The Great Drama of Jeremiah: A Performance Reading by Valerie M. Billingham

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Great Drama of Jeremiah: A Performance Reading by Valerie M. Billingham Amy J. Erickson valerie m. billingham, The Great Drama of Jeremiah: A Performance Reading (HBM 95; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2021). Pp. x + 271. £65/$85/€70. With this volume, Valerie M. Billingham adds her contribution to the growing field of performance criticism studies. This work is not a complete commentary. Instead, B. focuses her attention on eleven performance texts from the book of Jeremiah, all taken from the first nineteen of fifty-two chapters. Although this puts a considerable limit on the scope of her analysis and lends a feel of fragmentation, the advantage is that it permits her ample margin to focus and develop her methodology. The opening section offers an illuminative orientation to B.’s approach and influences. Here she reviews the major tenets of performance-critical approaches. This includes the working premise that the majority of biblical texts originated in oral rather than written form; it also resolves to attend to the imaginative, as opposed to the merely cognitive, dimensions of the text. Yet B. helpfully clarifies her own stance: instead of interpreting the biblical text with an eye to its potential for future performance, she instead opts to “work with certain passages in Jeremiah as scripts in their own right” (p. 15). Billingham enlists several other interpretive postures for her aims. She appeals to rhetorical criticism’s techniques and, accordingly, commits to a synchronic, rather than diachronic, approach to the text. She also aligns with the Earth Bible team’s foundational interpretive principles, which yields renewed attention to the land as an actor and agent in its own right. What is perhaps her strongest contribution to scholarship on the text is her contention that Jeremiah improvises a number of Israelite traditions in order to appropriate them to his particular context of invasion and exile. This de facto places B. well within the orbit of canonical criticism, as she sensitively tunes to Jeremiah’s unique riffs of themes that reverberate elsewhere in the canon. (This attunement is on impressive display in the list of references in the biblical index at the back.) Billingham’s synthetic approach yields unique attention to and insights about Jeremiah’s creative engagement with other Israelite traditions, to the emerging (and fusing) voices in the text, and to the unique and active role of the land. Instead of exhaustively [End Page 133] summarizing B.’s analysis, I will draw attention to just a few of these respective insights as exemplary. In her analysis of Performance 3 (Jer 5:1–31), B.’s combined canonical sensitivity and commitment to an Earth Bible–inspired interpretation yields recognition of what she labels an “aquatic” script. The sin of the people whom Jeremiah addresses overturns the script found elsewhere in Scripture that Yhwh will honor the seasons of rain in accordance with the people’s fidelity (e.g., Deut 11:23–24); their iniquity has, instead, overturned this divine order—and to their detriment. Elsewhere, B.’s eye for performance creatively identifies voices within the biblical text. In Performance 4, for example, she identifies Jer 6:4–5 as belonging to the intervening voice of the attacking foreign army, which underscores the divine warning that precedes it. In Performance 5, she points out the telling absence of one voice—that of the priests—and surmises, “perhaps their glaring absence is a deliberate snub” that points to their failure to guide and teach the people of Israel (p. 127). On more than one occasion B. refrains from defining a particular voice, opting instead to retain interpretive ambiguity, for example, Yhwh and/or the people (p. 102) or Yhwh and/or Jeremiah (p. 140). One agent who receives foregrounded attention in her account is that of the earth itself, even when it is not assigned a direct script. The title of one scene in Performance 3, for example, is “Earth Knows the Terms of the Covenant but the People Don’t” (p. 78). Occasionally one wonders if this intent to elevate the role of the earth is somewhat forced. In the interpretation of Jeremiah’s instruction to bury a loincloth, for example, it is averred...