Stopping the Pendulum in the Middle

The ideas I would like to propose here arise out of two

different sets of experiences. One of these is my own attempt to

incorporate the Israelite prophetic literature into an Old

Testament theology. Because my approach to that task involves

attaching texts to the portion of the story of Israel to which

they refer, and examining the way they contribute to the

development of the divine character, attention to both diachronic

and synchronic aspects of the prophetic literature is necessary.

The other experience is my encounter with the powerful work being

done on this literature by those currently reading through a lens

of pre-disaster/post-disaster or pre-trauma/post trauma tension.

I would cite the work of Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim,

using the language of disaster, and Kathleen O’Connor, using the

language of trauma as primary examples of this kind of work. All

of these interpreters use the language of survival in significant

ways to read and interpret the prophetic literature. In a more

specific manner, the recent work of Marvin Sweeney engages the

prophetic literature in similar ways as he attempts to read it

“after the Shoah.” So, my goal is to develop a way of reading

the prophetic literature that connects it to the other literature

of the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly the narrative books which

provide the shape for the canonical story,1 without which the

prophetic literature would be hopelessly cryptic, and to do so in

a context that is acutely aware of the challenges of speaking to

the experience of human pain. Our contemporary ways of

understanding the prophetic literature continually run up against

the same problem, however, and this is that neither synchronic

nor diachronic approaches alone can perform the task adequately.

Many interpreters have been recognizing this for some time now,

and have sought to use a combination of methods, but the result

still looks more like alternation than a synthetic approach that

allows the results produced by synchronic questions and

diachronic questions to speak to each other and work together.

If I can add one more additional challenge, it would be to ask

1 Megan Moore is correct that the prophetic literature provides additional details not found in the primary narrative of Genesis-Kings, and that the prophetic books provide insight into the “thought world” of Israel during these events, but these additions are only intelligible against the broad backdrop provided by the narrative books. See Megan Bishop Moore, “Writing Israel’s History Using Prophetic Books,” in Israel’s Prophets and Israel’s Past: Essays on the Relationship of Prophetic Texts and Israelite History in Honor of John H. Hayes, ed.Brad E. Kelle and Megan Bishop Moore (London: T & T Clark, 2006), 35.

whether we can develop a way of reading prophetic literature that

is manageable for non-specialist readers, including our students,

that gives attention both to the origin and development of

individual texts and to the ways that they fit into the final

forms of the scrolls.

The historical-critical approach to the study of the Bible

that dominated our field from the late nineteenth century to the

late twentieth century produced enormous accomplishments in

relation to the prophetic literature. In the face of centuries

of reading tradition, particularly within Christian contexts,

which tended to mine this literature for doctrinal proof-texts

and to spiritualize its claims, interpreters of this era drew

back the curtain on historical contexts in which the likes of

Isaiah, Amos, and Micah could become flesh and blood persons who

preached justice in a material world. As historical

reconstructions became more complex and hypothetical and as

detailed proposals concerning the history of composition

fragmented the prophetic books, these ways of reading receded,

but did not go away, and to dismiss them now is as misguided as

it is disrespectful. At the end of the twentieth century new

ways of reading emerged which gave much more attention to the

language of texts, both in terms of their rhetorical effect and

the literary character of the full, finished scrolls in which we

now find them. Audiences of these texts, in both oral and

written form, long ago and now, took on a central role as

speakers and writers faded into the background. This development

was exciting for many of us eager to ask questions like, “What is

the Book of Isaiah about?,” and a brilliant book like Edgar

Conrad’s Reading Isaiah was suddenly possible. This shift in

interpretive approaches fused nicely with Walter Brueggemann’s

initial offering in the The Prophetic Imagination and all of his

subsequent work that grew out of that book. The great prophetic

scrolls became literary worlds which offered an alternative

vision of the interaction of God and humanity within them.

While the move toward “synchronic” reading has been

enormously productive, it has left at least one great difficulty

unresolved, the one identified in the work of interpreters like

O’Connor, Stuhlman, Kim, and Sweeney. A straightforward

synchronic presentation of any of the four prophetic scrolls

produces a fairly simple set of ideas that may resemble a plot.

