The Historical Jeremiah

Many readers of the Bible come to the text with the unexamined (and usually unqualified) assumption that the literature is unequivocally historical. In other words, the people existed and the events happened more or less as described by the text. But was the version of the character presented in the text an accurate portrayal of the real, historical figure? We can't know. I've realized that history-writing is much more about creating a plausible narrative about the past than about precisely recording the details. So, the historical person and the biblical/literary character are not one and the same. In the case of Jeremiah, no scholar highlighted the difficulty of reconstructing historical and biographical information from the biblical account as thoroughly as the late Robert P. Carroll. Despite his reputation as the quintessential skeptic and practitioner of a hermeneutic of suspicion in biblical exegesis, I found his honesty about the limits of our knowledge refreshing and his conclusions quite in line with what I've proposed before.

The ‘I’ and ‘me’ of various prose pieces are assumed by most exegetes to represent Jeremiah as speaker, and the editorial framework frequently attributes prose actions and statements to him. Reading the book at face value and following the dictates of traditional and conventional readings of the text, the bulk of modem scholars have understood Jeremiah to be the book of the life and times of Jeremiah the prophet, with direct access to his words, deeds, innermost thoughts and reflections. Such an approach presupposes so much historical information to which nobody has access and a one-to-one correspondence between text and social reality that it is an extremely problematical reading of the book. The precise relation between the character constructed by the writers of the tradition and a hypothesized ‘historical’ Jeremiah behind the book is a very difficult question to answer, though not acknowledging its existence in the first place does not make it any the less real a problem for interpreting the book. For the purpose of this chapter the character of Jeremiah presented in the book will be treated as the creative fiction of the editors and writers who produced it and the relation between the ‘historical’ Jeremiah and the ‘fictional’ Jeremiah will be left to the speculative sophistications of the reader....

Although the majority of scholars continue to read Jeremiah as a biographical or autobiographical set of documents, and this ‘compact majority’ must be recognized for whatever value may be attached to such statistical reports, we cannot prejudge the issue as if there were no alternative or more feasible accounts of how the book was put together. Such accounts undergird the logic of the claim that perhaps the figure of Jeremiah is more the creation of the tradition than the creator of it.**

The bottom line is that reading any biblical book as if it provides direct historical/biographical information is problematic, especially in light of the clear theological program that motivated the anonymous writers behind the bulk of the historical narrative (the so-called Deuteronomists and the Deuteronomic school). What was their theological program and how did it affect the "spin" they put on the biblical history? Tune in next week...
**Quoted from R.P. Carroll, Jeremiah (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 75, 77.

Thou Shalt Not Study Ezekiel

It's just too dangerous to study Ezekiel, especially chapter 1. The Talmud records that:

The rabbis taught: It happened once that a certain child, who was reading in his teacher's house in the Book of Ezekiel, was pondering over 'Hashmal, and there came out fire from 'Hashmal and burnt him, and they sought in consequence to conceal the Book of Ezekiel. (b. Hagigah 13a)

The word "hashmal" only occurs 3 times in the Hebrew Bible, all 3 in Ezekiel's attempts to describe the appearance of God Himself. Since we don't really know what the Hebrew word was trying to describe, Jewish exegesis imbued the word itself with the dangerous power of God's presence as if the ark of the covenant itself was in the room (see 2 Sam 6:6-7 for an example). Rashi, the great medieval Jewish commentator, moves on from Ezek 1:4 with the comment that attempting to understand this verse was not allowed.

The rabbis prohibited anyone under age 30 from studying Ezekiel because of this incident. One needed to be sufficiently mature in the study of Torah before they would expound the secrets of Ezekiel 1, especially the divine chariot. So if your Bible reading plan takes you through Ezekiel, be careful and you may want to implement the buddy system. Never read alone. Just in case.

Shift: Back to Square One

Isn’t it wonderful when, after doing some preliminary research and writing an introductory paper on a potential thesis topic, you discover you missed an important source that reveals massive additional bibliography on the subject and strongly suggests there’s nothing more to be said?

I am interested in the topic of creation in the Hebrew Bible and had begun exploring it especially through the aspect of Deutero-Isaiah’s use of the motif. I’ve presented a paper on the topic at a regional SBL and discussed the topic with potential dissertation committee members. Only one advisor cautioned me that there might be little new ground to explore on this motif, or at least, it would be a huge challenge to find because of the massive bibliography on the book of Isaiah and creation separately. I have finally realized how self-guided PhD research really is and how much it is on me alone to track down what’s been done and find my own avenue for original research.

Here is the opening to the chapter by Richard J. Clifford I read last night but should’ve read months ago:

Given the many verbs of creating in Second Isaiah . . . , it is remarkable that explicit scholarly discussion on the topic began only in the 1930s. Recent years have made up for previous neglect; there now exist over a dozen articles, three books, and numerous treatments within commentaries and monographs on creation in Second Isaiah. The first part reviews critically some of the scholarly contributions, for several questionable assumptions have crept into the consensus, viz., that the “problematic” is the relation between originally distinct concepts of redemption and creation; that the concept of creation is subordinated to redemption; and that a distinction between creation of the whole and of the individual is operative in Second Isaian hymns and individual laments.[1]

Now it is somewhat gratifying to discover one’s independently reached thoughts on a subject have been anticipated by a scholar of Clifford’s caliber, but that is little consolation when one is attempting to craft a thesis proposal.

So, I’m shifting gears to a different area of research, back to square one with my proposal. Well, not totally square one, I’m shifting to one of my other interests, probably Biblical Hebrew and Translation Studies.

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[1] Richard J. Clifford, “Creation in Isaiah 40-55”, Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible (CBQ Monograph Series 26), 163-176.