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Insights from postcolonial theory are important for historical and textual analysis seeking to illuminate the effects of imperial subjugation on a defeated and colonized group. The cultural production of the book of Jeremiah was carried out when the scribes of Judah were living under Babylonian militarized colonialism and, later, Persian political and economic hegemony. More clearly in Jeremiah than anywhere else in ancient Israel’s sacred texts, we see the expression of one effect in particular: the overt and unvarnished promotion of political accommodationism as a strategy of survival. This position is worked through the Dtr-Jer prose in a complex network of rhetorical moves. These include the figuring of the brutal invader Nebuchadrezzar as Yhwh’s “servant” (25:9; 27:6; 43:10); the repeated counsel “to submit to Babylon and live,” or in the words of Gedaliah, “stay in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you” (40:9); and the vicious disparagement directed by Judeans in the Babylonian diaspora at their compatriots who had remained behind in Judah or had fled to Egypt rather than allowing themselves to be taken into captivity in Babylon. All of this requires the close attention of postcolonial critique: interpretation that goes beyond the summarizing of known historical data to a deeper interrogation of the politics of colonization and the wounds and traces it has left behind in dominated cultures. As Bradley Crowell says, “Postcolonialism as a practice attempts to shift the focus of literary and cultural analysis, in order to expose the conditions of the colonial experience, and the methods that colonial subjects have used to construct their identities and expressions within their literature and cultural products.”¹⁵⁵

­Distortions and ­traumas of ­colonialism Living under colonialism distorts the cultural possibilities for whole peoples and subgroups in a wide variety of ways. Militarized colonialism effects trauma on many levels as a region or group yields, often after protracted fighting in terrifying and exhausting circumstances, to ongoing acts of forcible violence, economic exploitation, and profound cultural disrespect inflicted by a stronger enemy. The lived realities of colonization catalyze bitter political divisions and social fractures in the groups that are brought into subjection. It is clear that Jeremiah was produced by groups struggling in different ways to come to terms with Judah’s subjugation by Babylonia. Survival might be won at the cost of assimilation into Babylonian culture; unstinting resistance might mean the annihilation of Judah. The scribes and leaders of Judah would have been under extraordinary pressure, before the fall of Jerusalem and in the Babylonian diaspora through the exilic period. In the words of Leo Perdue (1946–2017) and Warren Carter,

Cultural imperialism engulfed the exiles who had witnessed and endured the fall of what they had been taught was the inviolable sacred city of Jerusalem…. Many likely merged into the surrounding peoples and traditions. In addition, if the conquered Judahites in Babylonia could not reshape their theological traditions of election and providence to account for a new understanding of God’s activity in the life of the imperiled nation and the larger world, then the exiles would be lost to history as a distinct ethnos and world view. Their colonized minds would have lost an active resistance to the empire with the result of the loss of their distinctiveness as a culture and a people. The challenge was not only that of deportation, but also in resisting a vast empire with an advanced cultural tradition in the form of literature, architecture, military power, economic development, and religious symbols.¹⁵⁶

For commentary in a postcolonial key, it is essential to build readers’ capacity to recognize the harms enacted historically by militarized colonization in the history of ancient Judah, to understand that uncritical reception of this dimension of Jeremiah over the centuries has enacted new harms in communities gathered around Jeremiah as Scripture, and to resist the perpetuation of military terror and colonizing ideology as in any way natural or theologically unproblematic. As Mark Brett notes, postcolonial analysis is “committed to dialogical identities and to the recuperation of subjugated discourses.”¹⁵⁷ The analysis should proceed, in the words of Dube, through “a complex myriad of methods and theories which study a wide range of texts and their participation in the making or subversion of imperialism.”¹⁵⁸ Dube has laid out guiding parameters essential to the unmaking of political, gendered, and class-based harms enacted discursively in biblical texts and generated in the long history of effects of texts and traditions.

To confront imperialism as a postcolonial feminist, one must, first, recognize that patriarchal oppression overlaps with but is not identical to imperialism; second, recognize its methods and strategies of subjugation in cultural texts and reality; third, identify the patterns of resistance it evokes from the subjugated; fourth, recognize the use of the female gender in colonial discourse as well as explicate how postcolonialism exposes some women to double or triple oppression.¹⁵⁹

Analyzing the use and distortion of masculinities and gender-nonconforming identities, too, falls within the scope of the postcolonial feminist project.¹⁶⁰ This is arduous work, given that imperialism by nature and design performs the erasure of maligned subjectivities and their potential or actual dissension, discursive and otherwise. The reader must remain mindful that many deep and sustained injuries to the social body of colonized Judah were never made visible in this text, or can be glimpsed now only as traces. I speak of the moral horror, political disempowerment, and social fragmentation experienced by women and children living in Jerusalem and by the economically disenfranchised and poor (of all genders) who survived in the outlying regions beyond the city. The Jeremiah traditions preserve the contestations of male scribal elites, both as characters within the plot and, in metanarrative terms, those male elites who produced, amplified, and redacted Jeremiah in light of the Babylonian incursion, the Judean experience of colonization, and postcolonial possibilities.

