Jeremiah and Ezekiel

Joel Rosenberg

THE books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel — representing the two prophets who most epitomized Israel's transition to exile — pose literary prob­lems different from those of more purely narrative biblical books. A literary reading must try to make sense of how the books have chosen to unfold the words of their alleged authors, for it is fair to say that Jeremiah and Ezekiel are less the authors of their books than personages or voices within a text. Despite the common ancient practice of attributing authorship of a work to one or another chief figure within it (a practice that critical scholarship sometimes perpetuates), it is likely that ancient readers were at least subliminally aware of another presence — anonymous, nar­rative, and traditionary in character — by whose intelligence the prophet's words acquired additional shape, coherence, and historical resonance for a later community. This interplay of prophecy and traditionary memory is our key to the literary dimensions of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and accord­ingly we must beware of overvaluing any one part at the expense of the whole. Once we understand the carefully modulated montage of utterance and narrative in the two works, we will be better able to see the comple­mentary relation of the two prophets and to comprehend the role they played in the formation of biblical tradition as a whole.

Jeremiah

A chief paradox of the Book of Jeremiah is a kind of reciprocal ambiguity between the earlier and later chapters: the closer we are to the prophet's indisputedly original words, largely identified with the poetic material, the farther we are from biographical specifics; and, conversely, the more deeply immersed we become in the details of Jeremiah's life, the more likely we are to encounter either prose synopses of the prophet's utterances or stereotyped recapitulations, which are no less integral to the total composition. The poetic material in Jeremiah is most concentrated at the beginning (chaps. 1—25), middle (chaps. 30-31), and end (chaps. 46—51), and this fact supplies our initial clues to the structure and meaning of the book.

Before we examine that structure, however, we should try to appre­hend the separate styles and apparent sources as they present themselves and to gain a better sense of their uniqueness and internal progressions, so that later we can appreciate the distinctive way in which they are combined. We may here dispense with the chronological categories pro­posed by scholarship¹ and instead view the alleged sources as voices within the work, of which there are essentially three types: poetic oracles, prose sermons, and biographical prose.

Poetic Oracles

Although meter and parallelism are no longer criteria as certain as they once seemed for identifying biblical poetry, it is still possible to assert that a distinctly poetic style predominates in Jeremiah 1-25, 30—31, and 46— 51:² staccato exclamations, rapid changes of scene and vantage point, frequent shifts of voice and discourse, use of invocation, plural command, and rhetorical question, a propensity for assonance and wordplay, a rich array of metaphors and similes from the natural landscape and from human crafts and trades, and precision of metonymy and synecdoche. Here we come closest to the mind of the prophet, and it is clear that the book has been constructed to allow the voice of Jeremiah to dominate the beginning, end, and core of the text.

The opening chapters convey a sense of the prophet's panoramic purview and his brilliant reversals of mood and tone. The book begins with a starkly simple commissioning scene (a bold contrast to Moses' commissioning in Exodus 3 and to those of Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1—3), in which YHWH drafts the reluctant prophet ("Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee . . . and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations," 1:5), who is initially shown two symbolic visions: the almond branch (shaqed), a symbol of the watchful (shoqed) deity (1:11); and the molten caldron pouring destruction from the north (1:13), symbol of the immi­nent terror from northern peoples who will descend upon the hapless nation — an image that will dominate the whole book. The prophet now turns to plead with his audience, personifying a God who remembers the former love of his favored people (2:1-3—the influence of Hosea is espe­cially marked here) and reciting the milestones of its early history. Inter­mittently he flares up in wrath over the defilement of the Land, the faithlessness, superstition, and folly of the people, the futile alliances of their leaders. The nation is personified as a wanton woman, lustful in her passion (2:23-24), contriving schemes to grasp her lover (2:33), lying with paramours on roads and hilltops (3:23). Momentarily, the prophet imag­ines a scene of reconciliation, first calling to the people to turn back (3:2) and articulating their hypothetical heartfelt confession (3:22-25), then again in the voice of YHWH promising forgiveness and future blessing (4:1-2). Visions of doom resurge in 4:3-9, and the wrathful deity is now sketched as the awesome divine warrior of Near Eastern myth (4:11-13). In a characteristic etiological flourish, the prophet pauses to pronounce the causal nexus between human misdeed and bitter punishment: "Your ways and your doings have brought this upon you" (4:18 [at]). Then, suddenly, we are plunged into the moaning despair of one who must witness such devastation:

My anguish, my anguish!

I writhe in pain!

Oh, the walls of my heart! (4:19 [rsv])

Is it the prophet who speaks here, or is it YHWH speaking figura­tively of himself? No connectors enable us to know for sure. This min­gling of divine and prophetic persona (punctuated only occasionally by first-person markers such as "and the Lord said to me") is frequent in Jeremiah and illustrates the extent to which God's sorrow and the proph­et's suffering are seen as two sides of the same coin. As the prophet surveys the devastation of the Land as if it were already an accomplished fact (4:25-31), first and third person mingle with fluid ease; then, just as easily, the prophet turns again to the populace ("And when thou art spoiled, what will thou do? Though thou clothest thyself with crimson, though thou deckest thee with ornaments of gold . . ."; 4:30), and, shifting voice once more, depicts Daughter Zion's cry of despair: "Woe is me now! for my soul is wearied because of murderers" (4:31).

The chief themes of the early chapters, despite much geographic specificity, are unique to no particular moment of the prophet's mission and, indeed, display much the same feel for the typical and typologically recurrent that characterizes Hebrew prophecy as a whole. Jeremiah appears to have learned from his predecessors — from Amos and Micah the preoc­cupation with social injustice and the indifference to cultic propriety; from Hosea the feminine personification of Israel and the nostalgia for the days of the Exodus and the Wilderness wandering; from Isaiah the panoramic vision, the sharpness of satire, and the gift of paronomasia and linguistic musicality. The prophet moves around the Land with the certainty of a stage director, calling forth the sights, sounds, and exclamations of his tortured era, posing legalities and claims, mocking the self-exculpations and self-pity of the populace, and expressing anguish and despair over their devastation and its aftermath, only to call the enemy down upon them anew, as new offenses of the people come to mind. We notice a certain hardening of the prophet's position, as he moves from the hope of repentance to a sense of the inevitability of retribution. As this happens, we find increasing expression of prophetic and divine pathos — at first without distinction between the celestial and earthly perception; then, as the prophet's social encounters increase, with a growing sense of the prophet's isolation from God and man alike.

