard as more transgressive than is often admitted in traditional commentaries. I am aware that my translation is no “mirror” of the ancient text but a performance of attention to the ancient words that is infused with perspectival choices, social values, and communicative and other norms. All biblical translations—including empiricist, philology-forward works that pretend to neutrality—are entangled in and generated by ideologies of the translator, values promoted or disadvantaged by social and intellectual communities within which the translator is situated, and relevant cultural norms, whether recognized or unrecognized. My position on translation is itself situated historically, as is every position on the theorizing of translation, and is intelligible in light of Sandra Bermann’s comment on the history of translation studies:

As scholars studied translation more broadly, and included the more contingent and contextual issues affecting the translation process—for example, gender, empire, inequality of languages, orality versus different written scripts—the field shifted its focus from the more formal and abstract statements of linguistic equivalence toward a study of individual acts of translation and what these did in particular contexts…. In the process, this displacement signaled a move to a less essentialist or ontological view of translation, one less tied to the hierarchy of an authentic “original” and a “secondary” translation meant merely to mirror the source.¹⁴⁰

­Translation ­and ­issues ­of ­power Translation is continually implicated in performances of power and struggle. Essential for scholarly commentary is rigorous analysis of ideologies, including ideologies of gender, the body, the social body, and the Other, that are expressed in overt or submerged ways in ancient texts and in acts of interpretation. Critical reflection on these issues should be a central dimension of historical and textual analysis; it does not constitute a special topic that can safely be ignored by scholars who do not identify as feminist. Julia Asher-Greve notes, “Philologists would profit from feminist theories that pursue questions such as how language encodes ‘male’ meanings; how cultures differentiate the masculine from the feminine; and how the process of gender socialization relates to language socialization.”¹⁴¹ Indeed, and we now broaden that binary “masculine and feminine” to include the entire spectrum of gender performances, including genderfluid, genderqueer, nonbinary, and many others. No interpreter can come to an understanding of the text in some imagined neutral space, apart from the effects of ideologies through which bodies, agency, power, and epistemological possibilities are constructed. The choice is whether or not to examine those effects, bringing analytical tools to bear on them rather than feigning naïveté or purporting to offer a “natural” interpretation of the text “on its own terms.” The pressing of analytical questions regarding ideology, alterity, and power, especially as those can be articulated and explored within feminist and postcolonial frameworks, is prioritized in this commentary.

George Steiner (1929–2020) explores questions of translation and power in “The Hermeneutic Motion,” a chapter in his book After Babel. After an initial decision to trust the coherence and meaningfulness of the text to be translated, Steiner says, the translator acts aggressively to render the text otherwise than what it is. Steiner writes of translation as if it were a militarized expedition of conquest and plunder. He gestures toward Jacob’s wrestling at the Jabbok, but evokes nothing so much as Joshua’s first assault on the city of Ai, with attendant risks not only for the indigenes but for the invaders (Josh 7):

The translator invades, extracts, and brings home…. There are innumerable shadings of assimilation and placement of the newly-acquired, ranging from a complete domestication, an at-homeness … to the permanent strangeness and margin­ality of an artifact…. But we may be mastered and made lame by what we have imported…. Writers have ceased from translation, sometimes too late, because the inhaled voice of the foreign text had come to choke their own.¹⁴²

­Translation is ­not a ­mirror Translation cannot be—has never been—simple mirroring or paraphrase, restatement in a different tongue. Translation is agonistic, fraught with struggle on many levels from the philological to the philosophical. As Lawrence Venuti argues, “A theory or practice of translation can be called ethical … to the extent that it facilitates a transparent understanding of the interpretation that the translator inscribes in the source text.”¹⁴³ Damien Tissot presses the point further in a feminist key: “Many feminist theorists, such as Chandra Mohanty, Jacqui Alexander, Gloria Anzaldúa, Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal and Gayatri Spivak, have suggested that transnational strategies should involve a politics of translation that would challenge the power hierarchies inherited from centuries of oppression and resistance.”¹⁴⁴ To fail to account for gestures of oppression and resistance in translation and commentary would be to ignore vital aspects of the text’s signifying.

