Читать книгу Jeremiah 26-52 - Carolyn Sharp - Страница 32

In this dramatic opening to the second half of Jeremiah, the prophet performs the prophetic task of warning the people. He serves as a sentinel (Ezek 3:17) sounding the alarm: divine judgment will rain down on the people of Judah if they do not reform their sinful ways. Just prior to this narrative, in 25:30–38, images of ruin and slaughter have dramatized the terror of God’s wrath and the horrific extent of the impending devastation of Judah and all the nations. The roaring of the outraged deity will be heard from one end of the earth to the other, and escape will be impossible. The corpses of the slain will cover the earth, dishonored and left unburied “as dung” on the ground (25:33): horror, loss, and death as far as the eye can see. Rhetorically speaking, this vivid and disturbing imagery would leave the implied audience desperate for a way to avoid the looming catastrophe. The prophet offers precisely what is needed: a way to avert the destruction of the community.

The authority and integrity of the prophetic word are of paramount importance in this chapter. This is signaled by Yhwh’s command to Jeremiah, אל־תגרע דבר, “do not omit a word” (26:2), which evokes Deut 4:2. There, Moses had adjured the congregation of Israel to observe the statutes and ordinances of Yhwh precisely as they have been given. “You must neither add anything to that which (הדבר) I am commanding you nor omit anything from it (ולא תגרעו ממנו), but keep the commandments of [Yhwh] your God with which I am charging you,” Moses said. Here, Jeremiah is to honor the word that he is given by Yhwh, even at risk to himself. Jeremiah is commanded to stand in the court of the temple and warn all those coming to worship that they should obey God’s teaching and heed the message of God’s servants the prophets, else God will leave the Jerusalem temple a smoking ruin “like Shiloh.” That earlier shrine and its administrative center had long been abandoned. History provides no further details, but awareness of the historical significance of the event is clear from rabbinic tradition. Akiva Males gives us the teaching of Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1138–1204) on Israel’s various tabernacles from the time of the exodus onward:

Basing himself on the Mishnah (Zevaḥim 14:6) and Talmud (TB Zevaḥim 118), Maimonides writes, “From [Gilgal] they went to Shiloh, where a stone house was built, and it was covered with the Tabernacle’s curtains—as opposed to a solid roof. For 369 years the sanctuary stood in Shiloh. On the death of Eli it was destroyed, whereupon they came and built a sanctuary at Nob. On the death of Samuel it was destroyed, whereupon they came and built a sanctuary at Gibeon. From Gibeon they came to the Temple in Jerusalem.”¹⁸

In Jeremiah, the ruination of Shiloh serves as a symbol of the cultural and material ruin facing Jerusalem and all of Judah.

­Importance of the ­temple The Jerusalem temple was extraordinarily important to Judah’s official identity as a nation whose founding, in one authoritative stream of tradition, was tied to Moses and God’s giving of the Torah on Sinai. (Other traditions, such as the cycles of stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, could not admit of a central shrine in terms of the setting of the plot centuries before the monarchy and Solomon’s building of the temple. Those ancestral traditions had other ways of forming identity.) There were doubtless many Judeans in the surrounding countryside and at farther removes who did not give much thought to the temple or who may have resented the centralized authority it enjoyed. Early and late, the Israelite priesthood was riven by political conflict over the roles of local Levitical priests at countryside shrines versus the authority of those priests in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the role of the temple in teaching and modeling sacrifices and other rituals was unquestionably central to the cultic ordering of Judah’s life with God and to Israelite and Judean theology. Thus Jeremiah’s proclamation of God’s threat to make the Jerusalem temple “like Shiloh” (v. 6) would have been scandalous to the people, as indeed the narrative shows: the prophet is held to have uttered treasonous words.