The lamentation passages in 11:18-20 and later are perhaps the most distinctive feature of the book, from which alone we would be entitled to view Jeremiah as our most self-revealed prophet. Much akin to Job's outcries, Jeremiah's tortured confessions alternate between plea, accusa­tion, and anticipation, now begging for divine vindication in the face of his mockers and enemies, then, at a particularly raw moment of desper­ation (20:7-10), complaining of deception by the deity and of the cruel absence of respite or relief. After a brief glimmer of renewed trust (20:11-13), the prophet curses the day he was born, implicitly repudiating the mantle of prophecy that was laid upon him in the womb (1:5). Gradually we come to see the enormous toll and burden on one who was once granted the freest mandate and the most dextrous hand:

to root out, and to pull down,

and to destroy, and to throw down,

to build, and to plant. (1:10)

Many have noted the symbolic, exemplary nature of Jeremiah's suf­ferings—"a speaker of parables and himself a parable. "³ This impression is strengthened by the numerous ways in which Jeremiah is called upon to act out mimetically some aspect of the nation's fate: standing at the Temple gate (7:2), wearing and destroying a loincloth (13:1-7), refraining from marriage (16:1-4), witnessing a potter at his wheel (18:1-4), smash­ing a potter's jug (19:1-12), holding forth a winecup of wrath (25:15-17), attaching a yoke to his neck with thongs (27:1-4), and so on. But there is no need to view the prophet's anguish as purely teleological and didactic, or as a kind of shamanistic dramatization of the torment of an era. The lavishness of prophetic pathos flows more from the breakdown of mis­sionary purpose than from an enactment of it. Even YHWH must confront this unforeseen faltering of his plan. Had Jeremiah remained but a man­nequin of heavenly design, a disembodied oracular voice, we would not have sensed as fully the desperation and extremity of the time and place in which he moved. His sharp departure from prophetic tradition and custom in setting forth his complaint so elaborately is wholly his own innovation, and there is nothing else quite like it in biblical prophetic literature.

Prose Sermons

Extensive prose of a sermonic nature invades the Book of Jeremiah as early as chapters 3, 7, and 11, and it punctuates the oracles in briefer ways in the form of eschatological pronouncements ("In that day, there will be • • •") and etiological justifications ("for the people of Judah have done what displeases me"). Scholars have long noted the diction and cadences of the Deuteronomists in these prose segments—"Hearken to his voice," "to do right in the eyes of the Lord," "the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow," "provoke me to anger," and many related turns of speech ⁴. The prophet could be revealing his own familiarity with the so-called Ur-Deuteronomy, or he could be using phrases that were later imitated by the Deuteronomists, or the affinity could rest in commonality of language, era, and heritage, or there could have been interpolations by a Deuteronomistic hand in order to claim Jeremiah for the movement. Though the precise textual relation between the Book of Jeremiah and Deuteron­omy may elude us, there is a certain convergence of interest between Jeremiah and the Deuteronomist. Both simultaneously affirm and deny the uniqueness of Israel among the nations, both call the people to strict accountability for their wrongdoings, and both reflect a similar sense of historical and divine causality. That the nation's fate was to become a proverb and a byword in the discourse of later generations, as Deuter­onomy and the Deuteronomistic portions of Jeremiah would have it, accorded well with the idiom of this most emblematic of prophets— indeed, he, too, was a symbol of ridicule "I have become a constant laughingstock—everyone jeers at me" (20 7 [at]).

On the other hand, investigators seeking to challenge or downplay the influence of Deuteronomistic ideology in the prose sermons have suggested a useful model for recovering from them the authentic voice of the prophet. They have spoken of a remembered gist and of "demetrified" copies of the prophet's original utterances ⁵. If we shift our interest here from source-criticism to literary interpretation, we find an excellent model for understanding the voice of the prose sermons—for it is not the first­hand voice of the prophet but a voice filtered through memory and tradition, and thus a sign of the baroquely tortuous chronological sense that informs the book as a whole. The prophet speaks and is remembered speaking. As Jeremiah looks forward to the era of the survivors, eyes and ears from that era harken back to him. The mutuality of prediction and fulfillment is repeatedly affirmed. The wider arc of divine purpose is repeatedly made explicit.

Biographical Prose

The history of Jeremiah's life and times, like the Deuteronomic voice, builds gradually in the Book of Jeremiah. Indeed, anticipations of the biographic voice begin within the Deuteronomic material itself, in chapters 7 and 11. There we find reference to Jeremiah's famous Temple sermon in the fourth year of jehoiakim, to the prophet's clashes with the Jerusalem leadership during their apparent efforts to reverse the reforms of Josiah, and, most significantly, to Jeremiah's estrangement from his own village of Anathoth as a plot against his life arises there. The poetic oracles that accompany and follow this material underscore this biographical interest by presenting the prophet's laments over his many enemies and ndiculers. The narratives that accompany these laments represent the first of the various symbolic actions commanded of Jeremiah (discussed above), and so bring into focus the specific public confrontations that will later be given historical concreteness. Only from chapter 20 onward do references appear to specific names of officials and dates, and to controversies of late pre-Exilic Jerusalem. Up to that point, we experience the issues only typologically—in the homiletic rhythms of preachment and the com­pressed synecdoche of oracle. After that time, the history of Jeremiah's life gradually comes into full view, and the prophet is finally revealed as an engaged historical actor, uncompromising but relentlessly committed to persuasion and debate, mingling with the highest ruling circles, able to mobilize allies among them, and, most important, exercising, despite his vulnerability to persecution, considerable public influence, enough to have made himself a threat to the national leaders.

The biographical prose should be understood as stemming from two fundamentally different documentative processes—one arising as an am­plification of sermomc situations, and the other as part of a more purely historiographic or biographical project. There seems to have been an evolution from the one to the other, and that history of discourse on Jeremiah is preserved in the layout of the book as a whole, where we find a progression from oracle to sermon, from sermon to sermoic setting, and from sermonic setting to personal and court history.

Why was it important to include the historical material on Jeremiah? He is, after all, the most fully documented literary prophet in the Hebrew Bible, even without chapters 37-44. But the latter amplify the sparsely reported events of 2 Kings 24—25 in an exceptionally illuminating way. It is a stirring account, detailing Jeremiah's troubles during Jerusalem's final days, with fascinating glimpses of the uncompromising prophet and the tragically vacillating King Zedekiah. Here, we learn of the rescue of Jeremiah from starvation in a mud pit by an Ethiopian slave named Ebed-Melech, of the capture of the city and the humiliation and exile of Zede­kiah, of the defeat of the conspiracy and the stormy aftermath in Judah and Egypt. It is not a "passion" narrative, as some have maintained. If any­thing, it portrays the prophet's vindication and rescue, and the final set­backs he experiences, in his failure to convince the surviving Judean leaders to abandon their conspiratorial course against Babylon, serve only to accentuate the folly and perverseness of the very persons he is trying to rescue. Our clue to the function and significance of the history in the Book of Jeremiah can be found in the return of the Deuteronomic style in the later chapters, especially in 44. There an elaborate, almost cere­monial dialogue occurs between Jeremiah and the Judean exiles in Egypt, in which the prophet affirms that he has been sent as the last in a line of prophets mandated to warn the people "to turn from their wickedness, to burn no incense to other gods" (44:5). We see that a biography of Jere­miah—or, more accurately, a detailed report of his repeated rejection by court and community alike—underscores the Deuteronomic theme of an embattled prophetic tradition and sets the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah firmly into the framework of reciprocal justice that shaped the Deuteronomistic history as a whole (Deuteronomy-2 Kings) and, indeed, the entire narrative history from Genesis through 2 Kings.

