The Prophet Jeremiah and Exclusive Loyalty to God

The Prophet Jeremiah and Exclusive Loyalty to God

Kathleen M O'Connor. Interpretation. Richmond: Apr 2005.Vol.59, Iss. 2; pg. 130, 11 pgs
Copyright Interpretation Apr 2005


In the book of Jeremiah, the prophet's calling involves profound engagement with the world, with God, and with the local community. Exclusive allegiance to and intimate experience of God propel the prophet into the world, become the fiery source of his passion, and make Jeremiah the model of survival for his devastated community.


During these times of national and international turmoil, reflection on the prophetic calling is more than an historical inquiry. It is an urgent matter of critical importance for the Christian church in its worship, its ministry, and its striving to be faithful to the mission of God in the world. The prophets of ancient Israel invite believers to overcome the myopia of the personal and the local. They call for an expansive vision of faith and practice located not only in the local community but also in the larger world of international relations and of ecological life. Because Israel's prophets obey the Creator of the nations and the cosmos, they consider the whole world to be the arena in which the word of God holds sway.

In the Old Testament, the prophetic calling resembles a tree with three interrelated roots. This calling has its origin and nourishment from the realities of the world, from a steadfast relationship with God, and from the particular circumstances of an historical community. Although various Old Testament accounts of the prophetic calling may empiidiize one of these roots over others, all three are always present.

Jeremiah seems to be the prophet who offers the most fertile ground for reflection on the roots of the prophetic calling because the book named after him contains a river of so called "biographical information." Among these are a call narrative (ch. 1), prayers called "confessions" in the prophet's first-person voice (11:18-12:6; 15:10-21; 17:14-18; 18:18-23; 20:7-13), sermons attributed to him (e.g., the temple sermon, 7:1-8:3; the covenant sermon, 11:1-17; the Sabbath sermon, 17:19-27) as well as numerous stories about his prophetic struggles (especially in chs. 36-45). These materials about the life of the prophet do not, however, provide a direct witness to his personal sense of calling. Instead, the prophet's life and words are filtered through the eyes of the book's composers who are intent upon meeting the needs of their own community rather than on offering historical precision about the prophet's vocation.

Although prophecy is, indeed, a complex phenomenon, and much is known about prophetic phenomena in the ancient Near East,1 biblical prophecy comes to us as a literary heritage. That means Jeremiah's editors collected various kinds of material from different times to create a portrait, that is, a literary representation of Jeremiah's prophetic calling. Whatever historical life underlies the text, in his present "persona," Jeremiah is a highly symbolic figure conveying many levels of meaning.2 To understand the book's depiction of his vocation, it is first necessary to understand the historical world in which his prophecy is rooted.

PROPHECY ROOTED IN THE WORLD

Jeremiah's world is a place of disaster. Disaster created the book and led to Jeremiah's prophetic calling. No matter when the book received its final form, the tragic events surrounding and following the Babylonian invasions of Judah (597, 587, 582 B.C.E.) mark its every passage. Every poem, narrative, sermon, or symbolic act of Jeremiah relates to the Babylonian invasions one way or another, either announcing them, explaining them, or offering hope for surviving them.3 Daniel Smith-Christopher shows convincingly that Israel's exile was far more devastating than some interpreters previously thought. The collapse of the nation constituted a set of events that exceeded the ability of the nation "to cope."4 A disaster is more than a set of sorrowful or discouraging events or a temporary setback in the nation's flourishing. A disaster refers to an all-encompassing collapse of the world, what Louis Stulman refers to as "a cosmic crumbling."5 Indeed, the very meaning of disaster is that it is all encompassing. Nothing in the people's frame of reference is strong enough to support them in the aftermath of the crisis because their institutions and hopes have been destroyed.

A WORLD OF SUFFERING

To grasp the overwhelming suffering and despair that must have followed the Babylonian invasions requires little historical imagination. After years of international intrigue and maneuvering, Babylonian troops twice invaded Jerusalem (597 and 587 B.C.E.), destroyed the king's palace, razed the temple, and deported some of the leading citizens to Babylon. The Babylonian army then occupied Judah and Jerusalem, and a rebellion by some Judahites provoked a third invasion (Jer 41).

