Jeremiah

Pain And Promise

Kathleen M. O'Connor

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780800620400
• eBook ISBN: 9781451412291
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

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Imagining Lives

Historical Context

A disaster is marked by what it takes away. It takes away nearly everything. The nation of Judah underwent a series of unfolding disasters in the sixth century B.C.E. The Babylonian Empire (centered in present day Iraq) invaded Judah three times, occupied it for close to fifty years, and with each invasion deported some of the nation’s leading citizens to Babylon. These events brought Judah to the brink of extinction, a point long embraced by Jeremiah’s interpreters.

Imagining Little Stories of Disaster

To set the background for the book of Jeremiah, I want to imagine what it might have been like to live in Jerusalem when the mighty Babylonian Empire breached the city walls of Jerusalem, Judah’s capital city. But before presenting Judah’s larger historical narrative, I begin by inventing small stories of families living in Jerusalem during the second invasion (587 B.C.E.). I take the drastic step of inventing lives because I think Shoshana Felman is correct when she writes: “So much historical coverage of history functions to empty it from its horror.”¹ Felman means that the writing of history usually eliminates human suffering—the blood, the pain, and the horrors—from its reports about the past. Too often it dehumanizes victims and overlooks the horrible consequences of events for real people.²

Historians, of course, are properly cautious not to overstate what the evidence allows them to report. Yet the suffering depicted in biblical texts arising from the Babylonian Period contrasts sharply with most modern historical accounts of the time.³ From the point of view of trauma and disaster studies, the “facts” simply do not convey the full tragedy that accompanied Babylonian aggression.⁴ This prompts me to wonder what stories victims of this disaster might tell if they had been in my class?

With apologies to Gary Herion, who writes about the “Great” and “Little” traditions of monarchic Israel,⁵ I want to enter into the great events of Judah’s history by way of small ones, by telling little stories of families rather than of nations. I am encouraged to do so by the book of Jeremiah itself, because it also speaks about the massive historical disaster through little stories about the prophet, stories that seem to gather up elements of the whole thing. Perhaps by imagining the human toll of the Babylonian assault upon Judah, these stories may help readers experience the vibrant power of Jeremiah’s beautiful, difficult words.

Because such stories do not exist in any of our historical sources, I have to make them up. But fiction, too, can be a mode of truth-telling. It can help us think and feel our way into lives of others on a more human scale than some historical reports. Since life in ancient Judah centered upon the extended families and upon community rather than individuals, my four stories of violence and survival are situated within family households.

The Asher ben Jacob Family

When the Babylonian army broke through the fortified walls surrounding Jerusalem, the siege of the city had been going on for nearly two years. Hoped-for help from Egypt or from anywhere else has not arrived. News recently reached the city that outlying towns to the south were no longer returning signals to the Judean army, so the Babylonian forces were turning their full attention to Jerusalem. For their whole lives, Asher ben Jacob’s family had lived in a two-room house, built adjacent to one of the walls of the city that were to protect it from attack.

Noises of troop movements and battle preparations disturbed the days and nights in the neighborhood. The Babylonian army was building siege ramps up to the wall of the high-perched city with less and less opposition from the demoralized and exhausted Judean army. But the noise was growing more deafening. Babylonian soldiers were using battering rams to pound against the city wall a short distance from Asher’s home.

On this summer day in July 587,⁶ Asher did not return from his duties as a guard outside the king’s palace. Asher’s wife, Peninah, was in the house with their five children, Asher’s mother, and two female cousins. With no sign of Asher or any other male relative in sight, the women and children faced the army’s onslaught alone. Loud crashing sounds near the wall and fearful screams of neighbors filled Peninah with paralyzing fear. The Babylonians must have breached the wall because soldiers were pouring into the street, and no Judean defenders were in sight. With the help of her two cousins, she gathered, grabbed, and pushed her five children and mother-in-law out the door and down a path toward her father’s house a short distance away.

When they got there, her father’s household was in chaos. The women and her elderly father were throwing pieces of fruit and grain into a burlap sack, along with a cooking pot. Everyone was shouting at once. Their intent was to run for their lives. Babylonian soldiers with spears and swords were shouting in a foreign language and bashing down doors at the far end of her father’s street. Soldiers were invading homes in search of men who might resist them, of booty, and, Peninah knew, of women to rape. She ran with members of both households as they scrambled down back alleyways and through neighbors’ gardens, trying to stay together and keep track of her children. Terrified neighbors crushed upon them, and an elderly aunt fell in the crowded melee. They lost her in the rush, and Peninah soon lost track of her two oldest children among the throngs of people also running to escape the soldiers. Shrieks and confusion built as the stampeding crowd grew larger.

The two youngest children, an infant and a toddler, had been screaming but eventually grew quiet from fear and weakness as they made their way out of the city. None of her immediate family had eaten much since the Babylonians made camp outside the city nearly two years earlier, but in the past weeks the food was cut off completely. Throughout the siege, Asher had been able to supply them with bits of fruit and grain from the palace, but three days earlier he had come home empty-handed. Food was scarce even in the king’s household. On the road out of the city, Penninah’s family tried to stay together. Eventually they made their way north with a stream of refugees to the city of Mizpah in Benjamin. Perhaps it would be safer there, even though they had no family to take them in. Perhaps there would be food, shelter, and less violence.