Postcolonial analysis informs the interpretive framework within which I read tropes of conflict and submission in Jer 26–52. It will not be possible to reference thinkers and arguments from the vast tide of postcolonial scholarship at every point in my interpretation.¹⁶¹ I begin by drawing the reader’s attention to three hermeneutical stances outlined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza within a longer list that she provides.¹⁶² These, along with her other options, constitute “detoxifying or decolonizing” strategies that may be applied, seriatim or simultaneously, as the reader engages dimensions of Jer 26–52, such as the narratorial voice and the voicing of Yhwh; characterization of Jeremiah and other prophets, Baruch, priests, officials, kings, and others who position themselves as adversaries or allies; the function of threats and violence at many levels in the plot; and the virtually complete silencing of women and children. The reader may consider each quotation below from Schüssler Fiorenza to be an invitation to examine Jeremiah texts, analyze them, affirm or dissent from their rhetoric and their explicit or implicit values, and dare to imagine what the ancient writings left unsaid.

– “A hermeneutics of experience reflects on socially located experience and lifts into consciousness how much experience is shaped by the inscriptions of dominance and submission.”

– “A hermeneutics of imagination creatively envisions a world that is different from the world determined by empire and domination and seeks to identify visions of hope and transformation also inscribed in biblical texts.”

– “A hermeneutics of remembrance engages rhetorical analysis and historical re-construction for rewriting biblical history in terms of wo/men’s struggles against empire and for well-being. It thereby reconstructs a different context for biblical texts and interpretations.”

Steed Davidson’s 2011 book, Empire and Exile: Postcolonial Readings of the Book of Jeremiah, is an instructive model of postcolonial engagements of Jeremiah. Paying special attention to Jer 29:5–7, 32:1–15, and 40:1–12, Davidson argues that Jeremiah presents a variety of responses to the “threat to the local”—to “Judean and Jerusalemite realities”—pressed by Babylonian hegemony. These responses include concession, contestation, and adaptation. While multiple positions are discernible, Davidson maintains that overall, “Jeremiah stands as a text of resistance to imperial power.”¹⁶³ I honor that position in the dialogical space of this commentary. I concur that notes of resistance are audible—especially in the dramatic cultural symbol of Rachel weeping (31:15), the promise of a “new thing” being performed by Yhwh (31:22), and the heroism of Ebed-melech (38:7–13), along with the dramatized resilience of the written scroll (ch. 36). But in my view, the second half of Jeremiah is governed by a capitulation to Babylonian hegemony that has deformed the contours of the prophetic tradition and distorted the cultural logics of this ancient work. When I say Jeremiah is trauma literature, I do not mean only that the book is suffused with grief and rage at the Babylonian monster that swallowed generations of Judeans. I mean also that the cultural legacy of the book re-enacts its trauma in poorly integrated ways, perpetuating maladaptive distortions that are ruinously appalling and tragic. In Jer 26–52, the iron grip of concessions to pro-Babylonian ideology has tightened so drastically around the throat of the prophet, throttling Jeremiah and the postexilic scribes who present him, that in much of the prose discourse, this prophet can only hiss vituperation at his compatriots and whisper that Nebuchadrezzar is Yhwh’s “servant.”

I agree with Davidson that the intricate web of Judean responses gives us a Jeremiah who is neither fully historicized nor fully literary. Acknowledging “the contested nature of the central figure of the book,” Davidson avers that some “of the prophet’s original words are available” yet also that “the message of the text reflects the struggles of real communities dealing with the reality of exile.”¹⁶⁴ As regards Jeremiah’s purchase of land in ch. 32, Davidson finds inadequate readings of that act that place too much emphasis on future hope for Judah after Yhwh’s punishment of Judah is completed. A postcolonial reading must reject an interpretation that “authorizes acts of aggression insofar as they [are seen to] have redemptive consequences for subject peoples.”¹⁶⁵ His own reading highlights the polyphony of Jer 32, with its “divergent voices, audiences, time frames and ideologies,” and frames hope in terms of the passage’s underlying discursive logic: “The invocation of the ancestral, the operations of customary law, and the reinscriptions of the past all fall within the spiritual realm from which the colonized effectively excludes the encroachment of the empire”; Jeremiah’s transaction “enacts in symbolic fashion the claims of the pre-imperial past of the people in the face of the impending imperial enterprise.”¹⁶⁶