Structure

The structure of Jeremiah, and especially of its apparently chaotic chro­nology, has proved elusive to critical investigators, many of whom have declared the text to be in disarray and have attempted a reconstruction of an "original."⁶ The great divergence between the Masoretic and Septuagint versions of Jeremiah has intensified this perplexity, for the Greek trans­lation places the oracles against the nations (46-51) after chapter 25 (which seems to introduce the international theme). But by relying on the dis­tinction among poetic oracles, prose sermon, and prose history, we can make a very plausible case for adhering to the Masoretic arrangement. That arrangement not only has a symmetrical pattern quite common in biblical literature but also helps us to make sense of a number of odd details that might otherwise seem obscure. Allowing for some crossover or interfixing common to biblical redaction, we thus find a poetic central segment, bracketed by two long, chiefly prose segments; these, in turn, are bracketed by two more bodies of chiefly poetic oracle. The whole is then placed into a redactional framework introducing and concluding the prophet's mission. Parallel segments match up thematically as well as, for the most part, formally, although considerable overlap of elements occurs in the actual sequence of texts. The theoretical pattern is summarized as follows:

a Historical headnote (1:1—3).

b Commission (1:4).

с "Prophet to the nations" theme introduced (1:5—10).

d Doom for Israel; poetic oracles predominate (chaps, 1-10).

e Prophet cut off from Anathoth; focus on prophet's trials and conflicts; prose predominates (11:1-28:17).

f Optimistic prophecies; renewal of Israel; prose brackets poetic center (chaps. 29—31).

e' Prophet returns to Anathoth; focus on prophet's trials and conflicts; prose predominates (32:1—45:5).

d' Doom for the nations; poetic oracles predominate (chaps. 46-51).

с' "Prophet to the nations" theme culminates (chaps. 50-51).

b' Prophet's concluding message (51:59-64).

a' Historical appendix (chap. 52).

The outermost parallel is fairly self-evident: both sections are con­cerned with setting the book in the context of the Deuteronomic History and more or less presuppose the reader's acquaintance with that history, specifically with its last four chapters (2 Kings 21-25) or their substance.

The second parallel is more problematic—first, because b' does not seem to end the whole book but only the Babylonian oracles that imme­diately precede it in chapters 50-51; second, because its purported date (see 51:59) is the fourth year of Zedekiah's reign, not the end of jeremiah's career. Thus, his last mentioned prophecy is not his last delivered. Yet there are good reasons for ending Jeremiah's prophecies to the nations with the Babylonian oracles: Babylonia is presented as Israel's nemesis throughout the book, and she is now the most powerful of nations and the symbol of political might as such. One other episode in the book is dated to the fourth year of Zedekiah's reign, namely Jeremiah's confrontation with the court prophet Hananiah. Curiously, Hananiah's theme is the fall of Bab­ylon, and Jeremiah expresses reserve on the truth of this oracle, stating that it can be verified only if and when it comes true (27:7-8), and later (27:15) he criticizes Hananiah for having provided false assurances to court and kingdom. Assuming that both chapter 28 and 59:59-64 have a basis in fact, we learn something quite intriguing about Jeremiah: that at the same time that he was telling his own people not to expect the immediate fall of Babylon, he was telling the Babylonians (at least symbolically—no recipient is designated) that their kingdom would indeed fall.

The fall of Babylon, then, if authentically Jeremiah's prediction, seems to have been a secret prophecy, not intended for the prophet's contem­poraries back home in Judah, and possibly not even for the Babylonians of his era, since Jeremiah (51:59) gives Seraiah ben Neriah the scroll of his Babylon prophecies without designating any recipient (though it is to be read aloud). This is quite odd, and Jeremiah's further instructions to Seraiah suggest that the delivery is to be a purely magical act, not intended to persuade any crowd or official—only to notify "Babylon" as a whole. Recipients are not to be ruled out, but their locale and identity are un­important. With the delivery of this message, Jeremiah's ministry is log­ically complete, even though he has some eight more years of documented preaching.

These considerations enable us to understand the significance of с and ^c , which focus on Jeremiah's mission "to the nations." Much debate has arisen as to whether this means "to" or "concerning," but we need only assume that his mission embraces all nations, though it is also quite likely that most of his internationally oriented oracles were intended chiefly for recipients beyond his own era, Judean or otherwise. The mission is not to be understood as a serious program to preach to foreigners, in the manner of, say, Paul in the New Testament epistles. It is sound Deuter-onomic doctrine and also authentically Jeremianic. It affirms the central tenet of Jeremiah's whole prophetic mission: that the God of Israel and Judah controls the destinies of all peoples with thorough impartiality and vigorous justice. In chapters 50-51 the full design of Jeremiah's mission "to the nations" becomes clear for the first time: even the great devourer will be devoured; even the great nemesis, which throughout the book has been seen as the spearhead of "the enemy from the north," has its own enemy from the north (50:41-43).

The relation of the three bodies of poetic oracle (d,f, d') can now be seen more clearly. These are the three classic components of most pro­phetic books of the Hebrew canon: prophecies of doom for Israel; proph­ecies of doom for the surrounding nations; prophecies of restoration for Israel. Unlike, say, Isaiah or Ezekiel, where these three orders of prophecy are put into a relatively simple sequential relation, in Jeremiah they are placed in a polar and symmetrical opposition: d is opposed to d' and both are contrasted with f. The symmetry all the better underscores that we are not dealing with simple historical prediction, but with a dialectical system in which changes in one area — most specifically, Judah/Israel's repentance — can set off a chain of consequences in the others. All is contingent on human behavior, all is subject to the same impartial stan­dard, and all is reversible in the fullness of time. Between (and partly overlapping) these three elements are two long sections dealing with the life of the prophet, each introduced by an episode illustrating some aspect of his relation to his home village, Anathoth. As chapter 32 makes clear, the prophet's relation to Anathoth is a touchstone of larger events coming to pass — his return is a minuscule and possibly uncompleted token of Israel's eventual return from exile — and thus shows us in an oblique and quiet way that two major progressions in the nation's history are being comprehended: from prosperity to ruin, and from ruin to (still distant) prosperity.