The invasions vastly disrupted daily life among ordinary citizens of Jerusalem. Many survivors would have lost loved ones in the sieges and perhaps their means of livelihood as well. They lost their government and religious leadership, and in the case of the exiles, they also lost their homeland. Such violent disintegration of their world also meant a massive loss of confidence in their God. Into this physical and theological catastrophe the book of Jeremiah intervenes. It interprets this turbulent world and in direct and indirect ways offers the means of survival. In this urgent and immediate sense, the roots of Jeremiah's prophecy lie in the world of his broken nation.

Jeremiah's prophetic vocation finds roots in the wider world because God designates him, "prophet to the nations" (1:5,10).6 This unique title, granted in his call narrative, looms over the book in its strangeness. In what sense could Jeremiah be called a prophet to the nations? What does it mean for him to have such a calling when his audience appears to have been largely the people of Judah and the exiles in Babylon? Some interpreters have avoided the problem by emending the Hebrew of the title to read "prophet to my nation." Alternatively, Holladay proposes that Jeremiah's call to "the nations" refers to Jeremiah's mission to the divided nations of Israel and Judah.7 But in this book, the prophetic vocation concerns something much larger than the world of Jeremiah's own people. In the large sweep of the book, the prophet testifies to God's ineluctable governance of all the nations of the world. As prophet to the nations, his sphere of concern, if not of influence,8 is the international world.

Jeremiah's rootedness in the international world is evident, first, in his continued proclamation that enemy Babylon is God's agent in the world who will punish Judah for its idolatry and infidelity (Jer 1-20).9 Second, the international fabric of the prophet's mission appears when he urges the people of Judah to surrender to the invading Babylonian forces (38:2). For Jeremiah, imperial Babylon is God's instrument with whom God's own people must cooperate (21:1-10). He even counsels the Judahites deported to Babylon to seek the shalom of their captors because Babylon's shalom is their shalom (29:7). Third, Jeremiah's prophecy addresses the nations "caught up in the web of events which had their origin in the impress of Babylonian imperialism."10 As prophet to the nations, he announces divine punishment upon them, particularly Babylon. The nations will drink of the cup of wrath that poisons and destroys, each in turn until finally Babylon will drink (25:15-38). Jeremiah reiterates this vision and particularly Babylon's certain punishment in his Oracles to the Nations, placed at a conclusive point near the end of the Hebrew text (46-51).11 He again announces God's plans for justice against Israel's enemies and, in the process, offers hope of survival to his own destroyed nation.

To say that Jeremiah's prophecy is rooted in the world is to recognize how embedded is his prophetic vocation in concrete human life that focuses upon the international political realities of his time. Clearly, this prophet speaks a political word; he makes political claims and interjects himself into the intrigues and power plays of the nations, and, therefore, into the internal arguments among his own people.

Jeremiah's support of the enemy contributes to virulent political clashes among the leadership of his own people. With high drama, his altercation with the prophet Hananiah reveals his allegiance to the God who does not conform to the nationalist expectations of Jeremiah's compatriots (28:1-17). The prophet Hananiah, for example claimed with certainty and rhetorical persuasiveness that God would restore the temple vessels that had been removed to Babylon after the first invasion. In a most effective symbolic act, he breaks the wooden yoke Jeremiah wears around his neck to symbolize Judah's captivity to Babylon. Jeremiah has no reply and goes away for "sometime" (28:12), his word seemingly defeated. But later Jeremiah returns to restate and expand God's word about the world. He wears an iron yoke to show that the nations shall indeed serve King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon for God has "even given him the wild animals" (28:14).

Among his own people, Jeremiah's prophetic word is wildly divisive because it is political. It is divisive because his is the harder and more painful viewpoint for the community. And it is divisive because it represents the minority viewpoint, the viewpoint of the "peace party," the ones who urge cooperation with foreign nations. Of course, the ancient world did not separate politics from religion, yet the core of Jeremiah's prophecy is his theological allegiance. He believes God to be God of the whole world, not merely of his own people. He points at every turn to God's governance of the world and to God's sovereignty over the nations. As a corollary of these beliefs, he speaks of the intertwined fates of the nations themselves. Modern conceptions of religion divorced from the public domain would be inconceivable to this prophet on theological grounds.