Drawing on the work of bell hooks and Christopher Young, Davidson reads 40:1–12 “as a narrative of survival rather than release” in which the prophet chooses marginality among the people of the land as a strategy that disrupts the assumptions and values of imperialism.¹⁶⁷ Nebuzaradan is portrayed “as the benevolent imperial official, rather than a member of the belligerents involved in a war of occupation,” and he is given considerable literary space and voice in this passage. Jeremiah resists Nebuzaradan’s offer to watch over him in Babylon (40:4), choosing instead to remain connected to his own land, “a location on the social margins where voice, subjectivity, and agency could emerge for the people, that is, place.”¹⁶⁸ Jeremiah is silent in the passage, which Davidson reads as a “resistant move to prevent his voice from being appropriated”; in this, Jeremiah’s agency eclipses the compromised agency of Gedaliah, who has been compelled to take up the ambiguous role of “native agent” of the “indirect rule” of Babylon.¹⁶⁹ Davidson’s treatment of Jer 29, then, highlights the open-ended nature of diaspora, focusing on the series of imperatives in 29:5–7 as the articulation of a possibility, viz., flourishing more permanently in diaspora, that “renders the home nation-state ambivalent” and constitutes a “shift” away from homeland to “the family as the locus of anti-imperial resistance.”¹⁷⁰ Davidson reads in Jer 29 a transgressive practice of reconfiguring communal norms over against imperial values that prioritize control of national resources: Jeremiah’s “letter evokes religion, ethnicity, and family as alternative sites for the construction of community in diaspora in response to the reality of statelessness.”¹⁷¹

Davidson’s work in Empire and Exile demonstrates astute postcolonial interpretation that:

– recognizes textual resistance to imperialism on discursive levels that go deeper than the events unfolding within the narrative plot;

– figures marginality as something that can be chosen tactically from a position of strength, rather than as a condition of inevitable disempowerment and despair;

– assesses local practices of resilience, such as prayer and maintenance of family relationships, as politically effective for destabilizing imperialist control.

These three interpretive practices are vitally important for any commentary that seeks not to reproduce the norms of imperialism. Biblical commentaries based on scholarly analysis and critical theory ought not implicitly accept the norms of military power and imperialist control as the most important dimensions of these ancient texts, as if they were the obvious metrics according to which any thinking person would construe the (impaired) agency and (silenced) voices of subjugated peoples. For the postcolonialist commentator, it is not enough simply to redescribe the content of biblical narratives and discourses, even when supplying philological analysis and historical background in erudite terms. Commentaries that do little to interrogate the hierarchies of power narrated and assumed in these ancient texts have not done enough, in scholarly terms, to avoid replicating the imperialist project. Even apart from a postcolonial analytical position, scholarly interpretations of power, resistance, and hope should proceed differently, and certainly the values of postcolonial commentary should be performed differently. Toward this end, the above-named points demonstrated by Davidson will be engaged as foundational to my position as biblical commentator, though the specific insights cannot be articulated overtly at every juncture and may be visible, at times, only obliquely.

Relevant for feminist and postcolonial interpretation is the issue of the hegemony of English- and German-language philology and historical scholarship in biblical studies. Throughout North America, England, Germany, and Austria, and in many other parts of the world, hierarchies of academic value and pragmatic decisions related to the hiring, promotion, and tenure of biblical scholars continually reinscribe the overwhelming dominance of English and German scholarship and cultural norms for academic discourse. Galician feminist scholar María Reimóndez critiques the “hegemony of English in feminist thought,” arguing that the fact that “English is positioned as the hegemonic epistemic language of our times”¹⁷² has profound negative consequences for polyphonic exchange among scholars and activists. She avers,

Feminist translation studies has so far made limited efforts to develop a critical understanding of geopolitical positionality of (translating and translated) subjects and languages and open up the epistemological world of feminist thinking to a diverse body of non-hegemonic languages and cultures.¹⁷³

What Reimóndez says of feminist discourse generally is exponentially more problematic in biblical studies in most educational institutions and academy contexts. Feminist analysis is still marginalized in broad and powerful segments of the guild of biblical studies, and postcolonial insights are not regularly taken into account in philological debates about Biblical Hebrew and translation praxis. In this commentary designed specifically for readers of English and German, I make two interventions beyond my own constructive interpretive work. I quote from the NRSV (1989) for biblical texts in English outside of Jer 26–52. For the German translation of this volume, I have chosen to use the feminist Bibel in gerechter Sprache (2006) as the base text for biblical passages outside of Jer 26–52, well aware that this translation has had a controversial reception in the German-speaking world. Second, I include the Spanish Reina-Valera translation (1995) wherever I can when I am quoting from the NRSV, the NJPS (1985), or the new Zürcher Bibel (2007).

In what follows, I affirm and amplify two foundational insights from postcolonial theory generally that guide how I interpret historical and literary dynamics in the prose and poetry of Jer 26–52.