One further and striking symmetry in Jeremiah 20-40 sheds light on the otherwise quite confusing chronology of the book.

a Jeremiah's first imprisonment is no date given, but probably in recounted (20:1-18) reign of Jehoiakim

b An official of Zedekiah asks reign of Zedekiah

Jeremiah to pray to YHWH; broad

survey of Jeremiah's dealings

with various kings (21-24)

с Jeremiah summarizes orally 23 fourth year of Jehoiakim's reign

years of preaching (25:1-14)

d Cup of wine (gloss: "of wrath") fourth year of Jehoiakim's reign

is forced on neighboring nations

(25:15-38); Jeremiah's troubles beginning of Jehoiakim's reign

with official circles are recounted

(26:1-24)

e Jeremiah predicts that nations beginning of Jehoiakim's reign,

will be enslaved to Babylonia but real referent is Zedekiah's

(chap. 27) anti-Babylonian conspiracy

f Jeremiah's rival Hananiah pre- fourth year (or "beginning") of

diets short-term vindication of Zedekiah's reign

the nation (chap. 28)

g Jeremiah tells exiles to settle shortly after exile of Jehoiachin

permanently in Babylonia (Jeconiah); thus, beginning of

(chap. 29) Zedekiah's reign

h "Book of Consolation"

ad­dressed to Northern Israel

(chaps. 30-31)

g' YHWH tells Jeremiah to settle tenth year of Zedekiah's reign,

permanently in Anathoth (chap. 32) during siege of Jerusalem

f' Jeremiah predicts long-term vin- tenth year of Zedekiah's reign,

dication of the nation (chap. 33) slightly later than g'

e' Judean slaveowners renege on during seige of Jerusalem, but

releasing slaves, and Jeremiah possibly earlier than g'

predicts death for them (chap. 34)

d' Cup of wine is refused by Re- "in the days of King Jehoiakim"

chabites; authentic (but nonoffi-

cial) servants of YHWH are

praised; the nation's disobedience

is denounced (chap. 35)

c' Jeremiah summarizes in writing fourth year of Jehoiakim's reign

23 years of preaching (chap. 36)

b' An official of Zedekiah asks early in Zedekiah's reign

Jeremiah to pray to YHWH;

Jeremiah's dealings with Zede­kiah's

court are set forth in detail (37:1-39:18)

a' Jeremiah's final release from after the Babylonian capture of

prison is recounted (40:1-5) Jerusalem

It can be seen that the reigns of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah are inter­spersed m something of a checkerboard pattern, and that, starting with b/b' inward, parallel pairs fall within the same reign (the apparent excep­tion, e/e', at least yields messages applicable to the same reign). Just as the over­all layout of oracles stresses that prophetic prediction is not a matter of sequential chronology but rather of dialectical interdependence, this de­ployment of episodes suggests that the prophetic vocation is not a matter of steady augmentation of the prophet's doctrine or of increasing accep­tance by his public, but rather one of continual reversal, deadlock, setback, and resurgence. The restlessness and apparent aimlessness of the prophet's career is thus captured in a unique and profound way. Patterns emerge in his ministry which are hard to see in the short run (for the reader as much as for the prophet or his contemporaries), but which, over the long run, show simultaneously a deep consistency of vision and an immense ver­satility of expression. The relativity of the historical hour, the alteration of preachment to context and circumstance, are stressed as the prophet is shown churning about in relentless movement — adapting, clashing, revis­ing, retrenching, threatening, pleading, promising. Yet one thread of argument runs through this Herachtean swirl of change. The only human power that transcends all circumstances, all nations and alliances, all em­pires and kings, is the power of repentance. It is this power alone that grants insight into history, for it is here shown as the force that shapes history. And behind all motions and changes is the voice of Jeremiah, whose book characteristically leaves us in the dark about where he spent his final days—a not untypical ending for prophetic cycles (consider Moses' unknown gravesite, Elijah's exit in a chariot of fire, Jonah's silent perplexity before a divine question). In Jeremiah's case the omission creates a sense of the prophet's freewheeling ubiquity "to root out, and to pull down, /and to destroy, and to throw down, /to build, and to plant" (1:10), which can now be seen as an emblem for the double opposition, between national and international calamity and between calamity and restoration, that informs the design of the book as a whole, and which defines the parameters of historical understanding within the Hebrew Bible at large.

Ezekiel

Ezekiel is simultaneously more homogeneous a composition than Jeremiah and more opaque about the origins of its components. As is the case with practically every other biblical book, there is widespread disagreement on Ezekiel's unity, authorship, and historicity ⁷. Nevertheless, a significant number of modern interpreters recognize throughout the distinctive stamp of an individual mind ⁸. The pervasive dominance of the "I" voice, the persistence of precise dates and of an almost purely sequential chronology, and the private, literate, and bookish manner of the language and idioms give the text much of the quality of a journal, with all the disjunction and heteroglossia that characterize journals. Otherwise we have few clues concerning the flesh-and-blood Ezekiel, though perhaps even fewer grounds for distrusting the book's own testimony.

Whether or not Ezekiel lived when and where he says,⁹ he was an astute observer of political events, possessing an extensive knowledge of geography, human commerce, priestly lore, and foreign literature and mythology. He was a philosopher of history of the first magnitude. What­ever its historical authenticity and claims to prophecy, the book is a remarkable fiction, most of all in its own purported context, anticipating in imaginative power and in boldness of allegorical vision the major works of Dante, Milton, and Blake, to cite three on whom Ezekiel's influence seems considerable.

It may be best to begin where Ezekiel himself begins, on 31 July, 593 все, along the banks of the Babylonian Chebar canal. There, according to the prophet's testimony, "the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God". The verses that follow (1:2-3) give the book's sole narrative reference to Ezekiel in the third person (24:14 occurs within quoted speech),¹⁰ and we may, with a wide consensus of premodern and modern commentators, choose to regard it as a gloss "In the fifth day of the month, which was the fifth year of King jehoiachm's captivity, The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar, and the hand of the Lord was there upon him". But to call it a gloss misses the point of its presence that someone in the book's internal tradition knew that the prophet's enigmatic formulation in 1:1—"in the thirtieth year"—meant the fifth year of the Captivity, that is, 593 все. Curiously, the dating system followed throughout the book—by Ezekiel himself, presumably—is that of 1:2-3, not of 1:1. The opening verse's "in the thirtieth year," if it is not a scribal error, is there for a reason. What, then, is meant by "the thirtieth year"? Of what? Why are obliqueness and ellipsis called for here? Why start with a different calendrical system and then withdraw it?

