1. A Word on Redaction Criticism
The book of Jeremiah has been the subject of intense redaction-critical scrutiny, especially since Bernhard Duhmâs ground-breaking commentary from the beginning of the 20th century. This is unsurprising, given the wide scale of genres and diverging theological outlooks sitting side by side in this book. In addition, the Septuagint represents an edition considerably shorter than the canonical Masoretic text. Moreover, in chapter 36, the book itself offers a narrative that implies that the current version evolved throughout successive stages of completion. So, for a long time, an increasing number of scholars tended to subscribe to the view that this prophetical book arose from an extended history of growth which can be recovered to a certain degree by redaction criticism.
But for quite a while now, redaction criticism has been given a bad name in certain quarters of our discipline. Many biblical scholars, while not denying the composite nature of most of our biblical books, seem to consider diachronic agnosticism a token of a superior level of methodological awareness. Redaction-critical studies are written off as being based on too flimsy evidence, and producing an ever-mounting number of mutually exclusive theories that are unable to garner widespread support, which is why the approach should better be abandoned altogether. However, as far as the book of Jeremiah is concerned, it is interesting to note that a defense of redaction criticism has recently seen the light of day in a rather unlikely place, namely, in a collection of papers explicitly devoted to post-modern readings of the book. Taking a cue from âideological criticism, rhetorical criticism, and postcolonial theoryâ Carolyn J. Sharp undertakes to âgesture toward a reconfigured notion of redaction criticism that responds to absence, erasure, and rewriting in Jeremiah.â The aim of such an enterprise is âto take account of the irresolvable dynamics of foreignness that animate redacted biblical texts such as Jeremiah.â Therefore, redaction criticism is not a line of research that scholars are free to disregard at whim; on the contrary, it âis essential [âŠ] for persuasive negotiation of the multiple moments of interrogation and âresistant tracesâ that shape the book of Jeremiah.â Ultimately, following Sharp, redaction criticism is a necessary requirement for complying with the demands of âhermeneutical ethics,â because it prevents contemporary interpreters from being âcomplicit in dynamics of marginalization.â What used to be dismissed as a baseless intellectual gamble is suddenly championed as a pressing moral duty.
It is fascinating to see how Sharpâs plea is taken up by A. R. Pete Diamond and Louis Stulman in their introductory summary of the essays in Jeremiah (Dis)Placed. In their initial âassessment of the current guild,â they echo the usual prejudice against redaction-critical efforts. On pages 3 to 4, they gaze deeply into the poor traumatized soul of the historical-critical scholar:
In the encounter with the scroll of Jeremiah, the guild has been traumatized by inconcinnity. To manage such textual trauma recourse was taken to historicist tools focused on textual genetics rather than poetics. Schooled in the assumptions of modernity, the guild has sought to overcome the scroll by abandoning it. And thus in the process created a reader who must either create a biographical figure around whom to rehabilitate coherence for the disparate traditions or create a compositional biography which renders inconcinnity invisible by reading serialized Jeremiahs prior to the congealed scroll in its traumatizing form.
In doing so, historicist methods have created a type of reader ill equipped to handle aberrant textuality â that is, one alien to modernityâs aesthetic imagination. The scroll has become an open wound that wounds in return.
Rather than rigorously interrogate the adequacy of its aesthetic imagination, the guild, all too often, continues production of increasingly complex and intricate compositional hypotheses often lacking methodological common sense and theoretical clarity.
A reader emerges incapable of imagining ideological complexity and artistic cunning. Instead, this reader atomizes the scroll, dissolves it in the search for procrustean coherence. The resulting compositional portrait offers an illusion of historical precision and detail founded upon unverifiable speculation; profoundly unstable, such hypotheses are capable of multiple subjective reconfigurations based upon too many unknowns. The available data are just too thin.
Two pages further on, Diamond and Stulman recapitulate Sharpâs paper as follows:
Rather than abandon the Redaction Critical reader, Sharp seeks to reconstruct it via ideological criticism and rhetorical criticism through the lens of post-colonial theory. [âŠ] She grants the Redaction Critical readerâs vision of ideological diversity and conflict. Reading hidden authors and the clash of voices founded in party politics remains a central task. But then Sharp reconfigures the process of evaluating those voices by appeal to post-colonial concepts of the foreigner, of hybridity and of resistance in the face of imperial, monological domination. [âŠ] For Sharp, the reader must honor the hybridity of the resultant redacted scroll by not privileging any one redacted voice over another. Thus emerges a type of ethically motivated reader who refuses complicity in the politics of domination and marginalization.
In a collection of papers, the task of the introductory essay is not to criticize the contributors but to present an overview of what the volume offers the reader. So it is in line with common practice that Diamond and Stulman avoid commenting on Sharpâs position openly. But if we were to share their judgment on diachronic theories, we would have to reject Sharpâs point entirely. The available dataâto borrow a phrase from Diamond and Stulman, used in the above quotationâare unlikely to have grown any thicker within the brief moment it takes to peruse those two pages. Hence, we would have to conclude that Sharpâs endeavor was doomed from the outset for its sheer lack of methodological feasibility, regardless of the ethical merits of her struggle against the âdynamics of marginalizationâ operative in Biblical texts. Anyway, it should be clear that the viability of an approach does not depend on the nobility (or lack of thereof) of the cause pursued by the scholar, but instead on the availability of data and criteria. Or else the problem of method would transmogrify into a mere matter of labeling: as soon as you could guise your scholarly endeavor in the garb of an august concern or a fashionable theory, you could dispense with worries about facts.
In what follows, I will discuss a methodological issue of the redaction criticism of the book of Jeremiah. In so doing, I side with Sharp in maintaining that diachronic studies in the OT are viableâto a reasonable degree of course, as with all kinds of investigations affecting our subject. On the other hand, I see no need to resort to high-flying theoretical constructsâas for instance postcolonial theoryâin order to bolster my enterprise. I take the position of the autonomous reader, who identifies problems and seeks solutions appealing to his mind, while refusing to be lectured on how his imagination is somehow not up to the task, in contradistinction to other readers who confidently celebrate the superiority of their own theoretical stance. I take mere curiosity about the driving forces behind these developments as sufficient justification for trying to clarify the processes involved. In fact, even though fundamental doubts regarding the practicability of diachronic inquiry ha...