The Israelites became idolatrous and disobedient as the monarchy

progressed, YHWH became angry at this disobedience, and YHWH sent

prophets to warn them of pending punishment. Israel and Judah

ignored these prophets, so YHWH sent the Assyrian and Babylonian

armies in succession to punish them. After this punishment YHWH

offered the people of Judah hope for restoration if they would

return in obedient worship. How do we read such a story in a way

that does not blame the human victims of the brutality

perpetrated by advancing empires for their terrible fate? We can

start by recognizing that this skeletal plot comes nowhere near

telling the full story imbedded in the pages of the prophetic

literature. In her recent book on Jeremiah, O’Connor began by

reconstructing the stories of some of these victims during the

Babylonian invasion of 586. These stories are, in part,

fictional since the names and the details of events have been

invented, but they are certainly true in the sense that there

would have been people whose lives looked like this.2 Thus,

O’Connor puts a human face on the retributive transaction that

can look painless when only viewed from a high altitude like a

2 See Kathleen M. O’Connor, Jeremiah: Promise and Pain (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011),

pilot who has just dropped a bomb. She has put us on the ground,

named the victims, and forced us to look them in the eyes, thus

making certain that the question of suffering will not go away.

My proposal that careful attention to both synchronic and

diachronic sensibilities offers a way forward in this dilemma is

not new, but is still in its early stages, and ways of doing it

still need to be developed and refined. In the past, such mixing

of methods has frequently been frowned upon, but the status of

the interpretive questions I have sketched above is too urgent

for such boundaries. Diachronic reading reminds us well that the

prophetic characters were preachers in a certain time and place,

some in a pre-disaster or pre-trauma Israel. They saw real

injustice in the world and spoke against it, warning of the

consequences of a failure to repent. Synchronic reading reminds

us that the finished prophetic scrolls were composed in a post-

disaster setting, expressing the dismay and fragile hope of

survivors, but still incorporating the original messages of the

earlier prophets who are now depicted as literary characters,

textualized for continuing use.

One of the unfortunate by-products of the historical-

critical era was a romanticizing of the eighth century prophets,

making them the pinnacle in a scheme of decline that ended in the

disappearance of prophecy within the fog of second-temple

legalism. The results of this development roiled with anti-

Semitism and fed claims of Christian supercessionism, but it is

also important to point out where it went wrong methodologically,

so that we do not simply condemn the means for its end. The

very reason these early prophetic figures looked so compelling

was because of the literary artistry of the Persian-period

authors who composed the scrolls, presenting the characters we

call Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and Micah. Prophecy did not end, but

human prophets were replaced by textual ones presented by scribes

who defied us to look away from their portrayals. Perhaps we may

begin to realize that these writers provided a pathway, within

the scrolls, to read our way out of the dilemmas caused by the

pre-disaster/post-disaster tension. That way involves careful

attention to the elements of narrative in the scrolls of the

prophetic literature, including settings, characters, and events,

because it is these elements that connect the origins of these

scrolls with the finished products.

I would like to propose some examples of this reading path,

beginning with Isaiah. Each of these depends, to some extent, on

maintaining a clear distinction between the prophets as

historical figures in the past, whose words and actions provided

the beginning of a long tradition and the prophets as literary

characters in finished scrolls, the production of which marked a

transition toward prophecy as a textual experience. The

disappearance of the character named Isaiah son of Amoz at the

end of chapter thirty-nine of the book named for him is an

enduring feature of the book with which all interpreters have had

to contend. One of the most productive attempts to do this was

Conrad’s notion of a book within a book, the idea that the 6-39

core was placed within an outer book that unsealed and read the

inner book generations later.3 An aspect of this idea that needs

further development is the role of the central character in 40-

55, the servant of YHWH, in the full book of Isaiah. When the

character named Isaiah, who is occasional at best in 6-39, fully

3 Edgar Conrad, Reading Isaiah

disappears it is the servant who takes over and becomes the

literary character who connects contemporary readers back to a

previous era.