“­Evil/­harm/­disaster” as ­motif A Hebrew root vitally important in Jeremiah is רעע. This term has a range that includes valences of religious or cultic evil, moral or social wickedness, malfeasance, disaster, and harm. Where variations on רעע are repeated in the Hebrew, the literary effects of the repetition are masked or lost when translation renders רעע with different words in the target language. Such effects can include intensification or a valence of divine recompense that almost amounts to ironic justice. Such is the case in 26:3, where if each sinful Judean does not turn from their “evil” way, Yhwh will bring “harm” (or “disaster”) against them on account of their “evil” deeds. רעע on the part of Judah begets divinely ordained רעע.

­Torah ­faithfulness Core to this prophetic discourse are the covenant obligations that bind the people of Judah to Yhwh. The Hebrew term תורה occurs in Jer 2:8; 6:19; 8:8; 9:12; 16:11; 18:18; 26:4; 31:33; 32:23 (twice); and 44:10, 23. This richly multivalent term can mean moral or ethical instruction, priestly halakic guidance, a specific precept, statute, or ordinance, or the Law as a whole given to Moses on Sinai. Translated as “Torah,” it is most readily taken to signify the first five books of the Bible. It is often translated as “law” or “Law” (“Ley,” RVR), “teaching” or “Teaching” (NJPS), and “instruction” or “Instruction” (CEB; BigS chooses “Weisung”), with capitalization—in languages in which nouns are not normally capitalized—underscoring its unique status as a specific identified authority. The translation “Teaching” can often be a fine choice; it allows for a broad range of semantic implications related to ethical, halakic, and theological pedagogy. But in the ideology of Jeremiah, the force of תורה regularly has to do with covenantal stipulations to which Israel and Judah are held accountable, the breach of which has required their punishment by Yhwh. The idea of “teaching” in contemporary English does not normally connote a set of mandates the abrogation of which is understood to result appropriately in the miscreants’ suffering grievous harm or death. Thus “Teaching,” while desirable as a translation in several ways, can be misleading in English as regards a crucial retributive valence in the rhetoric of Jeremiah. I have chosen the translation “Law,” understanding that concept as a dynamic and negotiable set of parameters and precedents that are meant, in the ancient Israelite and Judean prophetic imagination, to form and reform the conscience of individuals and groups, structure power equitably in relationships, and enable the flourishing of entire communities, these viewed as connected to one another through historical time.

A fascinating feature of literary artfulness in ancient Hebrew narrative involves characters retelling or quoting strategically material that had come up earlier in the plot, making minor adjustments in their speech that may produce the effect of signaling the characters’ perspectives or some dimension of their convictions. Meir Sternberg notes the significance of the play of differing viewpoints for interpretation: “Narrative communication involves no fewer than four basic perspectives: the author who fashions the story, the narrator who tells it, the audience or reader who receives it, and the characters who enact it.”¹⁹ The subtleties of characters’ retelling or requoting words of other characters (including Yhwh) can serve several purposes, such as adding drama as the plot unfolds—for example, when a character withholds information that the implied audience knows is vitally important—or working in texture or shading in the narrator’s characterization of a speaker. In 26:9, the astute reader will notice that a collective character speaking as one, “the priests and the prophets and all the people,” repeats in significantly different words what Jeremiah has just prophesied in v. 6. Jeremiah is said to have prophesied “in the name of Yhwh,” which already distances the hearers from his message, suggesting that it might have been illegitimately in the name of Yhwh that Jeremiah had offered his (false) message. In Deut 18:20, Yhwh characterizes it as a grave sin—deserving of the punishment of execution—when someone “presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak.” Notably, “the priests and the prophets and all the people” do not in any way authorize Jeremiah’s message as having been actually from Yhwh. To make the point, the narrator has Jeremiah’s interlocutors use oblique verbs to retell that which Jeremiah had rendered clearly as actions of the deity. Jeremiah’s “I will make this house like Shiloh and this city I will make an execrated thing” (using active verbs with Yhwh as subject: נתתי and אתן) becomes “This house will become like Shiloh and this city will be left ravaged, without inhabitant” (with intransitive verbs: יהיה and תחרב). Because the implied audience knows that Jeremiah is a true prophet, the way in which the collective character “the priests and the prophets and all the people” discounts Jeremiah’s message and removes the agency of Yhwh in their retelling signals that they are ignorant of Yhwh’s plans for Jerusalem. Yair Hoffman mulls why the scribe crafting the narrative “did not clearly explicate the accusation,” and suggests “the omission is actually intentional paralepsis”—a strategy by which the speaker “pretends to omit mention of” that which is the central issue—“used to focus the reader’s attention on the reason that Jeremiah’s opponents have derived such an absurdity from his prophecy.”²⁰