We may leave this question unanswered until the full trajectory of the book justifies the answer. We may also allow the text's details of the prophet's vision to speak for themselves, for the text addresses itself amply and uninhibitedly to the lineaments of the divine chariot-throne and its angelic bearers. Let us confine ourselves to two matters comprehended by the account that the apparition occurs outside the land of Israel (while, despite the reference to exile, the nation's sovereignty is intact and the Temple still stands), and that the word used for the divine presence is Kavod ("Glory"), the priestly term for a manifestation of the deity during the ongoing sacerdotal operations of the cult (see Lev 9:6, 23). The vision is here not, as is sometimes assumed, a proclamation or assurance that YHWH can manifest himself outside the land of Israel, for that possibility was taken for granted in ancient Israelite belief. Nor does it seem to announce a transplanting of the cult to foreign soil, since at the time of the vision the Jerusalem cult in fact still stood and would never, in the belief system of the priestly prophet, operate anywhere but Jerusalem (see chap 6). No, this quasi-cultic manifestation can be seen only as an ex­traordinary occurrence, one not welcomed by the prophet, and which we could call a state of emergency. Not until chapters 8-11 does it become fully clear that a presence of the Kavod in Babylon foretokens its removal from Jerusalem, and nowhere in chapters 1—7 does the prophet say—dare to say—that the punishment of Israel will entail the end of its chief site of worship. People might suffer, surely—about this Ezekiel is unhesitat­ingly precise "parents shall eat their children, and children shall eat their parents" (5:10 [at]). But his delicacy and restraint regarding the effects on the divine Glory itself are all the more striking, and they flow from the deepest and most sensitive taboo in the priestly tradition the inviolability of the sacred site par excellence, the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem sanctuary. Only a shocking and unprecedented change in Israel's historical situation could bring the unthinkable into the open, and when the prophet comes to describe the Glory's awesome departure, in 10:18—22 and 11:22-23, there is a mood of almost hypnotic calm in his words, as if the grounds for this event were by now self-evident. No wail of mourning, no height­ened expression whatever, accompanies the report. It is the book's first firmly unequivocal declaration that the national sovereignty has come to an end.

Much has been speculated on the prophet's psyche and personality, but, restricting ourselves to the plane of literary expression, we need note only that the book, at certain crucial junctures, stops distinctly short of revealing the prophet's feelings, despite its lush generosity in rendering divine pathos, and even despite its willingness otherwise to render the prophet's astonishment and dismay over things coming to pass. This radical subordination of the prophet's human feelings to divine intention is already implicit in the mode of address that prevails in divine speech throughout the book ben-'adam ("human being," literally, "son of Adam"), a term hierarchic in force, and one that accentuates the prophet's mortal, earthbound, and subservient status. It is implicit as well in the first symbolic act commanded of the prophet his eating of a scroll (or book) containing "lamentations, and mourning, and woe" (2:10, see 2:8-3:3), whose ingestion yields a taste "as sweet as honey". There is much that we could say about the semiotic subtleties inherent in this merger of the prophet with his message (or, given the contents of the scroll, with Jeremiah's), but let us focus on the paradoxical skewing of the affective domain described here that a scroll of woe tastes sweet (3:3), and that the prophet is instructed (2:8) not to disobey or balk at what is offered. It helps to explain why Ezekiel, unlike Jeremiah, is so inseparable from the

unfolding of his book, and yet simultaneously why he is so self-effacingly circumspect about his own feelings. He is not, as such, required to suppress his feelings, only to make their expression coextensive with what is writ­ten — to maintain a silence that is analogous to the silence of a text. The taste of honey thus signifies not a sensation of the prophet's tastebuds, still less his reaction to the inscribed woes — only a typically emblematic and allegorical affirmation of the objective "sweetness" of that most pre­cious commodity, obedience to divine imperative. This terrifying reign of objectivity in Israel's darkest hour sets the tone for the entire book, transcending all alleged sources and genres. As we shall see, the prophet's personal life is not irrelevant to the book's argument, but it gains its relevance and poignancy only as a sign within the argument—"for I have set thee for a sign unto the house of Israel" (12:6).

Our sense of paradox is compounded in chapter 3, where the prophet receives two diametrically opposed commands. He is first told that, as a watchman over Israel, he is personally responsible for the fate of his charges should he fail to warn one who is capable of repentance (3:17— 21). He is then told (3:22-27) that he is to keep silent and remain within his house "I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb". Several times further in the book (see 24:27, 29:21, 33:22), the prophet's dumbness is alluded to, and we must appreciate the puzzle in the fact that though prophetic messages flow aplenty through the prophet during his entire alleged period of silence, and even though we know that in fact the prophet does make public declarations during that time (indeed, is commanded to—see, for example, 14:6 and 20:3), some aspect of that ministry is held unrealized, is judged or ordained to be a type of muteness. Are we to assume that Ezekiel is incurring the penalty of a negligent watchman, or that YHWH is contriving to punish the very man he commands'. Or is this perhaps a way of saying that repentance is no longer possible—or, more pertinently, that the time ripest for repent­ance, the time when the watchman's call can be heard, has not yet arrived? Before the watchman can be heard, the heart must first be broken, the seal of sovereignty must be ripped away.

Understanding the book in this manner helps make clear much that is otherwise peculiar about its contents or design. It explains, for example, the overwhelmingly legal orientation of the book's doom oracles in a work otherwise so preoccupied with repentance, mercy, and restoration. Unlike Jeremiah's, Ezekiel's discourses commence not with pleas for turn­ing, but with pronouncements of punishment that may, somewhere far down the line, elicit a retrospective repentance. Virtually all of the dis­courses, however elaborate and however varied in theme, unfold in the same basic rhetorical pattern, constructed out of the words у a'an ("be­cause") and lakhen ("therefore") ¹¹. Expansions of this elegant structure are afforded by the many phrases that underscore the causal nexus thereby proclaimed between action and consequence: "and when they ask you why . . . you shall say . . . ," "for thus says the Lord God" "and now behold, I shall . . . ," and, above all, the most ubiquitous of the book's motivically repeated phrases, "and they [or you] shall know that I am the Lord." Only completion of the trajectory of promise and fulfillment can truly convince those capable of being saved where their true interests lie, and who YHWH is. Ezekiel is perhaps unique and unprecedented in its preoccupation with the conditions of repentance. No prophetic book has formulated the problem in such a nuanced manner. So many of Ezekiel's discourses in the first half of the book—before the destruction of Jerusa­lem—are retrospective visions: Israel's whole pre-Exilic history is repeat­edly reviewed, as if in a kind of premature postmortem. The house of Israel is given a hindsighted depiction of its life in the Land, which will make full sense only once the dire predictions come to pass and the people — their remnant—are sufficiently motivated to reflect backward and understand. This expository strategy helps explain why a number of the deity's anticipations of repentance among the populace are envisaged only after the punishment has run its course—and thus why the prophet's mouth is not yet fully opened:

Yet will I leave a remnant, that ye may have some that shall escape the sword among the nations, when ye shall be scattered through the countries. And they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations . . . and they shall lothe themselves for the evils which they have committed in all their abominations. And they shall know that I am the Lord, and that I have not said in vain that I would do this evil unto them. (6:8-10)

But did Ezekiel preach this, and if so, where?