The book of Isaiah is filled with geographical references,

and the coming and going of all these place names can be a

bewildering experience, but perhaps a feeling of dislocation is

part of the goal of the book. Mary Mills has proposed that the

book of Isaiah operates in two worlds, “the world of everyday

political and social affairs and the world of the supernatural.”4

Thus, the settings of Isaiah are: 1) The great empires around

Jerusalem, both in terms of their political reality and their

mythical power, 2) Jerusalem, both as a city reeling from threat

and destruction and the visionary focal point of Israel’s

relationship with YHWH, and 3) the wasteland or wilderness, which

represents the distance between the Jerusalem of imagination and

the Jerusalem of reality.5 This third setting offers a space

that both Isaiah son of Amoz and the Servant of YHWH can occupy. 4

Mary E. Mills, Alterity, Pain, and Suffering in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (New York: T & T Clark, 2007), 60.5

I have borrowed this line from the musical artist Bruce Springsteen, who has said in interviews that the purpose of his music is “to measure the distance between the American dream and the American reality.”

While the idea that the Servant was Isaiah can be dismissed as

the correct historical answer to the question of identity, it may

be appropriate from a literary perspective to see the Servant as

a continuation of the character named Isaiah within the book.

The vague identity and lack of a name for the Servant may make

this way of reading easier. The life of Isaiah son of Amoz is

not nearly as entangled with his prophetic message as is Jeremiah

son of Hilkiah or Ezekiel son of Beeri, but there is some

combination of the two. Isaiah son of Amoz embodies his

proclamation by having and naming children and naming them

symbolically in Isaiah 7-8, and by disrobing for three years in

order to depict the taking of prisoners-of-war in 20:1-5. The

Servant as an extension of Isaiah takes this embodiment of the

prophetic message further by becoming the victim in the third and

fourth Servant Songs of the kind of injustice against which he

preaches in the first and second Songs.

Isaiah son of Amoz had presided over the miraculous

deliverance of Judah from the Assyrian aggression. The final

words of this character to king Hezekiah in 39:5-7 create

enormous tension in relation to the promises of eternal

protection for Zion offered in places like Isaiah 31:4-5. The

destruction of the Assyrian army in 37:36-38 seems to confirm

such claims, but Isaiah tells Hezekiah that such protection is

not permanent, even if Hezekiah decides to pretend that it is.

Isaiah son of Amoz then vanishes from our text without resolving

this tension, leaving it behind for the work of the servant of

YHWH, who begins his career as a teacher of justice and ends it

as a victim of injustice, managing in that process to redeem his

people. The audience of the final form of the scroll of Isaiah,

in the Persian period, is challenged to take this progression one

step further by identifying with the narrative character in the

book and becoming one of the “servants” portrayed first in Isaiah

54:17 and more fully in chapter 65.6

In relation to the scroll of Jeremiah, Carolyn Sharp has

posed decisive questions that clarify the problems inherent in

too many attempts to read the book, rejecting what she describes

as “the matter of pride when an interpreter manages to ply a

particular methodology, without faltering or admitting possible

6 On this way of understanding the appearance of the plural form, see Christopher R. Seitz, “Isaiah 40-66,” 316-318.

limitations of the method, through a great swath of biblical

material.”7 Near the end of her study of Jeremiah, she comes

back to the question of method, after identifying the competing

voices in the book, asserting that “It may not be in the

excavation of a single most important or unified meaning of the

text that the interpreter will discern the sense and the

coherence of the book of Jeremiah, but rather in attention to

differences and the charged spaces between them….”8 I think that

Sharp has observed some, but not all, of the benefit of paying

attention to the Jeremiah who is a literary character in the

book. Her portrayal of two groups in conflict within the book

establishes how each group uses the “call” of Jeremiah in 1:4-10

in different ways to promote their agenda.9 I would like to

start where an analysis like this stops, however, and ask what

kind of literary character is produced in a book that presses him

into service to articulate opposing points of view.

7 Carolyn J. Sharp, Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah: Struggles for Authority in the Deutero-Jeremianic Prose (London: T & T Clark, 2003), xv.8

Ibid., 167-168. 9

Ibid., 100.