Asher never rejoined his family. Although he was only a soldier—neither royalty nor priesthood—he was a strong man and a potential resister. When Babylonian soldiers captured him, they executed him on the spot, though Peninah and the family would never know what happened to him, nor to her aunt or her two oldest children.

The Micah ben Nahor Family

Less fortunate than Peninah, Deborah, wife of Micah, lived in another small house near the market stalls outside the temple where she sold fruit for a rich farmer. Her husband had been killed in the first siege of Jerusalem ten years earlier and two of her sons had been taken away by the king’s men to serve in the army. Now Babylonian soldiers surrounded the temple. They set it on fire along with the outbuildings and small businesses around it. Deborah escaped the burning neighborhood with four children and some neighbors and found a temporary hiding place in a shed for animals at the large estate that belonged to a wealthy, influential family. They were hiding there only a few hours when Babylonian soldiers came to the big house and began dragging out the occupants. Deborah and the children had to flee again. A good distance away they found refuge in a small cave in a hillside where other people were also hiding, including a few more of her stunned neighbors.

When the city grew quiet some days later, she and three others slipped out in search of food. As they surveyed the ruined streets, they feared further violence from bands of Babylonian soldiers guarding the city, but hunger—the children’s and their own—forced them forward. What they found was a landscape of destruction. Streets were unrecognizable, filled with stony rubble from destroyed buildings. Corpses of citizens lay unburied, and animals and birds seemed to have disappeared completely. They began searching for food in the half-standing buildings, desperate for anything to bring back to feed the children. They met others also ransacking empty, half-destroyed buildings for food or for valuables to trade. Deborah became obsessively focused on accumulating whatever she could carry.

She and a few companions hobbled back to the cave and managed to hide with their children for several weeks, making forays into the devastated streets only late at night. When the turmoil in the city began to diminish, some of the cave dwellers set out in search of a place to live. They came to the house of the wealthy family where Deborah and her children had first hidden and found it empty except for a few old indentured servants who now lived in the big house. With some of their loot, they were able to bribe the servants for fruit from the scraggly trees in the garden and for shelter in the shed now empty of animals.

Deborah’s children were hungry all the time. Her two young sons went to gather wood and her daughter to draw water from a nearby well, but other Judeans were demanding payment for these basics of survival. Rumors reached them daily of girls being raped and of young men being rounded up and forced to grind grain or carry wood and water. Three of Deborah’s children watched as soldiers hung two Judean princes by their hands.⁷ Her youngest son and her daughter now sat in the corner. They stopped speaking. Life was a misery and survival a daily challenge. She could not pray, nor even weep. Nothing made any sense.

The Noach ben Amoz Family

Noach and his extended family used to live in the big house where Deborah, her children, and their new companions came to find shelter. Noach was a “servant” of the king, a highly placed officer in charge of the treasury and an overseer of tax collections. Although his position afforded his family many privileges and a wealthy way of life, he greatly disliked what it required of him. Palace intrigues made his situation precarious and left him guarded and suspicious of everyone around him. And he had to extract taxes from the people. His neighbors hated him for the strenuous collection tactics he oversaw in the city, as greater and greater amounts of their harvests, their animals, and their treasure were demanded or taken forcibly from them.

For decades, the Judean kings were compelled to pay increasingly high tribute, first to Assyria, then Egypt, and now to Babylon. According to one of Noach’s fellow court officers, the king’s decision to stop paying tribute probably precipitated the invasions by the Babylonian army to attack them in the first place. But the people and the land had already been wrung dry under the tax system.

Now Noach, his wife Abigail, their four teenage sons, three younger daughters, two elderly parents, and numerous cousins were being herded off with other families of the king’s officers and priests who had survived the invasion. Babylonian soldiers treated them like cattle. They cut off their hair, stripped some of them, shackled them together, and forced them to march, while they insulted them and threatened them with whips. They had not gone far when Noach’s father fell, and a soldier killed him for hindering the march. The walking was strenuous and, even for the most able-bodied, the physical discomfort was enormous and the shame beyond bearing. These once-powerful families, along with some of the king’s relatives and friends, were being marched around the Fertile Crescent to Babylon, where, if they survived, they would be sent to labor in the fields or to work in the cities. Survival seemed unlikely.

The Eli ben Levi Family

Among the deportees was a priest named Eli and his family. Eli was relieved that some of his priestly brothers seemed to have eluded the soldiers, or at least he hoped that was what their absence meant. But he was devastated by the violence he had witnessed. He felt as if he were going crazy. Even though he had long expected the triumph of the invaders over the rabble that was left to defend Jerusalem, he could not beli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Wounds without Words
• 1. Imagining Lives: Historical Context
• 2. Hearts of Stone: Disasters and Their Effects
• 3. A Relentless Quest for Meaning: The Book of Jeremiah
• 4. A Family Comes Undone: The Metaphor of a Broken Family
• 5. Fragmented Memories of Trauma: The War Poems
• 6. If Only Tears were Possible: The Weeping Poems
• 7. Telling a Life: Biographical Stories
• 8. Survive by Praying: The Confessions
• 9. Encoding Catastrophe: The Sermons
• 10. Rekindling Hope: The Little Book of Consolation
• 11. Running Out of Strength: Endings
• 12. Confusion as Meaning-Making: The Composition of the Book
• Epilogue: A Work of Hope and Resilience
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Scriptural Passages
• Index of Names and Subjects