­Artful ­indirection and ­ellipsis As Sternberg says, Hebrew narrative works through indirection and ellipsis, suggesting “marked and gradated discrepancies in awareness,” in order to demonstrate and dramatize what is at stake in stories involving humans and Yhwh without telling it outright in a flat and tedious way: “Each character observes the world from [their] own perspective,” and “What such diverse figural perspectives have in common is the inherent limitation of knowledge and liability to misjudgment, which motivate the progress of the tale.”²¹ Scholars have long noticed that the collective character “the people” (העם) seems to vacillate in their response to the prophet. To this commentator, the tensions are overstated in the scholarly literature and are better read as developing according to the dramatic lines of the plot. Many scholars argue for layers in the compositional history of Jer 26, though tensions perceptible within the plot cannot be traced to redactional layers or atomistic interventions in any fully probative way.²² Jeremiah 26 may productively be read in terms of plot and characterization, without need for recourse to redactional layers for explanation, even though it may be the case that scribes did intervene in this text.

­Role of the ­people, ­read ­literarily Below are the ways in which the people are represented in Jer 26, framed in a way that takes the shifts in voicing and characterization as essential to the literary artfulness of the unfolding plot, rather than tied to theoretical compositional layers generated by different hands at different times.

26:7–9	“all the people” hear Jeremiah, seize him with the intent of execution, and throng him in menacing fashion	negative
26:11	“all the people” hear the formal denunciation of ­Jeremiah by priests and [false] prophets	neutral
26:12	“all the people” hear Jeremiah’s defense	they are persuaded
26:16	“all the people” join the officials in supporting the acquittal of Jeremiah	positive
26:17–18	“the entire assembly of the people” hears elders’ further arguments for acquittal	they are confirmed in their assessment of his innocence
26:24	Ahikam protects Jeremiah from being remanded for execution by “the people”	a further signal that the prophet has ­allies

­Micah as ­prophetic ­antecedentIn 26:18, the elders quote the oracle of Micah of Moresheth in Mic 3:12. The threefold parallelism in v. 18 works beautifully on several levels. We encounter three names for the authoritative center of Judah’s worship and ritual praxis: Zion // Jerusalem // the mountain of the House. These gather together three interrelated arenas of meaning for the hearer. “Zion” is a symbolic name for the city as cherished by God, often personified as Daughter Zion in the prophetic corpus generally and in the poetry of Jeremiah; personification adds gendered valences of beauty, vulnerability, and warm relationality, including in many oracles (though not here) the voicing of Zion herself.²³ “Jerusalem” anchors the three references as a clear and unambiguous city name. “Mountain of the House,” that is, the Temple Mount, is a much rarer term that draws the implied audience’s imagination toward what stands at the core of Judah’s halakic and theological identity: the Jerusalem temple on its elevated mount. Terrifying reversals are articulated in this prophecy from Micah centuries earlier. In each of the three pairs of terms, reversal is artfully inscribed in Hebrew assonance and alliteration, sound-play that takes up elements of the city designation and distorts those elements into a horrifying alternative.