About ten years ago, I was teaching my course on the

prophetic literature at Belmont. I had about a dozen juniors and

seniors in the room and we were working on the collection of

poems often called the Confessions of Jeremiah, spread throughout

chapters 11-20. I had guiding questions on the boar, and

students had been divided into groups to examine some of these

poems and report their findings back to the full class. We were

about halfway through that process when a student in the back of

the room suddenly yelled out, “Hey, Jeremiah was bipolar just

like me.” There was mostly awkward silence then, and a little

nervous laughter. I have no memory of what I said next, which is

fine because I am sure it was not memorable. It was a moment

like the book of Jeremiah – funny, painful, redemptive, and

convicting. Of course, we should be wary of psychoanalyzing

Jeremiah from five thousand miles and twenty-five hundred years

away, but I feel a need to take my student’s experience

seriously. The book of Jeremiah became a mirror to him in that

moment, in which he saw his own affliction clearly enough to

cause him to shout. If the literary character named Jeremiah

serves as the mouthpiece of multiple groups in conflict with one

another, how could he not look that way to my students when I

start pushing to read large portions of the book all together?

O’Connor has described the common understanding of the

composition process of the book of Jeremiah and has labeled it

“how the book became unreadable.”10 While she does not object to

the basic outlines of such a process, she is less concerned about

working out its details. In her words:

But I am not trying to figure out how the book came to be. I am trying to gain a glimpse of what the book might have meant for its early readers, survivors of the Babylonian disaster and their offspring, the ones who did not know if they would ever again be God’s chosen people. Using trauma and disaster studies, I want to ask how the book helps them survive. Its literary confusion contributesto that survival.11

This final statement and the approach to Jeremiah to which it

points are very much in alignment with my own approach to reading

Jeremiah and, in some ways, all of the prophetic scrolls, but I

am not as certain that the two questions at the beginning of that

statement, that is how the book came to be and how it affected

its first readers, can be separated. The first readers of the

10 Kathleen M. O’Connor, Jeremiah: Promise and Pain (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 29-30.11

Ibid., 30.

book of Jeremiah and the editors who compiled the book were

overlapping groups. Reading the book of Jeremiah after it was

finished was an act of survival, as O’Connor has demonstrated,

but forming the text was also an act of survival. Attempting to

understand the composers and to understand the first readers are

overlapping tasks that might contribute meaningfully to each

other. The instability of the text of Jeremiah, which seems to

have lasted into the period when the copies among the Dead Sea

Scrolls were produced, indicates that reading the book of

Jeremiah and putting it together were processes that occurred

together for a long time. We might even propose that the

reordering of the material in the Masoretic tradition was a

response to the reading of the vorlage of the Greek version that

found it unsatisfying.

It is stunning to go back and read the secondary literature

that was produced on the book of Ezekiel during the middle

decades of the twentieth century and see the confidence with

which so many interpreters wrote of a person who lived during the

early part of the sixth century BCE and kept a careful written

record of his daily activities that he eventually developed into

the book of Ezekiel. The result was an intense argument about

Ezekiel’s physical location and the location of his audience,

which ignored the literary development of a truly strange but

riveting character. The strange case of Edwin Broome’s 1946 JBL

article, called “Ezekiel’s Abnormal Personality,” may help to

illustrate this. The responses to Broome’s proposal were

vehement, almost as if he had called all of the prophet’s

interpreters “abnormal” too.12 For many of these interpreters,

careful form-critical analysis of independent units had obscured

the disturbing personal portrait that emerged from a collective

reading of the whole, but I am more concerned with the way this

literary character embodies a prophetic message with origins in

the early sixth century and an endpoint in a carefully written

scroll that addressed an Israelite audience in the Persian

period. The character named Ezekiel bound himself with cords and

lay on his side for hundreds of days at a time, was rendered mute

by the hand of YHWH, and had his wife, “the delight of his eyes,”

taken from him, after which he was forbidden to mourn. In these

12 Edwin C. Broome, “Ezekiel’s Abnormal Personality,” Journal of Biblical Literature 65 (1946), 277-292. See a more thorough description of this episode in David J. Halperin, Seeking Ezekiel : Text and Psychology (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 11-30

events Ezekiel becomes Israel, suffering because of it, with it,

and for it. His proclamations of judgment that fit pre-disaster

and mid-disaster situations of the early sixth century are

inflicted upon him, and this is what the readers of the book see.