­Feminist ­translation and ­Jeremiah For the feminist translator, the narrative and poetic artistry of the Jeremiah traditions—the gorgeous elaboration of poetic metaphor, the tumultuous polyphonic voicing of Jeremiah and Yhwh, the inexorable arcing of the plot toward tragedy—is indissolubly bound up with this text’s gendered erasures, its rhetorical moves to silence dissent, and its theological justifications for militarized horrors, including sexual violence. Translation and commentary on the language of Jeremiah must make these things visible for readers. Too many interpreters, in the academy and in faith communities, opt wittingly or unwittingly for the “complete domestication” of which Steiner speaks. In every act of translation, Steiner says, “the translator imports new and alternative options of being”¹⁴⁵—this is unavoidable, even for those who don’t recognize its truth, who still subscribe to the notion of translation as mirroring representation. Steiner reminds us,

Where language is fully used meaning is content beyond paraphrase…. Paraphrase predicates a fiction: it proceeds as if “meaning” were divisible from even the barest detail and accident of oral or written form, as if any utterance could ever be a total stand-in for any other…. Meaning, on the contrary, is more and more “what comes next.” The direction of comprehension, therefore, will not be lateral—a slide from a to b, from text to interpretation, from source to translation along horizontal lines—but ingressive. We learn to listen.¹⁴⁶

In the listening, we ourselves are changed. Tissot suggests the author and translator are to “change dialogically in relation to each other,”¹⁴⁷ something we may imagine heuristically for the ancient scribes of Jeremiah if we see them not (only) as finite persons who have been gone for two millennia, but as creative agents who, in their initial writing, have generated the possibility of reception history that now unfolds as perpetual dialogue. Their oracles and prose narratives are taken up into an intertextual web of ever-expanding signification, which includes this commentary. Tissot sees feminist translation as opening up semantic and cultural possibilities beyond the control of either the original or the translator: “Instead of being assimilated into the translator’s normative regime, or into the target culture’s patriarchal order, the translated text carves out a transgressive space between the source language and the target language.”¹⁴⁸ William Spurlin notes that translation—literal and metaphorical—can afford marvelous opportunities for reconstructive work:

Both “queer” and “translation” mediate between hegemonically defined spaces, and their critical conjunction offers the possibility of new sites of heterogeneity and difference as a vital heuristic for the work of comparative literary and cultural studies. The work of translation, like the work of queer, is never finished, as both modes of inquiry are committed to the endless proliferation of difference(s).¹⁴⁹

As we consider the fierce struggles and luminous hope of the Jeremiah traditions, translators can catalyze new learnings, new struggles, and new hopes for communities under threat.

In what follows, I lay out the pragmatic translation choices and feminist translation practices that have yielded the Jeremiah text in this volume.

­Pragmatic ­congruenceWhere possible and semantically valuable, I use a single English word when rendering a Hebrew word occurring in various clauses, especially when ironic reversal or building on earlier occurrences seems to be at work in the text. Because the semantic ranges of Hebrew terms can be broad and rich, and because contextual deployment of a term can color or change its meaning subtly or drastically, it will not always be possible or desirable to restrict the options for a single Hebrew term in the English translation. But where other factors are less significant and foregrounding the Hebrew repetition of a word or root is significant, that is the translational practice here.

­Declining ­unnecessary ­androcentrismThe pervasive androcentrism of many biblical texts is matched, and sometimes eclipsed, by the androcentrism of much traditional scholarship up to the present day. My translational practice is to avoid the unnecessary reification of masculinity in these texts. Here is a familiar example: בני ישראל need not be translated “sons of Israel,” since the construction signifies members of a group and can mean “the Israelites” or, more poetically, “the children of Israel.” This is true even in contexts in which the biblical narrator, we might surmise, was likely imagining cis-male persons. One of the deleterious effects of androcentric language is the masking of female and alternative or minoritized genders under the global use of androcentric terms for mixed-gender groups. The use of terms such as “men” for humanity, “brothers” for kin generally, and “sons of the prophets” for members of the prophetic guild erases non-males in these ancient texts in a way that may not reflect the ideation of the original writers and could well be false to the embodied realities of persons in those ancient contexts. Wooden replication of androcentric grammar structures in contemporary English, German, or another language is far from a neutral translational practice. It intensifies the androcentrism of the ancient texts by re-uttering a kind of particularization that may not have been intended and should not be reinforced.

