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Preface

In the 1661 London printing of The Saints Anchor-Hold (a sermon originally preached in New Haven, Connecticut), the minister John Davenport offered a simple message of perseverance in difficult times to his immediate congregation and to an imagined transatlantic readership. Based on Lam. 3:24 (given in the the print sermon as “The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in him”), the sermon begins with a contextualization of the entire Book of Lamentations:

that Book which God commanded Ieremy to write, and to cause Baruch to read it publikley, upon the day of a Fast, kept in the ninth moneth of the fifth year of Iehoikim, which afterward Iehudi read unto the King, sitting by a fire, in his winter house, who was so far from repenting, that, when he had read three or four leaves of it, he cut it with a penknife, and cast it into the fire, till all was consumed, and rejected the intercession of some of his Princes, that he would not burn it, and he commanded to lay hold upon Ieremy and Baruch; But God hid them. Whereupon the Lord commanded Ieremy to write the Book again, with Additions[.]

The history of the prophetic book includes too many agents and too many actions working at once, creating a permeable sense of authorship. Jeremiah’s words, given by God, pierce the hearts of the king’s court, even as they fail to penetrate the king’s conscience. Jeremiah is said “to write” these words, and yet it is Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah, who not only puts pen to scroll but who reads aloud the written words. The words of the book are both God’s and Jeremiah’s, and the respective roles of the prophet and his scribe, Baruch, blur together in this account of Lamentations. The earthly king might destroy the material book, but the combined endeavor of prophet and scribe ensures continuance of the Word in the world. The book is written again, “with Additions,” a textual rebuke to the king whose attempt to censor only makes the message more emphatic. Davenport’s own sermon explication constitutes further “Additions” to the textual presence of the original prophecy, especially as auditors and readers of his explication apply the prophetic message to their own lived experience.

This book considers the creation of sermon literature as a discursive process that involves the entire community in the twined endeavors of scriptural explication and the material dissemination of that exegesis. Challenges to static notions of authorship, authority, and authenticity open up room for a reexamination of texts through material variation. Acts of hearing, notetaking, and applying the sermon implicate the auditor in the work of the pulpit. Like the king and his court, lay auditors shape the meaning of prophecy through their responses. Like Baruch, they become materially involved with the recording and dissemination of prophecy. Sermons depend not only on the divine efficacy of scripture, nor the conscientious efforts of the minister, nor the soul searching of the auditor; rather, the production of sermon literature—the composition of texts, the application of meaning, the material and textual preservation of words—becomes the shared goal of an entire community of Jeremiah’s scribes.

Jeremiah’s Scribes