When all of that is put together into a single life, it certainly

looks abnormal

These experiences provide the characters named Jeremiah and

Ezekiel the moral authority to begin negotiating a revised

understanding of sin and punishment. Both prophets address the

question of sin and responsibility, challenging the proverb that

the NRSV translates as “The parents have eaten sour grapes and

the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:29 and Ezekiel

18:2).13 Both of them have experienced suffering because of

their obedience to the commands of YHWH, not because of

disobedience, but neither of them gets all the way to the point

of disconnecting suffering from sin in their realignments

reflected in the rejection of the proverb. Ezekiel states it

13

There is some dispute about the translation of the second colon, specifically whether the effect on the teeth is an immediate one time effect (like the NRSV’s “set on edge”) or long term damage caused byt the repeated eating of unripe fruit. See the discussion in Bob Becking, Between Fear and Freedom: Essays on the Interpretation of Jeremiah 30-31 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 229-233.

most clearly in 18:5, “it is only the person who sins that shall

die.” Nevertheless, he does not insist that reward or punishment

is immediate, so that sinners may repent and the righteous may

become sinful (18:25-29), and ends the discussion with the divine

statement, “For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone”

(18:32). Such arduous efforts to renegotiate the retributive

equations of the past are fitting coming from the mouths of

prophets who proclaimed judgment on the wicked in pre-disaster

days, only to be afflicted with undeserved pain, who watched the

disaster unfold and saw the innocent suffer alongside the guilty,

and who survived as characters in works of literature to speak to

survivors of trauma struggling to understand what happened to

them and why and trying to decide whether it is worth another

try.

This approach becomes the most difficult with the Book of

the Twelve, but one of the advantages of reading it as a unified

work is the possibility of looking at a collective narrative

character and the events that shape that character’s life. The

named characters who appear prominently in narrative depictions

are Hosea, Amos, Jonah, and Haggai and, to a much lesser extent,

Habakkuk and Zechariah. Taken together, the appearance and

disappearance of this collective character is not unlike that of

Isaiah son of Amoz. All four of the major named aspects of this

collective character become entangled in their proclamation to

some extent, embodying their message like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and

Ezekiel, and the most obvious of these is Hosea. The divine

command to have children given to Isaiah, which was reversed by

the divine command not to marry and have children spoken to

Jeremiah and the symbolic death of Ezekiel’s wife, receives a

canonical rebirth, as it were, in the character of Hosea. The

arrival of his three children into the story is not all good

news, however, as these three siblings are assigned, without

their consent, to carry horrible names, which point toward the

defeat and destruction of Israel. Ronald Troxel has offered an

approach to reading the prophetic literature that is focused

specifically on scribal activity, and specifically states that

this way of reading should be “used alongside others.”14 In his

reading of the book of Hosea, Troxel contends that readers should

“use the integration of Hosea’s family life with the threats and

14 Ronald L. Troxel, Prophetic Literature: From Oracles to Books (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), ix.

hopes as a lens through which to read the book as a whole.”15

His discussion of Hosea 1-3, however, is placed at the end of his

chapter on Hosea, and it is not clear how he has done this in the

preceding analysis of 4-14, which focuses primarily on the

composition process. The odd character called Jonah, whose book

seems such a misfit in this collection, now serves an important

purpose by revitalizing a sense of places, persons, and events in

the midst of other components of the twelve that are mostly

detached oracles. I confess to having given this guy a hard time

in the past, and I may not be finished, but reading this way has

led me to a position of greater sympathy for him. The torment of

Jonah’s experience, including his attempt to keep silent,

connects him with Jeremiah and Ezekiel. He has to watch his

enemy prosper, while his own life becomes one of exile into the

wilderness.

When it comes to the Restoration period the Book of the

Twelve offers a tremendous opportunity because some portions of

this prophetic scroll address the restoration of Judah in the

15

Ibid., 35.

Persian period in the most direct language found within the

prophetic literature. The other three prophetic scrolls all

address the restoration crisis, but they do so in a way that does

not put clear names and faces on the response to this set of

events. One reason this may be true is because the books called

Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel wish to retain close connections to

the characters for whom the books were named, so they speak

furtively of the Restoration period. The Book of the Twelve has

a unique advantage because its parts are developed under twelve

different names, allowing prophets like Haggai and Zechariah to

live and work openly in the Persian period, which, in turn, gives

them an opportunity to clarify the proclamation of the prophetic

literature about this period. These two would appear to be the

most ardent champions of a reconstituted Davidic monarchy,

embodied in Zerubabel, but like the citizens of a restored Yehud

they do not see these hopes realized and are left navigating the

complexities of internal community conflict in a Persian

province.

