Professor Joseph M. Henderson unpacks the history, research and journey that became Jeremiah Under the Shadow of Duhm, a book that examines how the work of Bernhard Duhm has dominated Jeremiah scholarship and outlines ways forward that examine Jeremiah's dramatic style and narrative progression.
How do you think your book could be described – in just one sentence?
My book is a reconsideration of the foundational assumption of modern Jeremiah scholarship: that the poetic form of individual passages from the book indicate that they are authentic: that is, derived from the prophet and thus useful as evidence for reconstructing his life or thought.
What drew you to researching Jeremiah?
I found the book to be a profoundly moving work of literature. I was drawn in by the tragic story of Jeremiah, who had hoped to avert the judgment of his people, becoming an agent of their destruction and the greater tragedy that Jeremiah’s story reflects: the story of Yahweh bringing destruction on his beloved people.
What led you to focus in particular on Bernard Duhm’s scholarship?
When I turned from reading the book of Jeremiah to reading scholarly accounts of the book, I was surprised to see how often scholars missed the story it told and what a slight perception they had of its portrayal of its central characters, particularly the character of Yahweh. I found that this was often because they were using the poetic sections of the book as isolated pieces of historical evidence to create alternative stories of the prophet (reconstructed biographies) and using the contrast between the poetry and prose to contribute to another story (the decline of prophecy into scribal legalism). They routinely used Yahweh’s poetic speeches as evidence of Jeremiah’s psychology and Yahweh’s prose speeches as evidence of the theologies or political agendas of various exilic or post-exilic schools or parties. It was not hard to trace this way of using the book to Duhm’s 1901 commentary on Jeremiah, which was the first account of the book that was wholly built on the assumption that the division between poetic speeches and prose speeches represents a division between authentic and inauthentic historical evidence.
Are there any new insights that you realised while writing your book?
My primary discovery had to do with the source of Duhm’s way of understanding poetry and prophecy and the alternative biography of Jeremiah and alternative history of Israel’s religion he built on his understanding. Although the influence of several currents of nineteenth-century thought are evident in his work, the most pervasive is Romanticism: Duhm’s work is characterized by Romantic literary values, Romantic conceptions of literary production, Romantic biographical narratives, Romantic historiography, and Romantic hermeneutics. My most surprising discovery was finding how each of these were rooted in novel account of the poetry in the prophetic books. They were all adumbrated in book best known for its discovery of principles of Hebrew poetry and its presence in the prophetic books: Robert Lowth’s 1752 Lectures of the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. I was fascinated to see how Lowth’s understanding of prophecy and poetry set the course for both Romanticism and modern Biblical scholarship and how these recombined in Duhm’s commentary on Jeremiah.
What do you hope this volume will contribute towards Jeremiah focused Biblical scholarship?
In the almost thirty years since I started my work on Jeremiah, I’ve been encouraged and helped by the new works of many scholars who’ve attempted to “move beyond” Duhm’s approach to approaches attuned to the coherence and aim of the whole book. However, most of these works are straightjacketed by their inability to relinquish Duhm’s foundational assumption, often treating the poetic speeches as bits of biographical evidence and the prose speeches as parts of a secondary redactional frame. It’s my hope that exposing the dubious roots of Duhm’s assumption and showing its unwelcome fruits will enable scholars to leave it behind and liberate them to pursue fresh readings of the book alive to its dramatic portrayals and stories.
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