There is some suggestion that Ezekiel was in regular contact with the elders among his own Exilic community in Babylon, and on numerous occasions was compelled to preach to them or to their constituents things they might not have liked to hear about the fate of their homeland (see 14:1-11 and 20:1-44). Any preaching "for Israel," that is, for the Land and its inhabitants, was just as relevant to the ears of his colleagues and compatriots in Babylon. This double applicability flows from the unique situation of the exiles of 598 б.с.е. Those deported with King Jehoiachin were not in exile in the fuller sense of the term that prevailed after 587, but were a kind of hostage community of leading citizens, who were apparently valued enough by at least some of the population who remained that their detention could be used to enforce the submission of the home populace to Nebuchadnezzar's political sway (see 2 Kings 24:10-17). In such a setting, eyes and ears among the exiles were, at least from 598 to 587, trained on the land of Israel and its fate, and all preaching to them was, literally or figuratively, a preaching to the land and to Jerusalem.

And for the time being (given what we know of Jeremiah's experience), the detainees alone, among the nation as a whole, could be in a position to hear or appreciate the prophet's message. Only they had the foretaste of exile; only they knew firsthand the might (or even, given their relatively lenient treatment, the "sweetness") of the Babylonian yoke. Given this anomalous audience, Ezekiel, unlike Amos, Isaiah, or the poetic Jeremiah, rarely surveys his contemporary Judean society with the detailed eye of the social commentator or of the anguished deity, for the historical setting in which such a survey would have force and cogency has passed away. It is not the trial but the moment of sentencing that most animates the prophet, and the post-sentencing search for perspective and insight over what has been lost. Curiously, Ezekiel's most expansive poetry, verses in the grand manner of his great predecessors, occurs not in the Israelite phase of his mission, but in his diatribe on foreign nations (which we must assume to have been spoken to his own countrymen), where he could be more uninhibited (though still retrospective) in his invective, and more certain of enlisting the agreement of his listeners.

This last matter brings us one step closer to understanding both the structure of the book and the special character of Ezekiel's symbolic discourses in the book's first half, especially the parables of Israelite his­tory. Both phenomena flow from the unique conditions of the first Exilic community, as we have seen. This group was torn by great dissension. The exiles had no way of knowing what would come about for them­selves, or how history would turn. A bad but eloquent prophet might easily be preferred to a good but blunt one. A priestly prophet was by heritage and training a conciliator, a consoler, a sealer of consensus. It was at times necessary for a blunt prophet, one with an adamantine brow such as Ezekiel's (see 2:9), to moderate or disguise his message for the ears of his less reflective constituents by fashioning a discourse difficult to pin down, addressed past the emotional multitudes to those who shared his concerns. Whence the riddle (hidah), the proverb (mashal), and the dirge (qinah), all of which are oblique discourses. This is not to say that Ezekiel was comfortable with the role of esoterist; indeed, he chafed under criti­cism by his contemporaries of his abstractness and indirection: "Ah, Lord God, they are saying of me, 'Is he not [j^ust] another maker of allegories?" (20:49). (Allegory, parable, and proverb are the same word in Hebrew, mashal). We may see more than dismay at persecution shaping this dis­couragement: the prophet is straining at the bit. For all their analogical brilliance, the parabolic addresses in chapters 13—24 seem crabbed and claustrophobic. Ezekiel is prevented from exercising his most cherished priestly mission, one for which his birth and schooling have most con­ditioned him to serve, as dispenser of absolution and consolation. For this his mouth is closed, his hands are tied. It is significant that just before his complaint about the ridicule of his allegories we encounter Ezekiel's mas­terful effort (in chap 20) at abandoning the mashal mode and expounding the nimshal, the thing analogized.

Such, at any rate, is what emerges from the scant biographical hints throughout the book's first half (chaps 1-24). The book's structure re­quires this interpretation, for the beginning and end of his so-called silence are very clearly marked in 3:24—27 he is told to keep silent until God is ready, in 24:25-27, at the close of his prophecies on Israel and just before his prophecies on the surrounding nations, he is told that when news comes of the city's fall, his mouth will be opened and he will no longer be dumb, in 33:21-22, at the close of his prophecies on the nations and the beginning of his prophecies of Israel's restoration, he records that "in the twelfth year of our captivity" (586 всЕ ) a survivor of the debacle came to announce that the city has fallen, and we are told that the prophet's mouth was hereby opened. It is not the quantity of biographical material that is significant, but its placement. Still, the progression would amount to but a dry formalism were it not for one further biographical detail placed just before the second of the three announcements noted above.

Also the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man behold I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down Sigh, but not aloud [rsv], make no mourning for the dead bind the tire of thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes upon thy feet, and cover not thy lips and eat not the bread of men. So I spake unto the people in the morning and at even my wife died, and I did in the morning as I was commanded.

And the people said unto me, Wilt thou not tell us what these things are to us, that thou doest so? Then I answered them, The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Speak to the house of Israel Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the excellence of your strength, the desire of your eyes, and that which your soul pitieth, and your sons and your daughters whom ye have left shall fall by the sword (24:15-21, see 24:22-27)

The stoic silence and lucidity of Ezekiel the man are here most aston­ishing — as is the grotesqueness of his didactic exchange with the people. (It is difficult here to imagine how this scene would have played with flesh-and-blood actors). This is the only place in the book where the prophet's domestic life is brought into view, and it rounds out our vision of the man in an unexpected way. Ezekiel is not, as his visions might lead us to expect, a shamanistic recluse, but rather a devoted family man. He is a full sharer in the sufferings allotted to his people. The death of his eye's delight, or desire, is now the text, an object lesson, as the adultery of a similarly precious companion had been for Hosea, and it must here serve as a sign of the precious city and Temple that will now fall. "Sigh, but not aloud" could be the watchword of the prophet's entire career, and no phrase better captures the raging torrent of emotions that must, as when Abraham had told Isaac, "God will provide himself a lamb, my son" (Gen 22 8 [ar]), remain unspoken. Paradoxically, Ezekiel's enforced muteness concerning his personal loss coincides thematically with the opening of his mouth concerning the nation's loss. The entire first half of the book is now revealed as the prehistory of a wider and more significant mission, to be unfolded in chapters 25-48, where we have the feeling that Ezekiel, whatever problems of expression might arise, is more in his element.