Jeremiah's vocation is also rooted in the world because the horizon of his ministry is broader even than international politics; his vision is cosmic. He sees the fate of humans to be inexorably linked to the fate of the earth itself. Like many prophets, his metaphors bespeak a kind of human and ecological symbiosis.12 The sinfulness of the people and the invasion by the Babylonians find mirroring expression in non-human life. With harrowing power, for example, the prophet depicts the coming onslaught of the Babylonian army as a reversal of creation itself.13 Light, mountains, hills, birds, and the cities will return to primeval "waste and void" (4:23-27; cf. Gen 1:2). In this mythic description of the effects of war, Jeremiah promises that the invasion will leave a burnt-out land, a moonscape devoid of human and animal life. The destruction of the created world anticipates and echoes the destruction of the people's life together.

When Jeremiah chastises the people for their infidelity, he melds the people's mourning, the spiritual emptiness of their leadership, and the barrenness of their lives with the impact of a drought upon the land and its creatures. Then, in the book's four short chapters of explicit hope often called "the little book of consolation" (chs. 30-33), he promises restoration of the earth itself. The created world will participate in the transformation of the covenant community in the impinging future. The storm of YHWH will have passed, and the exiles will travel home past brooks of water (31:9). The earth will be bountiful, and "the people shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine and the oil, over the young of the flock and the herd, and life shall become like a watered garden . . ." (31:12). Creation itself will be reborn.

The prophet's vocation, therefore, embraces more than the merely human. It assumes the interrelationship of peoples with the larger creation in which they dwell. Jeremiah offers his audience a wide-angle view of their relationship to the earth and to other peoples, because he has an expansive vision of the domain of the Creator. His is an ethical vision that locates individuals and community in their proper place in the world; they are not at the center.

PROPHECY ROOTED IN GOD

With more deliberateness than any prophetic literature, the book of Jeremiah presents the prophet as centered utterly on his relationship with God. This is first evident in the account of his call, presented in the typical literary pattern of the call narrative. The call includes the following features: a divine encounter, a divine commission to the prophet, resistance by the prophet, reassurance, and a sign.14 Taken together, these elements of the call narrative point directly and essentially to the relationship of the prophet with God and establish that relationship as the unequivocal source of his vocation.

God summons him even before he is born, an indication that the prophecy to follow has it origins in God, not in Jeremiah's own designs. In the manner of the great prophet Moses (Exod 3:10-12), Jeremiah forcefully resists his call. He cannot speak, he claims, because he is too young. God reassures him by promising to be with him to "deliver" him to prophesy and commands him to speak "whatever I command you" (1:7). Two visions are signs that confirm his call (1:11-19). By means of a play on words in Hebrew, the early blooming branch of an almond tree (saqed) signifies God's steady watching (soqed) over the prophetic word. The overturned boiling pot signifies the content of that word to portend the disaster coming upon Jeremiah's people from the mythical "north."

Jeremiah's call account clearly indicates his vocation is God's idea, but it does something more. It characterizes the relationship between YHWH and the prophet as intimate, dialogical, and compelling. Jeremiah's commission comes in a conversation, a dialogue, in which the prophet and God speak back and forth; each speaks and hears, each gives and takes, and each is fully occupied with the other in the fashion of an intimate relationship. This relationship gives authority to Jeremiah and to all the words of the book; this relationship is why Jeremiah's audience can trust his interpretation of the calamitous world in which they live; and this relationship is the reason he can face the resistance of his own people to his preaching. The text portrays him to be so deeply rooted in his life with God that he is compelled to speak God's truth. Allegiance to God alone enables him to "gird his loins" against the people's resistance and to "stand up and tell them everything" God commands him (1:17).

The conversation between Jeremiah and God does not end with the call narrative. The book continues to portray him as one enabled to endure enormous suffering because of his on-going conversation with God, even though that relationship itself is part of his suffering. His five laments known as the "confessions" (11:8-12:6; 15:10-21; 17:14-18; 18:18-21; 20:7-13)15 portray Jeremiah as God's interlocutor and conversation partner despite his sense of divine abandonment. These laments are beautiful, poignant expressions of the prophet's sorrows in fulfilling his mission to be God's spokesman, and they are testimonies to his continued intimacy with God.

In the first two confessions (11:18-12:6; 15:10-21), Jeremiah complains of his enemies' attacks against him despite his innocence and his non-violence in the face of their evil deeds. He lays his case before God. "Why does the way of the guilty prosper?" he asks. God replies that things will get worse (12:5-6). Jeremiah again laments his situation in the second confession, this time from the perspective of his mission. His calling requires that he sit alone and not join in merrymaking because "your words were found and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and a delight" (15:16). Jeremiah has identified with his calling so completely that he understands God's word as if he had eaten it. But despite his costly loyalty and devotion, God has become like a "deceitful brook," like a wadi that floods in winter and dries up in the hot summer. God again urges Jeremiah to remain steadfast against the people's opposition, for God will make him "a wall of bronze" (15:19-21). Jeremiah can persevere in his calling because his strength comes from God.

