Review in: Interpretation
2005 59: 412
Review door:
Kathleen M. O'ConnorGevonden op: http://int.sagepub.com/content/59/4/412.full.pdf+html
Jeremiah
21-36: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
by Jack R. Lundbom The Anchor Bible 21B. Doubleday, New York, 2004.
649 pp. $68.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-385-41113-8.
Jeremiah
37-52: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
by Jack R. Lundbom The Anchor Bible 21C. Doubleday, New York, 2004.
624 pp. $68.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-385-51160-4.
JACK LUNDBOM, ALONG WITH Phyllis Trible and Walter
Brueggemann, was a student of James Muilenburg, the eloquent articulator of
rhetorical-criticism for biblical studies. Lundbom is a well-known practitioner
of rhetorical-criticism and a highly regarded interpreter of the book of
Jeremiah. The publication of the second and third volumes of his Anchor Bible
commentary concludes a massive labor of love on his part and marks a welcome
addition to Jeremiah studies. For biblical scholars and teachers, these works
are treasure troves of information, exposition, and interpretation relating to
Jeremiah's ferocious book. For pastors seeking help with sermon preparation or
theological reflection, I am not so sure.
The
difficulties lie in the format of the Anchor Bible Series that presses heavily
upon matters of text, translation, history, and interpretive problems. Lundbom
imparts vast amounts of information about these in lucid prose on each portion
of the text. He is highly appreciative of Jeremiah's rhetoric in its linguistic
creativity, multiple genres, metaphors, and persuasive claims. The books can
serve ministers well by laying the groundwork for theological and hermeneutical
reflection, but they are theologically thin and require readers to integrate
the material from the commentary's multiple sections themselves.
The two new volumes do not stand alone
but need to be read in conversation with the "Introduction" to the
first volume (Jeremiah 1-20,1999, 55-151). There Lundbom lays out the
rhetorical-critical method and discusses other critical questions of canon,
divergences between the Hebrew and Greek versions of Jeremiah, relationships
between poetry and prose, division of the book into literary units, historical
settings of the book, and the life and ministry of the prophet Jeremiah. This
first volume is worth acquiring for its clear, detailed exposition of
rhetorical criticism (pp. 68-101). Lundbom teaches readers how to decide genre
and boundaries of texts and how to discover structural elements and the
"configuration of their component parts" (p. 72). By discovering the
text's effects, he shows how to identify the text's claims upon readers and
makes it possible for readers to do similar work themselves.
The
commentaries follow a four-part division: "Translation" of the
section of the text under consideration, "Rhetoric and Composition,"
"Notes," and "Message and Audience." Lundbom's translation
for each volume appears in continuous form at the front of the book and is
repeated section by section in the commentary. He captures the cadences and
heated imagery of Jeremiah's poetry. His word order, faithful to the Hebrew, is
often surprisingly effective in English.
By
far the most original contribution of these commentaries appears in the
"Rhetoric and Composition" section where Lundbom applies
rhetorical-criticism with fulsome, scrupulous detail. He uncovers how the text
creates its power, musicality, and rushing force. In the process, he names
structural features from a variety of perspectives and represents them in graphs.
For example, on Jeremiah's narrative polemic against emigres to Egypt (Jer
44:1-30), Lundbom divides the text in half according to the chapter's two
superscriptions and further divides the two parts on the basis of Hebrew
grammatical markings of closing and opening that coincide with genre divisions
(poetic oracles or narrative). With a second graph, he presents structuring
elements such as repeated syntactic structures, key words, and repeated
vocabulary. Finally, he divides the chapter in yet another way on the
chronological basis of past, present, and future. These accumulating literary
features reveal a text that speaks of evil in the past, present, and future.
With refreshing new insight arising from his literary work,
Lundbom calls into question standard assumptions of Jeremiah studies. First, he
disputes the view that the more complex Hebrew version, by contrast to the
leaner Septuagint translation, is not the result of scribal errors and
additions. The expansive Hebrew text of Jer 44, for example, indicates
"vigorous discourse, something akin to the music of an organist who ends a
grand performance by pulling out all the stops" (Jeremiah 37-52, p.
