A Mouth Full of Fire

The Word of God in the Words of Jeremiah

Andrew G. Shead, D. A. Carson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830884155
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

"I am putting my words as a fire in your mouth; these people are tinder and it will consume them." (Jeremiah 5: 14)In the book of Jeremiah, not only is the vocabulary of "word" and "words" uniquely prevalent, but formulae marking divine speech also play an unprecedented role in giving the book's final form its narrative and theological shape. Indeed, "the word of the Lord" is arguably the main character, and a theology that is both distinctive and powerful can be seen to emerge from the unfolding narrative.In this stimulating study, Andrew Shead examines Jeremiah's use of word language; the prophet's formation as an embodiment of the word of God; his covenant preaching and the crisis it precipitates concerning the recognition of true prophecy; and, in the "oracles of hope, " how the power of the word of God is finally made manifest.Shead then brings this reading of Jeremiah to bear on some issues in contemporary theology, including the problem of divine agency and the doctrine of Scripture, and concludes by engaging Jeremiah's doctrine of the Word of God in conversation with Karl Barth. The prophet's major contribution emerges from his careful differentiation of "word" and "words."Addressing key issues in biblical theology, the works comprising New Studies in Biblical Theology are creative attempts to help Christians better understand their Bibles. The NSBT series is edited by D. A. Carson, aiming to simultaneously instruct and to edify, to interact with current scholarship and to point the way ahead.

Chapter One

Word and words in Jeremiah

What makes Jeremiah, of all books, so well suited to being read for its theology of the word of God? If we can answer this question we shall have cleared the ground and shall be ready to begin the theological reading I have proposed. The next task will then be to begin that reading by getting the lie of the land, as it were, both thematically (in this chapter) and structurally (in the next chapter). This will mean examining the rather sophisticated way in which Jeremiah speaks about the word of the LORD.1 And it will mean sketching out the structure and flow of thought of the book of Jeremiah when conceived of as a narrative about the word of God.

The suitability of Jeremiah as a source for word theology

The book’s heading

Jeremiah’s distinctive theology of the word of God – its ‘word theology’, in shorthand – begins to show itself in the book’s opening verses, where we find two subjects introduced: the words of Jeremiah (v. 1) and the word of the LORD (v. 2). The way these two subjects are related to one another is important, and deserves careful examination:

The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, one of the priests living in Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin, being the word of the LORD that came to him [’ăšer hāyâ dĕbar-yhwh ’ēlâw] in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah son of Amon, king of Judah.

The opening of verse 2 contains some unusual syntax, and in the four other places in Jeremiah where this atypical expression is found (Jer. 14:1; 46:1; 47:1; 49:34), it clearly functions as a new sentence, as in the TNIV/NIV: ‘The word of the LORD came to him’. But here in Jeremiah 1:2 it is in the wrong place to be a new sentence, because the relative particle ’ăšer does not act as an absolute beginning (as it does in 14:1), but rather subordinates what follows to verse 1. As a result, versions like the ESV/RSV have made it a relative clause: ‘to whom the word of the LORD came’. However, this solution also has its problems, as it wrongly makes Jeremiah the focus of the verse. The referent of the relative particle ’ăšer is not Jeremiah, but the words of Jeremiah, as the Septuagint version suggests.2

In my judgment verse 2 is not an opening after the atypical pattern of Jeremiah 14:1, but rather follows the pattern of one of the most common headings used throughout the book, such as at Jeremiah 1:4: ‘the word of the LORD came to me’ (wayĕhî dĕbar-yhwh). It has lost its normal shape, however, because it has been attached to another heading in verse 1, giving the book a double title. In other words, two titles have been joined into one, and the second title has been altered so as to prevent it from being read as a second and subsequent statement. These are two different ways of saying the same thing.

We may conclude that the double title of the book is making a close identification between two things: the words of Jeremiah, and the word of God that came to him.3 At one level this is not a difficult idea, and a phrase such as ‘Hearing the Word of God in the words of Isaiah’ can be used with no further qualification.4 And yet, Jeremiah challenges us to take a closer look. What precisely does it mean to identify the words, plural, of Jeremiah with the word, singular, of God? Does this restrict the word of God in this book to the words of Jeremiah, so that only those things Jeremiah said count as the word of God? On the contrary, the sense is quite different: verse 1 implies that every word in the book that follows is one of the words of Jeremiah, whether Jeremiah is reported as having said it or not. This implication is borne out by the addition in the Masoretic version of an inclusio to bind together the material between Jeremiah 1:1 (‘The words of Jeremiah’) and Jeremiah 51:64 (‘The words of Jeremiah end here’). This clearly demarcates the limits of the words of Jeremiah, embracing the entire book except for its final chapter, a version of 2 Kings 25.5