In the third confession (17:14-18), Jeremiah's spirit continues to plummet downward, but he speaks unwaveringly to God. He asks God to heal him, to be his refuge, and to vindicate him against his enemies (17:14, 17, 18), to hear him and to protect him (18:19, 23). He accuses God of injustice (12:1-4) and of seducing and overpowering him (20:7). His calling itself is the cause of his immense pain. When he preaches, no one believes him; when he speaks out, enemies try to slay him for his treasonous words. He decides to quit his calling because the conflict is so wrenching, but he cannot. In a brilliant description of the power of his relationship with God to hold him steady in the face of massive doubt, he describes his vocational conflict and God's restraining power over him. "With me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot" (20:9).

After Jeremiah passes through his angry and bitter vocational despair, he ends his prayer with the renewed confidence in God typical of the lament form. He proclaims that God is with him and he himself will prevail over his enemies. He has moved through his darkness to a deeper faith. "YHWH has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers" (20:13).

Jeremiah's confessions declare that the steadying, energizing core of the prophetic vocation is life with God. They mark the true prophet as a contemplative, a mystic, a person of deep prayer, smitten by his encounter with the divine. This aspect of the prophetic vocation is easy to overlook, to historicize or intellectualize away because for some it smacks of overwrought emotion or flamboyant piety. Yet the prophet appears as one who lives in profound intimacy with God and knows that intimacy in his whole being. This intimacy distinguishes the true prophet from the false, for the latter has not stood in the council of God to see and hear the divine word (23:18).

Jeremiah's confessions also suggest something more about the prophetic calling. They, along with narrative accounts of Jeremiah's travails, show the prophet to be one with his people. In subtle ways, Jeremiah serves as a symbol of his community's predicament in the aftermath of disaster, even though he also suffers at their hands.

PROPHECY ROOTED IN COMMUNITY

In its richly evocative portrait of the prophet, the book depicts Jeremiah first as one with a unique calling as God's spokesperson, set over against his people. At the same time, it presents the account of Jeremiah's life as emblematic of the fate of the nation. His calling is rooted in the community in the obvious sense that the community is his primary audience, but it is also rooted in the community because the survival and future reclamation of the community are the book's most thoroughgoing concern. To help the community to endure its present suffering, to understand and absorb what has happened to it, and, finally, to reconstitute itself as God's covenant people is the book's large rhetorical purpose. The book's portrait of Jeremiah's life contributes to that purpose. His prophetic vocation reaches in two symbolic directions.16 On the one hand, the prophet suffers because his vocation is to speak words of judgment to a community utterly unwilling to listen. Their failure to heed him is one of the principal reasons they are in their present predicament. On the other hand, he suffers in ways that echo the fate of that same community, so that his life embodies their pain, mirrors it back to them, and offers them an example of how to survive it.

Jeremiah does not escape the suffering of his people, for in complicated ways, he also is a victim of the disaster. His repeated captivities (20:1-6; 26:1-24; 37:11-21; 38:1-6) and escapes from death (26:24; 36:19; 37:21; 38:7-13; 39:11-14), attacks upon him (11:18-19, 21-23; 20:1-6; 26:1-24), and his own exile (chs. 42-44) parallel the people's historical sufferings from military invasions, captivity, and exile. His celibacy points to the end of domestic life in the land (16:1-4), when there will be no more giving and taking in marriage, no voice of gladness, no voice of bride or bridegroom (16:9). His solitary state serves as an icon of the devastation of daily domestic life in the land.

Like his community, Jeremiah is a survivor of captivity, though in his case he is forced into exile in Egypt by some of his own people, rather than in Babylon by the foreign enemy. The book's silence regarding Jeremiah's life after exile in Egypt and its silence about his death are puzzling, especially if we think his portrait is biographical in the modern sense. The narratives leave him miserable in Egypt (chs. 43-44). But Jeremiah must survive and endure in the book, for so must the people, even up to seventy years in Babylon (29:10). At the end, all Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch have gained are their lives "as the prize for war" (45:5). And that is the book's chief promise to Jeremiah's people-they will survive. Jeremiah's survival is a sign of their survival, a basis for hope, a promise of a future in the utterly bleak present.