I have avoided androcentric language for the deity wherever it could be argued that androcentrism is being exacerbated or imported by the act of translation. In these pages, the mysterious term “Yhwh” will render the Tetragrammaton, rather than “the Lord,” which is used only of subjects of masculine gender in English, as is true of “der Herr” in German, and further, can suggest a monarchical or feudal valence that was not necessarily expressed by the Tetragrammaton. In ancient Israel’s sacred texts, Yhwh was imagined as king and male warrior; that is indisputable. But where the Hebrew does not use androcentric nouns, the translator should certainly not go further in that direction than the original. The revelation of the divine Name at the burning bush (Exod 3:14) is a powerful mystery in the metanarrative of Israel’s encounters with the divine. The translator should not apply gendered constrictions from the target language heedlessly in rendering what is said to Moses in that moment, whether or not the translator identifies as feminist.

My choice to use “Yhwh” does not preclude readers from audiating or saying “the Lord” when they encounter the Tetragrammaton in translation here. Many readers will prefer not to audiate Yhwh with vowels while reading silently, or may need to refer to lines from this commentary aloud in an instructional setting in which they wish not to offend others who do not pronounce the Tetragrammaton. Feminists and others have long debated how to address this. One might supply “Adonai,” honoring the Hebrew vocalization inscribed by the Masoretes. While אדני evokes a valence of masculinity in Biblical Hebrew, there is a degree of distance created, perhaps even for speakers of Modern Hebrew, in using that vocalization for the letters Y-h-w-h, so that audiation may not replicate masculinity as directly as does “Lord” for those whose native tongue is English. When audiating or reading “Yhwh,” one might also supply “the Name,” whether intending to reflect the Orthodox Jewish usage Ha-Shem or not. Or one might supply “the Divine,” or “Mystery,” or anything else the reader deems appropriate. The more regular a substitution becomes in a reader’s silent audiation and audible pronunciation, the more deeply rooted it will become in their reading praxis.

The reader will not find masculine pronouns in this commentary in reference to the deity. Where needed for clarity in English, I supply “Yhwh” or “Yhwh’s” in parentheses. In the German translation of this volume, the reader should not find “er” or “sein” but instead „Jhwh“ or „Jhwhs“ in parentheses. If the reader does encounter an androcentric pronoun for the deity in these pages, it will have been due to a production error and should be reported to the publisher.

­Singular “they”My commentary uses “they” as an epicene singular pronoun for instances in which the gender of an individual is not specified, cannot be determined, should not be mapped onto one particular gender identity, or should not be constrained by the empirically inaccurate gender binary of masculine and feminine generally. For example, in 48:35, I translate מעלה במה ומקטיר לאלהיו as “one who sacrifices in a high place or makes offerings to their gods.” Where possible, I will use “they” as a singular pronoun for Israel where the Hebrew may have grammatically masculine singular verbs yet the relevant metaphor does not rely on a notion of human gender, for example in imagery of Israel as a flock enjoying pasture in 50:19. In that case, I deem “it will graze” to be too impersonal to represent the poetic expression well, but “he will graze” is overly restrictive as regards gender in English for the image of a flock; “they will graze” is the best choice. Singular “they” is not new; it has a venerable historical pedigree, being found in English literature at least since the fourteenth century.¹⁵⁰ The reader who prefers to imagine only male actors is not hindered from doing so; the use of epicene “they” does not prevent such conceptualization.

­Making ­gender more ­visibleEnglish marks second-person forms for neither number nor gender, while Hebrew does signal number and gender in the second person, as well as in some third-person forms. On that score, ambiguities could arise in English that are not present in the biblical text. Thus I have marked many imperatives and other verbs, pronouns, and pronominal suffixes with {ms}, {mp}, {fs}, or {fp} in the translation for semantic clarity. A forest of such brackets would be visually distracting, so the reader should assume an initial marking applies to what follows within that discursive unit, normally until the subject or speaker changes. My choice to mark gender will make female addressees and pronominal referents more visible, and it will also point up the pervasiveness of masculine agents and addressees in this text.

­Honoring ­changing ­referentsWhere a referent or addressee changes mid-utterance, as in instances in which Yhwh addresses Israel in the second-person plural and also discusses Israel in the third person, I will usually preserve the variation in English. Such variation can easily be processed by the contemporary reader. Emending this feature of ancient Hebrew poetry and prose is unwarranted. In some instances, this sort of variation may be a byproduct of processes of compilation of oracles and not semantically significant in any particular way. But in other cases, such variation is a constitutive feature of poetic communication, marking the ancient scribes’ view of aural or literary coherence as other than the perspective that governs contemporary Western readers. Further, variation in referent or addressee may have been signaling something important, such as an explanatory aside to a subgroup within the implied audience.