As noted earlier, the "nations" oracles are among Ezekiel's richest poetry, in a narrower sense of that term. Translators are accustomed to render most of Ezekiel in prose rather than in strophic format, but it is clear that much of what they have deemed prose is capable of being cast as verse. Yet even by the conventional reckoning, chapters 25-32 abound in verse, and here we find Ezekiel's masterful command of geography, commerce, and mythology. He pictures Tyre as a huge ship with Leba­non's cedars and Bashan's oaks for its planks and oars, the men of Zidon and Arvad at the helm and among the rowers, those of Persia, Lud, and Phut, and Arvad manning troops and towers, Javan, Tubal, and Meshech trading bronze for merchandise (27:5-13). "The heart of the seas" teems with mariners, pilots, caulkers, and merchantmen, while the king, having enclosed himself "in Eden the garden of God" (28:13), and encrusted with an abundance of gemstones as the symbols of his royal status, believes himself as wise as a god. Pharaoh, for his part, is seen as a dragon of the Nile whom God will hook by thejaw, and as a verdant world-tree, rooted in the waters of the deep, shelter of birds and nations, whom the hand of foreigners will now fell. The section moves logically, surveying the neigh­boring countries from the more provincial and proximate—Ammon, Edom, and Philistia (chap. 25) — to the more maritime and cosmopolitan Tyre (26: 1-28:23) and Egypt (29:1-32:32) We must here recall the oracle in which God has promised Ezekiel that from Jerusalem will go forth a fire that will consume in a progressively widening arc (3 4).

That the bulk of invective is reserved for Egypt and its maritime arm Tyre is no surprise, for Ezekiel, like Jeremiah, sees Egypt's duphcitous leading role in the abortive western cabal against Babylonia as the linchpin of Israel's troubles. This perspective helps account for Ezekiel's sense of Egypt as a place of depravity and vicious corruption. Unlike Jeremiah, Ezekiel spares Babylon from censure, a measure of his different vantage point, and, unlike in Jeremiah, the censure of nations occupies a midpoint rather than the finale of the book. At least one of the oracles (29:17-21) is dated after the book's final oracles—indeed, is the latest of the book's dates, 571 все —and it is doubly interesting for being the book's sole indicator that Ezekiel's prophecies on Tyre and Egypt were left unfulfilled. Whether this frankness emanated from Ezekiel or an editor is unclear (it is a decidedly Ezekiehan touch), but it has the effect of making 29:17—21 the centerpiece of the foreign oracles, and indeed of the entire book. Curiously, this lone contradictory oracle strengthens rather than weakens the force of what surrounds it, for we are thus notified that Ezekiel has left the realm of his normally astute political and historical wisdom and entered, true to his preferred mission, into the riskier realm of Utopian fantasy, magic, and myth — though myth here is a vehicle of satire and belittling, not yet the more earnest paradisiacal consciousness that will dominate chapters 40-48. We have here (especially at 28:12-19) what seems an older, more mythological prototype of the Garden story, not yet pressed into the cadences of homily and fable, but unequivocal in its rejection of false paradises. The motifs of cosmic centers that are promi­nent in these chapters throw into relief one glaring omission. The panorama embraces the two maritime powers flanking Israel but omits Israel, the geographic center. This omission sets the stage for the final use of cosmic-center imagery in chapter 47, where from the Temple threshold flows a river eastward to the Dead Sea, fostering teeming new life in its hitherto uninhabitable waters. But in this last image there is an instructive differ­ence, which we should now consider in the context of Ezekiel's restorative visions as a whole.

It has been customary to view chapters 33-48 as the third and final movement of the book, comprising in its broadest sense a body of re­demptive prophecies for Israel of an unprecedentedly radical, supernaturalist cast. This interpretation needs some qualification. First, a good deal of textual space is still allotted to prophecies of woe or admonition. If a redemption is coming to birth, its birth pangs are still considerable, even before Gog's appearance in chapter 38. Second, two contradictory attitudes toward the redemption seem to occur side by side. Оn the one hand, divine judgment of righteous and unrighteous in Israel and a general mood of conditional divine blessing continue even as the people's fortunes are restored (so, for example, 35:17-22 and 43: 11?), on the other hand, the people's perennial unrighteousness is no longer a stumbling block to their redemption — it is not for their sake that the God of Israel acts, but for his holy name (32 22-32, cf 37 23). Indeed, just as disaster was once necessary to create the conditions for repentance and soul-searching, now unmerited redemption is expected to do the same. We have, in a sense, been cut loose not only from our moorings in political facts and historical likeli­hoods, but from logic itself. We find the God of Israel sanctifying himself before a world audience in a setting that no longer bears the familiar earmarks of a world. From here on the representational powers of lan­uage, even allegorical language, break down. Myth, which came alive so palpably in the foreign oracles, is no longer serviceable, and what replaces it, whatever its origins and its outlandish lineaments, is not mythic — a type of gnosis, to be sure, but one mobilizing contradictory potentials in the prophet's imagination: a severe and solemn precision, on the one hand, as in the measuring out, down to the cubit and the hand-breadth, of the dimensions of the restored Temple (40: 5-44: 3), and at the same time an airy insubstantiahty about the whole, a kind of abstractness, going all the way back to chapter 33, that somehow seems related to the odd fact that Jerusalem's fall per se is unrepresented—it is signified only by an announcement from without (33:21-22). In this Exilic perspective, we are far from the ambience of Lamentations and the poetic Jeremiah. We find instead a baroquely artificial diction, a frenzy of labeling and cataloguing — a celebration, almost, of the naked functionality of language, somewhat analogous to our modern architectural style, rooted in Vladimir Tatlin, that allows pipes, tanks, and service scaffolds to play a role in a building's artistic form.

Yet there is no faltering here in the expository structure of the book. This dramatic shift in the role of language, while anticipated as far back as the opening chapters, is comprehensible solely in the light of the limi­tations imposed on the prophet in 24:15-17. Just as the city's cries cannot be heard, the prophet remains ever apart from his newfound freedom of pronouncement. We have, in the fullest sense, a "sigh, but not aloud".