More subtly, Jeremiah symbolizes what his community ought to be. His behavior shows them how they must behave if they are to endure the present suffering and reconstitute themselves as God's covenant community in the future.17 Like them, he is wounded, but he is also the ideal survivor who, even as he opposes his people and is opposed by them, exhibits virtues they must practice to regain their life together. They should relate to God in the same manner he does. Like him, they must be utterly devoted to God; they must resist political allegiances contrary to God's will, and they must cooperate with others to survive.

Jeremiah's absolute loyalty to God creates a counterpoint to the behavior of the community whom he accuses of abandoning YHWH to follow after other gods, a theme that sweeps through chs. 1-20.18 Jeremiah's relationship with God is unbroken and enduring despite his suffering and his anger at God. God and he continue to be "made known" to one another (11:18); he converses with God and clings to God in his suffering (1:4-10; 11:18-12:6; 15:10-21). So must the community.

Jeremiah pursues his calling in fidelity to divine rule of the world. God's claims upon him transcend his personal fears or concerns for acceptance by family and friends (cf. 11:18-23; 15:15-18; 16:1-9). In this biblical book, the prophetic calling arises from allegiance to the God of Judah who is also the God of the nations. For Jeremiah, such fidelity yields a harsh fate, a stand against the national consensus, a lonely road of abandonment, but his fidelity allows for no other. Expressed at every turn, Jeremiah's fidelity appears most evidently in the "confessions." Despite attacks on his life (11:18, 21-23; 12:6; 20:10), his isolation from others (15:17), his sense of abandonment by his community, and, above all, by God (12:1; 15:18; 20:7), he stays engaged with God.

The confessions reveal the prophet's struggles with his vocation, but they also show the community how to pray to and rage at God as an act of fidelity in the midst of devastation. He is fully obedient to God's word even as he resists it, wrestles with it, and is "burned" by it (20:9), as they must be. Hence, Jeremiah's intimacy with and allegiance to God are not merely credentials of his calling. They are emblematic virtues to be practiced by the community in the midst of disaster. His prayers teach his people how to pray when all is lost. His complete devotion to God at the heart of his vocation is also the complete devotion to God at the heart of the covenant relationship between God and people. The prophet's life, therefore, invites the community to be as faithful as he is.

The book portrays Jeremiah as a mystic, a contemplative, one utterly entangled with God. He knows God, communes with God, and argues with God. He is "seduced" and "tricked," yet steadfast (20:7). Although Jeremiah consistently prays for judgment upon his opponents and in this sense may seem less than exemplary, his prayers are laments that speak brutal truth to God. His laments encourage the community of survivors to do the same. Such prayer offers them a means to express their bitterness, their sense of betrayal, and their rage. Like Jeremiah, they too should pray for justice and for hope in the face of despair. Perhaps they will also survive with renewed life in God.

Jeremiah's relationship with God is the source of his courage and of his prophetic message. It empowers him to resist the king, religious leaders and the national consensus that they are safe because they are God's chosen. His loyalty to God requires him to be a teller of truth, and it both undermines and overrides any loyalty to human leaders, monarchical (37-38) and prophetic (27-28). It makes him the embodiment of political resistance to the excessively nationalist outlook of his own nation. He challenges those who make the temple a robber's den (7:11). He declares that everyone "from the least to the greatest of them is greedy for unjust gain" (6:13). He accuses the priests and prophets of whitewashing the situation by saying, "Peace, peace when there is no peace" (6:13-14). He threatens the king who "builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing and does not give them their wages" (22:13).

Jeremiah's preaching and the book itself bring a large global vision before the people, but the audience is not finally the nations; it is his own community. That Jeremiah had a community of followers and supporters is evident from the existence of the book itself, but also from the many stories of the book, where he is rescued by supporters and by the presence of Baruch as his scribe and the chief conveyer of his prophecy. Although the first twenty five chapters of the book present Jeremiah apart from his community and as the sole faithful member of his community (5:1-6), the book's second half shows him surviving because of the help and cooperation of other faithful ones. He escapes some of his tribulations because of aid from others inside and outside the community. Ahikam, son of Shaphan, mysteriously rescues him after his trial (26:24). Officials of King Jehoiakim counsel Baruch and Jeremiah to hide before Jeremiah's scroll is read to the king and thereby these officials save them from the king's wrath (36:11-19). Ebed-melech, the Ethiopian slave of the king, rescues Jeremiah from the cistern (36:7-13). Baruch records his words on two scrolls when Jeremiah is prohibited from entering the temple (ch. 36).

