Review in: Theology 1998 101: 371
Review door: Robert P. CarrollGevonden op: http://tjx.sagepub.com/content/101/803/371.full.pdf+html
A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile
and Homecoming,
Walter
Brueggemann (Eerdmans 1998), xiv + 502 pp, £19.99 pbk
This
is a one-volume version of Brueggemann's two-volume commentary on Jeremiah
published in the International Theological Commentary series as To Pluck Up,
To Tear Down: A Commentary on the Book of Jeremiah 1-25 (Eerdmans/The
Handsel Press: Grand Rapids/Edinburgh, 1988) and To Build, To Plant: A
Commentary on Jeremiah 26-52 (Eerdmans/The Handsel Press, 1991), with an additional
seven-page introduction on 'Recent Jeremiah Study'. That said, it must also be
said that it is good to see Brueggemann's middle-brow, middle-order,
middle-price work on Jeremiah appear as a one-volume work. Brueggemann eschews
the rigorous historicist approaches of the big guns on Jeremiah (Holladay and
McKane) in favour of a theological reading of the book which will serve ecclesiastical
readers. Brueggemann is well informed on the scholarly discussion about Jeremiah
and builds on the vexed debates of current Jeremiah studies to develop his own
take on the book of Jeremiah as 'a constructive proposal of reality that
is powered by passionate conviction and that is voiced in cunning,
albeit disjunctive artistic form' (p. ix, Brueggemann's emphases). For
Brueggemann the book of Jeremiah 'is a rich and open field for venturesome
interpretation', but it is not so open as to be endlessly indeterminate. Over
against the recent tendency for some scholars to argue for ideological readings
of Jeremiah which Brueggemann sees as a negative tool for reading, he offers
his own positive reading of the book as canonical (ideological and canonical
are two sides of the same coin for him).
Having
written a pair of appreciative reviews of the two volumes when they first
appeared (SOTS Book List 1990: pp. 52-3; 1993: p. 56), I would only wish
to add here my pleasure at having to hand a smart one-volume paperback of
Brueggemann's commentary on Jeremiah. It forms a nice balance to the much more
philologically orientated work of Holladay and McKane and will provide readers who
are interested in a theological reading of the book of Jeremiah with such a
corrective to what has at times been missing in those erudite works.
Robert P. Carroll
University of Glasgow
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