ציון שדה	two nouns (“Zion” and “field”), each with two syllables and each beginning with a sibilant
וירושלים עיים	two nouns ending in –îm, the first noun (“Jerusalem”) five syllables, the second noun (“heaps of rubble”) only two Hebrew syllables
והר הבית לבמות יער	two complex nouns, each with two elements in construct (“mountain of the House” and “high places in the forest”); soundplay ­organized chiastically works from outer gutturals and a–vowels (har and yā‘ar) to inner repetition of b and t consonants

The elders underline the responsiveness of Hezekiah in this precedent (v. 19): that earlier king had heeded Micah, showing obedient reverence for the purposes of Yhwh, and his response secured the safety of Jerusalem from divine wrath in his time.²⁴ Their terror at the prospect of doing otherwise here—failing to heed Jeremiah—is evident and marks an apex in this narrative. ­Alarming counter-example It is precisely at this juncture, with suspense at its height for the implied audience, that a counter-example is mustered (vv. 20–23). The point? Jehoiakim has already shown that he is no Hezekiah: he has slaughtered a true prophet, Uriah son of Shemaiah, who prophesied “in words similar to all those of Jeremiah” (v. 20). Readers may have felt a welcome reprieve from the threat of mob violence when the officials and people had stood up for Jeremiah’s innocence (v. 16); readers may have been heartened further at the elders citing the precedent of Micah of Moresheth. As Walter Brueggemann observes, their mustering of this example “suggests that Jeremiah is not an isolated figure, but he stands in a long tradition of covenantal memory and is the speaker for what must have been a live and insistent political opinion in Israel.”²⁵ But here in vv. 20–23, the threat against Jeremiah surges once again to the fore. That threat is all the stronger because the elders have made transparently clear that the doom of the entire Judean populace hangs in the balance. Abraham Heschel (1907–1972) observes,

At the crucial moment of history, Jeremiah was the hope, the anchor, and the promise. The slaying of Jeremiah would have meant the death blow to Israel as well, a collapse of God’s mission. It was not his vested interests, honor, or prestige that the prophet was fighting for. He was fighting for the physical survival of his people.²⁶

­Iconic ­ally: ­Ahikam son of ­Shaphan An influential political ally steps forward: Ahikam son of Shaphan. Jeremiah’s physical well-being is safeguarded—temporarily—at the end of Jer 26. But the volatility of the scene is not wholly contained. Lingering in the air is the ominous note struck in v. 19: “we are about to commit ruinous harm at the expense of our own well-being!” That functions as a signal not just concerning this particular moment when Jeremiah is at risk, but concerning the future, the implied audience—including every re-reader of Jeremiah—considering the terrible fate of Jerusalem from the vantage point of the postexilic period. This suspenseful story ensures that the implied audience is drawn in, alarmed to see priests, prophets, and people misjudging the purposes of Yhwh in a way that—as postexilic readers and hearers know all too well—will result in the devastation of Jerusalem.

The notice about Ahikam’s protection in the final verse of Jer 26 secures what had already been developing in the trajectory of the plot. The people had been bent on harming Jeremiah, but having listened to arguments for his prosecution and in his defense, they are persuaded that the prophet has done nothing deserving of capital punishment (v. 16). The note about Ahikam works in three different ways to highlight the importance of protection of the prophet. First, even if a decision in favor of the prophet’s execution had been the final disposition of this process, the influential Ahikam would have been able to keep Jeremiah safe. Second, when murderous sentiment against Jeremiah rises again in this book that bears his name—as it most assuredly will—the reader now knows that powerful allies stand with the prophet. Third, courageous solidarity with Jeremiah has been made visible, even iconic, for the community gathered around Jeremiah’s prophecies in all future times of threat. The patent awkwardness of v. 24 is also a stroke of literary genius. As the mob had thronged Jeremiah, as the charge of seditious words had been leveled at the prophet, and as the merits of the charges had been debated, Ahikam had been (as it were) nowhere to be seen. But at the end of the scene, Ahikam steps from the shadows, prepared to use his power to guard Yhwh’s prophet from being silenced. The literary effect is marvelous: allies are present among “the officials” even when danger threatens and all may seem lost. The awkwardness of that final verse cues the reader to be prepared to look for Jeremiah’s allies as other scenes of danger and tumultuous dispute unfold.