A focus on the prophets as literary characters in the

finished scrolls is an important part of the process of shedding

the traditional claim that prophecy stopped in Israel. How could

it have stopped when Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos, and

more continued to speak through these scrolls? The question to

ask and answer is not why prophecy stopped but why, at some

point, the Israelite prophets were replaced by textualized

versions of themselves. William Doan and Terry Giles have given

some attention to this issue in their discussion of performance

criticism. Most significantly they have pointed to the

transformation of the “prophetic actor” into the “prophetic

character” by the scribe. They assert that the scrolls do not

present the deaths of the prophets because this keeps the

characters alive and under the control of the scribes, who

appropriate the prophets in the presence of their reading

audiences.16 I am not so certain that the scribes succeeded in

gaining this control, however. The later appearance of works

like The Martyrdom of Isaiah and The Lives of the Prophets indicate an

ongoing interest in the biographical details about the prophets

not included in the scrolls, particularly the deaths and burials

16 William Doan and Terry Giles, Prophets Performance, and Power: Performance Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (London: T & T Clark, 2005), 23-24.

of the prophets. Still, the notion is there that the development

of prophetic characters is central to what the scrolls are doing.

Keeping the prophets grounded in their stories and the story

of Israel may provide a better way for non-specialist readers to

avoid detaching individual texts. The worst mis-readings of the

prophetic literature come from the process of lifting individual

pieces out of the renegotiation process embodied in the full,

finished scrolls. Perhaps the most humorous of these is the

appearance of a product called “Ezekiel 4:9 Bread” produced by

the Food for Life Baking Company and sold in many health food

stores. This bread contains all of the ingredients listed in

4:9, but, of course, it ignores the cooking instructions in 4:11-

15. More significantly it ignores the fact that the production

and eating of this bread is part of a pantomime of punishment

performed by Ezekiel. This is the food of captivity forced upon

a prisoner. Even worse, the odd mixture of ingredients may be

describing bread prepared from the discarded leftovers of others.

As an embodiment of a captive Israel, Ezekiel is compelled by God

to eat food made from trash, cooked on a fire made from

excrement.

We celebrated yesterday the thirty-fifth anniversary of

Walter Brueggemann’s ground-breaking work, The Prophetic Imagination.

If the task of the prophetic scrolls is to construct an imaginary

world that resists the injustices, false claims, and power

structures of the world we live in outside the text then the

interpretive process must be a continual renegotiating of

theological claims that models itself after the process exhibited

by that imaginary world, lest a static text become co-opted by

the powers of the world that the scrolls resist. Bringing

reading approaches together must make possible the observation of

the contexts and processes that made it necessary and possible to

recast existing forms of the prophetic traditions in order to

address new circumstances. At some point it became impossible to

physically change the scrolls any longer, and the re-writing that

took place with re-reading had to be placed in other textual

vehicles. Nevertheless the renegotiating of theological claims

did not stop, and the fixed text contained within the scrolls

themselves offer models for how to conduct this renegotiation.

Marvin A. Sweeney, “Foundations for a Jewish Theology of the

Hebrew Bible” Prophets in Dialogue” in Jewish Bible Theology:

Perspectives and Case Studies, ed. Isaac Kalimi (Winona Lake, IN:

Eisenbrauns, 2012), 161-186.

Section on Latter Prophets 177-185

p. 179 “Although Isaiah’s perspective finds agreement in the

books of Ezra-Nehemiah, which portray the reestablishment of a

Temple-based Jewish community in Jerusalem under Persian rule as

the fulfillment of the great prophet’s vision, Isaiah’s prophetic

colleagues are hardly so accommodating. Jeremiah is a case in

point.”

“In general, however, diachronic critical treatment contends that

Jeremiah calls the Temple into question as a source for national

security, sharply criticizes the house of David, and says little

about the restoration of Jerusalem.”

“As interpreters begin to consider the synchronic literary

dimensions of the book, additional issues come to light. One is

the issue of intertextuality, particularly with regard to

Jeremiah’s relationship with the book of Isaiah.”