155). Such is Lundbom's sense of the literature's power. Second, Lundbom
challenges the long-held assumption that Jeremiah comprises three or more
pre-existing literary documents combined in haphazard fashion. From his close
literary readings, he concludes that a far more inventive literary process
takes place in this book than a rough editorial patching would allow.
"Notes"
on text and translation are amazingly thorough. They attend to deviations
between the Septuagint and the Hebrew translations and offer detailed
information about place names, unfamiliar terms, and cross references to texts biblical
and otherwise, ancient and modern. For example, Lundbom includes a lengthy
accounting of the double spelling in Jeremiah of the Babylonian emperor's name,
Nebuchadrezzar and Nebuchadnezzar.
Although the analytic divisions of
Lundbom's commentary are deeply erudite and clearly written, I find little
integration among its various levels of analysis. The "Message and
Audience" sections are the most disappointing throughout the two volumes.
I expected to find in them a synthesis of material so far discussed or a
highlighting of central themes and images, culminating in theological questions
or reflections on meaning in the passage or in relation to the whole book.
Instead, these entries generally paraphrase the text almost in a pre-critical
fashion, as if one could successfully interpret the text at face value.
Paraphrases of the text's "message" generally make little or no
reference to the preceding analysis and leave readers to assimilate the various
sections of the work on their own.
By "message," Lundbom typically means a
straightforward retelling of the passage. By "audience," he means the
groups in the population named in the text under study rather than the
"implied audience" of the book itself. Sometimes the audience is the
whole community, or kings, or priests, or in Jer 44, the expatriots in Egypt
with whom Jeremiah is immensely angry. But what are the text's claims upon the
readers? How might passages have functioned for the audience of the book? Why,
for example, is Jer 44 preserved and included in this part of the book and not
elsewhere in the redaction? How does it contribute to the life of Judeans and
to larger biblical theology that it should be preserved at all? In commenting
on the new covenant passage (31:31), however, Lundbom finds apt and startling
analogies between the text and the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and between
other texts and words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther's, and struggles
in present day Palestine.
Among contemporary interpreters, "historical reliability"
of the accounts of Jeremiah's life and words are a subject of deep controversy.
Lundbom concludes the "Message and Audience" sections by dating
passages on the basis of the general history of the period. An appendix at the
end of Jeremiah 37-52 lists important dates of the period. Lundbom is no
historical literalist; he recognizes the difficulty of making an
"historically precise reconstruction" from some of the narrative
material (p. 51). Nonetheless, he trusts the text more than I do, particularly
in his presentation of Jeremiah's life. The large amount of
"biographical" information about Jeremiah may be recorded simply to
keep the details of his memory alive, but it is likely that the portrayal of
his life has further symbolic purposes to address the situation of a people
devastated by the Babylonian invasions.
Most of the twelve appendices to the commentary are of great
help to general readers of the Bible: conversion tables of weights, measures,
and distances; extensive lists of differences between the Hebrew and Greek
versions; names and dates of archaeological periods; and even the names of the
months in the Jewish calendar, plus a glossary of rhetorical terms. Also
important are two excurses, "The New Covenant in the literature of
Judaism, including Qumran" and "The New Covenant in the New Testament
and Patristic literature to A. D. 325" (Jeremiah 21-36). Although
fine descriptive histories of theological interpretation, these two excurses
stop short of implicating modern Christians in anti-Semitism on the basis of
the new covenant interpretation.
I think Lundbom's commentary is too trusting of historical
information, and wish it were more attentive to critical theological questions,
and more integrative of its own information. However, I will use these
reference books often and with gratitude for the depth and breadth of their
scholarship on nearly everything concerning Jeremiah.
Kathleen M. O'Connor
COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
DECATUR, GEORGIA
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