A Critical Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book of Jeremiah, its historical background, distinctive literary character, language of trauma and resilience, dominant ideologies, and the state of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Jeremian scholarship. It concludes with an explanation of the goals and structure of the Handbook. Like the ancient book and the prophetic persona, the interpretation of Jeremiah has also been fractured and at times conflictual. Certain recent schools of Jeremiah scholarship explore new spaces for reading the ancient text that reconfigure, redeploy, and move beyond conventional interpretations, while others concentrate on historical issues, examining variant manuscripts and comparative Near Eastern texts. Until now, these divergent schools of thought have worked in relative isolation. This Handbook, the introductory chapter notes, seeks to bridge the gap between the current scholarly debate. It recognizes the importance of both post-historical and hermeneutic interpretive perspectives and ancient contextual approaches. It engages historical methodologies as well as literary and situated readings. This essay suggests that it is an opportune moment, within the frame of a single, field-encompassing volume, for a synthetic anthology that encourages the fruits of these disparate technical subfields to be gathered in order to nourish the field as a whole. Jeremiah, prose and poetry, trauma, Deuteronomistic History, methodology, SBL, Writing/Reading Jeremiah, biblical studies