Implicit in these accounts is a call to the community to acquire a spirit of openness, of willingness to seek survival in cooperation with others. The exiles must seek the shalom even of the enemy for Babylon's shalom is their shalom (29:7). And this too is an expression of loyalty to God who promises "When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me . . . and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you . . . I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile" (29:13-14).

Jeremiah's prophetic vocation was deeply pastoral, but perhaps not in the modern sense of the term. His words and deeds are not aimed at keeping the peace among his own, nor at trying to avoid offense, nor at supporting the people's rampant, narrow-minded nationalism, as if they lived in a world designed for their well-being alone. The claims of the God of the nations upon him override his personal fears or concerns for acceptance by family and friends (cf. 11:18-23; 15:15-18; 16:1-9). He pursues his calling in fidelity to God's rule of the created world. He ministers to his community by speaking truthful words directed at its disobedience and idolatry, and his own life offers a counter example of how to live in fidelity to God in the midst of disaster.

In this biblical book, the prophetic calling arises from allegiance to the God of Judah who is also the God of the nations. For Jeremiah, such fidelity yields a harsh fate, a stand against the national consensus, a lonely road of abandonment and exile, but his calling allows for no other. It may be that his sorrows and his pain provide the space wherein he can imagine a new community in which everyone will know God from the least to the greatest, and their new life together will be like a watered garden.

[Footnote]
1 See P. D. Miller, Jr. "The World and Message of the Prophets: Biblical Prophecy in Its Context," Old Testament Interpretation: Past, Present, and Future; Essays in Honor of Gene M. Tucker, eds. J. L. Mays, D. L. Petersen, and K. H. Richards (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995) 97-112.
2 For studies with strong confidence in the book as historical biography, see William L. Holladay, Jeremiah, 2 vols. Hermeneia (Philadelphia and Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986 and 1989). For more literary approaches see W. Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); M. Biddle, Polyphony and Symphony in Prophetic Literature: Re-reading Jeremiah 7-20, Studies in Old Testament Interpretation 2 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996) and essays in A. R. P. Diamond, L. Stulman, and K. M. O'Connor, Troubling Jeremiah, JSOTSup 260 (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1999).
3 J. Bright, A History of Israel, 4th ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000) 345-46.
4 D. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile, OBT (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) 79, cf., 75-104.
5 L. Stulman, Order Amid Chaos: Jeremiah as Symbolic Tapestry, The Biblical Seminar 7 (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1998).
6 N. Habel's important form-critical study of prophetic "call narratives" ["The Form and Significance of Call Narratives," ZAW 77 (1965) 297-323] is now almost cliché among interpreters, but it deserves continued reflection. See also D. N. Freedman, "Between God and Man: Prophets in Ancient Israel," Prophecy and Prophets, ed. Y. Gitay, SemeiaSt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 57-87.
7 Holladay, Jeremiah, vol 1, 33.
8 So R. P. Carroll, Jeremiah (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986) 95.
9 Until ch. 20, the prophet refers to the invaders under the mythic and terrifying title, "foe from the north." See especially poems scattered across chs. 4-6.
10 R. Clements, Jeremiah, IBC (Louisville: John Knox, 1988) 18.
11 In the Septuagint, the Oracles Against the Nations appear in chs. 26-32.
12 See, for example, Joel 2:1-11; Hosea 2:21-23; and Isa 11:6-9.
13 K. M. O'Connor, "The Tears of God and Divine Character in Jeremiah 2-9," God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, ed. T. Linafelt and T. K. Beal (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998) 172-85.
14 See Habel, "The Significance."
15 Some interpreters divide 11:18-12:6 into two poems, and some include 20:14-18 in the final confession. I interpret the first confession as containing two parallel panels of poetry, and 20:14-18 as a cursing poem. K. M. O'Connor, The Confessions of Jeremiah and Their Role in Chapters 1-25, SBLD 94 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988).
16 T. E. Fretheim, "Caught in the Middle: Jeremiah's Vocational Crisis," WW (Fall 2002) 351-60.
17 See J. B. White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
18 See for example, Jer 2:1-4:2.

[Author Affiliation]
KATHLEEN M. O'CONNOR
Professor of Old Testament
Columbia Theological Seminary