For this reason, even the momentous miracles of chapters 37-39 have a kind of geometric starkness and paradoxically, which are further sus­tained in chapters 40—48. Though the bones of Israel are clothed with flesh and animated by the spirit, they remain nameless, faceless soldiers in the army of YHWH. Gog and his infamous hordes are slain in a mysterious conflagration that leaves the Land strewn with the invaders' corpses but also leaves the inhabitants strangely unscathed. The Land is purified, but only by suffering the grossest of defilements. The invaders are buried, but they are also carrion for birds and beasts. The Temple sanctuary is readied for the return of the Glory, but only after the deity himself, glutting the maw of chaos, offers "sacrifice" of flesh and drunkenness of blood to the scavenging animals (39:17-20). Later, the Land is allotted to the renewed tribes, but according to no known geographic or historical imperatives. Clearly, the world has been turned upside down, no familiar norms of mimetic representation or prophetic tradition now prevail, and the mythic language of chapters 28 and 31 now appears as the crudest kind of literalism, the language of the historically ephemeral. With his array of charts and blueprints, the prophet moves into uncharted domains for biblical tradition — the audacious textuality of a broadly architectonic allegory. It remains tantahzmgly uncertain whether it is the national or the personal loss that most guides him. Looked at one way, the book of Ezekiel is a silent tribute to his deceased wife, viewed in another way, it is an object lesson in which the prophet's personal tragedy is but a sign of larger events.

One further key to the meaning of the book's final chapters (40-48) is found, naturally enough, in the section's headnote the date "in the twenty-fifth year of our exile," namely in 573 все. Here, we may take a simple but important suggestion from medieval Jewish exegesis. As Rashi notes on ¹¹, the mysterious "thirtieth year" is that of Israel's final Jubilee cycle — one begun but not ended in the Land. Thirty years before the inaugural vision in 593 was 623 — the eve of Josiah's reform. Twenty-five years after that, in 598, King Jehoiachm was exiled. Twenty-five years after that was Ezekiel's Temple vision. Ezekiel's affinities with the Code of Holiness are well known, and in that document (quite comcidentally, in Lev. 25) the laws of Sabbatical and Jubilee are set forth. There (25: 9), the Jubilee is designated to begin on the Day of Atonement, that is, on the tenth day of the seventh (or New Year) month. The vision in Ezekiel 40-48 is likewise dated "in the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning [sic] of the year, on the tenth day of the month " (The number 25 likewise appears motivically throughout the Temple vision). In the Jubilee year, all land and property must revert to their original owners. Likewise, in the vision, the Land will return to Israel and to the protective aegis of Israel's God. It matters not whether the Jubilee reckoning (or even the Exilic reckoning in the headnote dates) was authentically Ezekiel's— it is part of the book's internal tradition, and it adds an extraordinary coherence to the reported events, setting Ezekiel's era in a vaster frame­work of history and metahistory. The Jubilee reckoning must remain unexplicit because, in the ritual-legal code of the priest, it is an ambiguous category a fifty-year sacred cycle that was uncompleted in the Land, begun but not ended by the Israelite inhabitants, transferred from the custody of priestly law to the redemptive designs of the self-sanctifying deity. If the more familiar contours of biblical (essentially, Deuteronomic) justice, of the human-centered cycles of reward and punishment, have fallen by the wayside and been replaced by a more apocalyptic causality, it is the extreme desperation of the era that has made it so. If Ezekiel, consummate journeyer of the spirit, has left behind the flesh-and-blood environment of Land and people, he may be forgiven by force of events that have left him triply bereaved. We may think of his book as a form of farewell to the household, priestly calling, and land he has known and loved. It is a form of silent sigh, and it had the benefit, perhaps unforeseen by Ezekiel, of nurturing within his fellow Israelites a concretely restorative hope.

NOTES

i For classic source analysis of Jeremiah, see especially Sigmund Mowmckel, Zur Composition des Buches Jeremiah (Knstiana [= Oslo], 1914) and Prophecy and Tradition (Oslo, 1946) On more recent trends, see Т R Hobbes, "Some Remarks on the Composition and Structure ofjeremiah," Catholic Bible Quarterly, 34 (1972), 257—275, reprinted in Leo G Perdue and Brian W Kovacs, eds , A Prophet to the

Nations Essays m Jeremiah Studies (Wmona Lake, 1984, henceforth cited as "Perdue and Kovacs"), pp 175-191

2 On the problem of poetry and prose m Jeremiah, see, m general, W McKane, "Relations between Poetry and Prose m Jeremiah, with Special Reference to Jeremiah ш 6-ii and xn 14-17," Vetus Testamentum, supp 32 (1981), 220-237 (reprinted m Perdue and Kovacs, pp 269-284), and note 4, below On the Jeremiamc authenticity of chapters 30-31, see John Bright, Jeremiah A New

Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible, XXI (Garden City, N Y , 1965), 284-287 On the authenticity of chapters 46-51, see Umberto Cas-suto, "The Prophecies ofjeremiah Concerning the Gentiles" [1917], m Biblical and Oriental Studies, vol I Bible, trans Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem, 1973), PP 178-226

3 James Muilenberg, "Jeremiah the Prophet," m The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, II (New York and Nashville, 1962), 824, col i

4 SeeJ Philip Hyatt, "Jeremiah and Deuteronomy," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, i (1942), 156-173 (reprinted m Perdue and Kovacs, pp 113-127), idem, "The Deuteronomic Edition ofjeremiah," m R С Beatty, J P Hyatt, and M К Spears, eds , Vanderbilt Studies m the Humanities (Nashville, 1951), PP 7i-95 (reprinted m Perdue and Kovacs, pp 247-267) Cf John Bright, "The Date of the Prose Sermons of Jeremiah, "Journal of Biblical Literature, 70 (1951), 15-35 (reprinted in Perdue and Kovacs, pp 193-212), especially Appendix A

5 See, for example, William L Holladay, "A Fresh Look at 'Source B' and 'Source C' m Jeremiah," Vetus Testamentum, 25 (1975), 394~4i² (reprinted m Perdue and Kovacs, pp 213-228), and sources reviewed there

6 See, for example, Bright, Jeremiah, pp Iv-lxxxv, especially Ivi-lxiu, idem, "The Date of the Prose Sermons," m Perdue and Kovacs, pp 198-199

7 For a summary of critical opinion on the book's composition, see Walther Zimmerh, Ezekiel i A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapters i-xxw (Philadelphia, 1979), pp 3-8, Brevard S Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (London and Philadelphia, 1979), pp 357-360

8 See, for example, Walther Eichrodt, Ezekiel A Commentary, trans Coss-lett Qum (Philadelp

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