‘The word of the LORD’ in verse 2, as we shall see, means the message from God, and so we are being told that Jeremiah’s words – that is, the words contained in the book of Jeremiah – make up this message. But how closely is this message tied to the words of Jeremiah? Was Jeremiah free to express the message he received from God in any words he liked, or is there an exact form of words that count as the word of God? Most of us read Jeremiah in translation, and in replacing Jeremiah’s words with English equivalents inevitably something of the original meaning will be lost or altered. For Muslims this would be unacceptable, and the Qur’an cannot be translated. But for Christians the Bible is translatable. So what is it about Jeremiah’s words that make them count as the word of God? Is it their divine origin? Is it their particular content? Is it the person who says them?

Whatever the answers to these questions – and we shall return to them – Jeremiah unmistakeably draws our attention to the theology of the word of God at the very outset.

The prevalence of the word of God in the book of Jeremiah

Jeremiah abounds in ‘word of the LORD’ language, more so than in any other book. This abundance takes three main forms: a general affinity for word vocabulary, the prominent use of markers of direct speech, and a frequent emphasizing of divine speech.

First, the vocabulary of word and words is used more liberally in Jeremiah than in any other major Old Testament book.6 In the rest of the Old Testament we can identify a second tier of word-heavy writings consisting of Deuteronomy – which is a major source for Jeremiah’s language and theology – and books with significant Deuteronomic influence.7

Secondly, Jeremiah is replete with formulas that mark and give formal structure to direct speech, mostly the speech of God. The three most important formulas are used to introduce poetic oracles, narrative episodes and major book divisions respectively. The first of these formulas is usually labelled the Messenger Formula; the latter two are variously labelled, but because I shall be referring to them often I have given them informal labels: the Narrative Formula and the Disjunctive Heading, respectively.

• The most well known of these formulas is the phrase ‘Thus says the LORD’. Its label, the Messenger Formula, is somewhat misleading since it is not always used by messengers; it is a simple formula to mark a citation of another’s words.8 It is used to introduce prophetic oracles, in both poetry and prose, as well as the interpretation of symbolic actions. It is quite strikingly abundant, being found 155 times in Jeremiah, which is more often than the rest of the Old Testament books combined.9
• The principal Narrative Formula is the phrase ‘The word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, saying’ or, if Jeremiah is the speaker, ‘The word of the LORD came to me, saying’.10 This phrase is used to introduce new episodes within the main storyline of the narrative,11 and it occurs some 23 times in Jeremiah. Ezekiel uses it twice as often, but it occurs almost nowhere else in the Old Testament.
• Perhaps the most important of these formulas is ‘the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD’; I shall call this the Disjunctive Heading.12 It is not a sentence proper but a heading that stands over a divine word or a narrative leading up to a divine word. It is completely unique to Jeremiah, and marks a major break, or disjunction, in the narrative. Its function is to link the material it introduces into the overarching narrative framework of the book.13

We shall return to these formulas, especially the Disjunctive Headings, in our next chapter, because they have been used to structure the final form of the book. As Mark Biddle has argued, they ‘subsume entire discourses under the heading of YHWH speech’ and ultimately convert what were once oracles, sermons and narratives addressed to a range of audiences into a single written message from the LORD.14

Thirdly, the expression usually translated ‘declares the LORD’, or ‘oracle of the LORD’ (nĕ’um yhwh) deserves separate mention. It has no structuring significance, but simply adds emphasis to a divine word. And once again it is strikingly preponderant in Jeremiah: with 167 uses Jeremiah accounts for over 60% of all cases of this expression in the Bible.15 There is another reason for noting this third feature of the book’s word language, and that is the fact that many of the structural formulas mentioned above are associated with a later stage in the composition of the book; they are more frequent in the MT edition than in the earlier edition which underlies the Septuagint (the LXXV); and their Deuteronomic flavour is pronounced. It might be possible to conclude from this that Jeremiah’s word theology was a late development, not native to the prophet’s thought. However, the prominence of the expression ‘declares the LORD’ in every level and stage of the book suggests that this is not the case. We might say that the book’s interest in the word of God grew along with the book itself, but this growth was nothing more than the continuation of an interest central to the book from the beginning. This point will become increasingly clear as we examine more of the book in later chapters.

Let me summarize this welter of statistics. The book of Jeremiah, even more so than its spiritual parent Deuteronomy, is rich in the language of word and words. And when it comes to expressions referring to the speech of God, Jeremiah is unparalleled in the richness and diversity of its language. What is more, this language is not randomly scattered throughout, but serves two main functions. It pro...