The Theology of Jeremiah

The Book, the Man, the Message

John Goldingay

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830855285
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

How do we think about the theology of the book of Jeremiah? Do we consider themes section by section, or do we step back and look at the whole? John Goldingay says "both."In The Theology of Jeremiah, Goldingay considers the prophet Jeremiah himself, his individual circumstances and those of Judah, and his message. Though Jeremiah's message varies throughout the book, we gain insights into Jeremiah's theology by viewing the book in its entirety. In doing so, we learn about God, Israel as the people of God, the nature of wrongdoing and prophecy, and what we know about the future.

CHAPTER ONE

THE MAN AND THE SCROLL

THEY SAY YOU NEED a gripping first sentence if you want to get people’s attention. I’m not sure that the first sentence of the scroll counts:

The words of Jeremiah ben Hilkiah, one of the priests of Anathoth in the Benjamin region, to whom Yahweh’s word came in the days of Josiah ben Amon King of Judah in the thirteenth year of his reign, and came in the days of Jehoiakim ben Josiah King of Judah, until the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah ben Josiah King of Judah, until Jerusalem’s exile in the fifth month. (Jer 1:1-3)

Whether or not it’s gripping, it does tell us something about the man and the times and the scroll’s origins.

JEREMIAH THE MAN

Jeremiah came from a priestly family in Anathoth, a small town three miles north of Jerusalem (the name survives as the name of a Palestinian town called Anata). Different priestly families were based in different towns—they were thus able to look after their land and livestock there and make their livelihood; the priests would go to Jerusalem when it was their turn to be on duty in the temple. They might also engage in teaching and counseling in their home area and be on duty at the local shrine when there was one. When Jeremiah lived in Anathoth he was within easy commuting distance of Jerusalem.

He calls himself a young man when God commissions him as a prophet (Jer 1:6), so maybe he hadn’t reached the age to be a priest himself (thirty according to Numbers 4). And by the time he was old enough, for a variety of reasons the question might not arise. But he was someone well schooled in proper Israelite faith, and maybe his priestly father and his mother get a fair amount of the credit. He came from the kind of family that John the Baptizer would come from: Hilkiah and his wife were like Zechariah and Elizabeth.

On the other hand, although Anathoth was near Jerusalem, it was outside Judah in the region belonging to Benjamin. So Jeremiah would be a bit like someone from out of state living in Texas or California, or someone from England living in Scotland. He might not be viewed as really belonging and he might not feel he really belonged. Yet these dynamics were evidently complicated, as the scroll indicates that there was tension between Jeremiah and the people in Anathoth itself.

That first sentence (Jer 1:1-3) tells us that the scroll will comprise “the words of Jeremiah,” which also express “Yahweh’s word.” The plural words points toward Jeremiah’s addressing of a range of issues in different situations. The Jeremiah scroll is the longest book in the Bible apart from Psalms, and it speaks in different ways in different contexts. Is Yahweh going to impose terrible redress on Judah, or is he going to restore and bless Judah? Does Yahweh totally dismiss the temple and its worship, or does he affirm the temple and its worship as aspects of the ongoing life of Israel? Is Judah’s devastation inevitable, or can it be obviated if people turn back to Yahweh? The Jeremiah scroll gives both sorts of answers to such questions in different contexts. But the singular word points toward there being a coherence and unity about the “words.” They are all aspects of one “word.”

There’s another bit of complementarity. They are Jeremiah’s words but they are Yahweh’s word. Yahweh is the name of God in the First Testament, a bit like the way Jesus is the name of Christ in the New Testament. Most English translations replace the name Yahweh with the expression “the LORD” (they use capital letters so you can see what they are doing). But in Jeremiah, for instance, it’s often important that Jeremiah is talking about Yahweh being the real God; someone like Marduk is not the real God. So I use the name Yahweh when Jeremiah does. Jeremiah’s words were all concrete expressions of Yahweh’s one word.

That word “came to” Jeremiah. Literally, it “happened” to him. Jeremiah uses the same expression when he declares that “Yahweh’s word came to me” (Jer 1:4), and it recurs often in the scroll. In some ways, Yahweh’s word coming to him could be like another human being speaking to him, like hearing a voice behind him. Presumably the words were not literally audible; nobody else would have heard them, otherwise it might have been easier to convince people that it really was God speaking. But Jeremiah knew the message was coming to him. Even when he formulated the words, he didn’t make up the message. It was Yahweh who gave him his overall perspective on Judah, his awareness that Yahweh was going to bring disaster to it because of its rebellion, and his conviction that in due course Yahweh would restore his people. And it was Yahweh who was behind his individual messages.

THE LIFE AND THE TIMES

There’s a further subtlety to that introduction (Jer 1:1-3). While the Jeremiah scroll comprises the word of Yahweh, the words of Jeremiah, it incorporates many stories about Jeremiah, even bits of narrative in which Jeremiah doesn’t appear, and prayers that Jeremiah prays that Yahweh sometimes rejects. Yahweh’s word is bigger than simply a series of prophecies. The message is expressed in prophecies, stories, prayers, and protests.

Jeremiah’s life as well as his words express his message. In a sense that’s true about every servant of God, but it’s true of Jeremiah in a way that’s unique, until it becomes even more true of Jesus. Jesus is going to be an embodiment of God’s gracefulness and truthfulness; Jeremiah is already an embodiment of them. He keeps being faithful to God’s commission and he keeps embodying God’s faithfulness to his own people. His life is also an expression of the message in a way that’s not so voluntary, in that the negative way people treat Jeremiah is the negative way they are treating God.

The scroll includes examples of Jeremiah’s prayers and protests to God, and in a modern Western context they are the aspect of the scroll that especially appeals to people. Reading Jeremiah’s prayers and protests is like reading his spiritual journal. But the prayers and protests are in the scroll because they are part of “Yahweh’s word.” They reflect how the community is resisting Yahweh’s message. They face us with what can go on between us and God as we are people who resist what God has to say to us. In this respect, too, the Jeremiah scroll parallels the Jesus story. We like to think that we identify with Jeremiah and with Jesus, or at least with Jeremiah’s disciples and the Gospel writers. Actually, we are wise to see ourselves as more like the people who oppose Jeremiah and oppose Jesus.

The introduction to the scroll indicates how Jeremiah lived and worked over a number of decades in a tumultuous time. Northern Israel (Ephraim) had been overrun by the Assyrians a century before, so “Israel” now more or less comprised only “Judah,” occupying an area that was for practical purposes smaller than Rhode Island. It centered on Jerusalem, and Jeremiah could speak of “Judah” and “Jerusalem” as if they are almost the same thing. The scroll’s introduction mentions Josiah, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah, the three long-lasting kings of Judah between 640 and 587 (there were two others in between, Jehoahaz and Jehoiachin, who reigned for only three months each, but the introduction ignores them).

• Josiah came to the throne at a time when Judah had long been a fringe part of the Assyrian empire, but when Assyria was in decline and a power vacuum was developing in the Middle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: The Man, the Scroll, the Story, the Messages
• Part 2: The Theology of the Jeremiah Scroll
• Further Reading
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for The Theology of Jeremiah
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright