During Lent this year, I want to read through the book of Jeremiah, starting today with a little background.
Day 1: Background
1. I don't want to spend too much time on background here because much of it will become clear as we read through the text. Jeremiah prophesied during the reigns of Josiah, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah -- roughly from the 620s BC to the time after the temple's destruction in 586 BC. Jeremiah is sometimes called the "weeping prophet" because the message God gave him was one of coming judgment and destruction.
I've often said that I would much rather be a prophet like Isaiah than one like Jeremiah. The message from Isaiah to King Ahaz was an optimistic, positive one -- have faith, Ahaz, because God is going to deliver you! Jeremiah's message was that Israel was going into exile. Let's just say kings often don't like people who speak the truth to them and bring bad news!
Jeremiah had what I sometimes call "Cassandra syndrome," from Greek literature. In Greek mythology, Cassandra did not return the god Apollo's love so he cursed her with the gift to tell the future... but for no one to ever believe her. Jeremiah's situation was not dissimilar. Though he was obviously right, he was largely rejected by his people.
This is also a reminder that it isn't always easy to see who the true prophet is in the thick of things. There were other prophets in Jeremiah's day who were parroting the message of Isaiah a century earlier. "Don't worry," they said. "God is going to save us." But they were false prophets.
2. Suffice it to say, Jeremiah did not sit down one day and write from chapter 1 to 52. In fact, it will become clear that the chapters of Jeremiah in our Bibles aren't in the order in which they were prophesied. Jeremiah had a scribe, Baruch, who wrote down the prophecies for him. At some point, someone collected them into a collection of scrolls. [1]
This is a paradigm shift. Jeremiah's prophecies originally had a very oral character, even if parts of them were written down. Without even realizing it, we live in a literary age. [2] We think in terms of books. They thought in terms of speech, meaning that they thought of books differently than we do. Books retained an oral, more fluid character for them. We tend to think of books as having a much more fixed, preserved character.
Similarly, they read books aloud. The "reader" of a book was not someone sitting alone with a copy of a book in their hands (cf. Mark 13:14). A reader was the person who read a text aloud to an audience of some sort, whether Israelites in a synagogue or a reader in a Christian house assembly. The vast majority of people could not read themselves although literacy was likely higher among Jews.
3. Because the material of Jeremiah is not in order, it's clear that the book itself was edited into its current form later. In fact, the chapters are in a different order in the Greek Old Testament dating from as late as perhaps the 200s BC. This suggests that the arrangement of Jeremiah was not entirely fixed even a couple centuries before Christ.
The first compilation of Jeremiah's prophecies probably took place during the Babylonian exile in the mid-500s. Perhaps Baruch himself edited the prophecies of Jeremiah's life onto scrolls. It's important to remember that God can inspire editing as well as initial writing. Most Christians probably have never thought about this possibility, simply assuming Jeremiah sat down and wrote the book all out at once.
But the concept of inspired editing as part of the process fits equally well with the notion of inerrancy as an author writing something all at once. The key is that the text in its "canonical" form -- the content and shape it came to have in the biblical text -- was inspired. There are some complications here, but this general sense of the situation suffices for our reading.
[1] The book form was not used at this point in history. Scrolls were not infinitely long. A work the size of Jeremiah probably would be kept on three or four scrolls.
[2] At least the older ones of us do. Younger individuals live in a digital age and are digital natives. This is a third major paradigm shift in history.
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