The Historical Jeremiah

Abstract

Jeremiah scholars are generally cautious in drawing assumptions about the historical reliability of the material found in the book of Jeremiah. Yet the sources within the book possess literary patterns that provide oblique information to create a broad-stroke outline of what was known and remembered about the prophet himself. Approached with an eye to cultural memory, three features of the Book of Jeremiah provide ways to recover some dimensions of the historical prophet: the rhetorical shape of chapters 1–25 (in both the MT and LXX traditions), the book’s points of contact between the Levites and the Deuteronomistic tradition, and the unique characterization of scribes and scribalism within the book in relation to oracles ascribed to Jeremiah. These avenues of inquiry enable us to cautiously arrive at a tentative understanding of the Jeremiah of history.