The Formation of the Book of Jeremiah: Doublets and Recurring Phrases

Abstract

The Formation of the Book of Jeremiah: Doublets and Recurring Phrases, by Geoffrey H. Parke-Taylor. SBLMS 51. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000. Pp. xviii + 327. $45.00. Professor Parke-Taylor's work is a close study of the myriad of repeated words, phrases, and word-strings in the book of Jeremiah. The doublets and repeated phrases offer clues to the growing network of intratextual links formed in the long and complex editorial history of the book. These words and word-strings also form increasingly elaborate connections between Jeremiah and an expanding intertextual world dominated by, but limited to, Deuteronomy and the deuteronomistic texts. Following an opening discussion of the history of the investigation of doublets and phrases in Jeremiah (pp. 1-12), he analyzes the doublets in the Confessions of Jeremiah (pp. 13-53). He finds that the doublets in the confession confirm the thesis that the Confessions were inserted tendentiously into this collection of prophetic words and have the effect of dramatizing the themes of judgment (cf. A. R. Diamond, The Confessions of Jeremiah in Context [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987]). Two sections of this study apply his analysis of doublets and repeated phrases to old paradoxes in the present text of Jeremiah: the ambivalent attitude toward the Judean monarchy and the ambivalent attitude toward Babylon. In both cases, the book of Jeremiah preserves ongoing reflection on the Jeremianic tradition in new and different circumstances. The doublets in sections dealing with the monarchy (pp. 55-79) bring forward harsh Jeremianic judgments against the kings of Judah into a new context. In this new context, the hope for an ideal Judean monarch is at the center of the hope for a future for Judah itself. In the words concerning Babylon (pp. 165-84), Jeremiah's conviction that Babylon is the present agent of the divine will is overwhelmed by the elaboration of texts expressing the inevitable destruction of Babylon. Jeremianic words, supplemented by phrases from a larger prophetic corpus, are a critical part of this elaboration of words of disaster concerning Babylon. In the discussion of the growth of the oracles against the nations (pp. 115-64), he describes this as a part of the process of unsystematic growth, expansion, and reordering of the older Jeremianic tradition under changing circumstances. In this discussion, he finds the idea of a rolling corpus (cf. William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah [2 vols.; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986, 1996]) of texts that pick up interpretive expansions in the course of their transmission. Many of these interpretive and reinterpretive elaborations include phrases and sentences only from the Jeremianic tradition, but also from broader awareness of a growing body of texts preserving the traditions of earlier prophets. In the oracles against the nations, and particularly in their old introduction, 25:1-13 (pp. 101-14), he uses the shorter text preserved in the Septuagint to identify one stage in the elaboration and expansion of an earlier tradition (cf. J. G. Janzen, Studies in the Book of Jeremiah [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973]). In the Septuagint Vorlage, this is an oracle against Judah, followed by the oracles against the other nations. In the MT of Jeremiah, the poem climaxes in a period of Judean servitude in Babylon followed by judgment on Babylon. This text is a pastiche of Jeremianic phrases, including late texts reflecting the restoration of the cultus. He finds here and elsewhere a circle of traditionists that not only safeguarded the Jeremiah tradition, but applied this tradition to historical situations well beyond the time of Jeremiah himself (p. 114). A series of analyses of the relationship of Jeremianic rhetoric to a broader intertextual context (pp. 213-92) document the predominance of connections with the deuteronomistic tradition, and incline him to support the thesis of a Dtr edition of Jeremiah. …