Jeremiah 26-52

Previous critical and theological treatments of the prophets have been selective readings. Interpreters have been able to name the prophets as ethical giants only because they have focused on some parts of the prophetic message at the expense of others.. The dominant paradigm has been identified (usually unconsciously) with the perspective of the male prophet and of the male God that these books describe.79

To remedy such distortions, it would be far from adequate simply to include data on ancient female leaders and scribes, though I commend that work wherever it is done: the regular erasure of women's agency and cultural contributions in ancient Israel and Judah is a profound failure of historical scholarship that must be remedied wherever possible in scholarship generally, not just in the work of feminists. Nor is it enough to cite a prominent feminist scholar here and there. That would be a low bar indeed, though sadly, it constitutes a level of engagement with feminist intellectual history that is still not met by most traditional commentaries. The challenges pressed by feminist epistemologies must be engaged more fully here, across the multifarious forms and discourses of Jeremiah. Stulman urges that interpreters "read Jeremiah as art-i.e., as a disjointed, atonal, and polyvalent artistic expression of the wreckage of war, embedded with hope," going on to ask, "What kind of epistemological matrix is appropriate? How might reading strategies shift?"80 I agree with Stulman's position and underline the urgency of his query. I would amplify his term "war" to include the ceaseless warfare pressed by oppressive institutions, traditions, and discourses against women, men who perform masculinity in non-normative ways, queer persons, gender-nonconforming persons, and others marginalized by cis-heteropatriarchal norms. Stulman asks what epistemological matrices and reading strategies might be needed. Here is my answer.

This feminist commentary on Jer 26-52 will unfold with attention to the methodological convictions articulated below and attendant consequences in my practices of translation, interpretation, and writing. Explaining these in a transparent fashion leaves me open to critique from traditional scholars who insist that historical criticism can indeed be neutral and objective. I would respond that it is not scholarly-not wissenschaftlich-to ignore the operations of gender and power as those are expressed and suppressed in ancient texts and in interpretive engagements with those texts. It is not scholarly to leave unanalyzed the cultural misogyny underlying prophetic metaphors of sexualized shaming. It is not wissenschaftlich to observe that most scribes in the ancient Near East were males and leave the matter at that, without examining the powerful effects of that gendered social location on the narrativization of ancient Israel's history; nor to remark the metaphorization of Judah's theological and political center, Jerusalem, as "Daughter Zion" without analyzing the many effects of that metaphor; nor to pass in silence over the Latter Prophets' pervasive framing of political pragmatism and interreligious engagement as "adultery" and "whoredom." In the current climate of the academic guild, where norms of older historical criticism dominate and attention to gender and power is still openly dismissed by many senior scholars, this point cannot be made emphatically enough.81 Historical analysis is inadequate when the androcentrism and other biases of texts and interpretive trajectories are left uninterrogated.82

Further, the dialogical and collaborative nature of much scholarly endeavor is masked in the monologic summarizing approach to commentary-writing. An unfortunate consequence of the "dry summary" approach to commentary is that it renders material less accessible to non-expert readers. In these pages, I regularly offer quotations of other scholars rather than my compressed approval or dismissal of their contributions. This is a purposeful feminist intellectual practice designed to honor the positions of others, as well as to enliven the material for the non-expert reader, through a textured and more dialogical presentation. In this, I affirm the position of Musa Dube that "feminist decolonizing readings should encourage 'solidarity in multiplicity.'"83 I regret that space constraints preclude the quoting or even naming of every scholar whose work I find valuable on Jeremiah, prophecy in the ancient Near East generally, feminist and womanist criticism, literary interpretation, postcolonial studies, and queer theory. I have done what I could, with much gratitude for those whose work I have not had the space to cite.

I am keenly aware that some reviewers may be displeased to see points from feminist translation theory and trajectories mapped by queer theorists rather than deft summaries of the history of research on every philological question and detailed explication of redaction-critical schemata. Deeply alarming to me was a savage attack on Robert Carroll that I witnessed early in my career at a Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting. A scholar leaped to his feet in a crowded room where Carroll was present, verbally shredded Carroll's commentary in a storm of petulance, and shouted, "Das ist gar kein wissenschaftliches Buch!" Of this and similar incidents, Carroll would comment later that it taught him about "the ideological nature and depth of the Guild's political opposition to non-conforming voices in the contemporary discipline of biblical studies."84 Indeed. During the writing of this commentary, I have had to brace myself for what may come. Yet it would not be truly feminist commentary if feminist and queer readings were hinted at only at the end of each chapter, articulated as supplementary after the writer had demonstrated sufficient fealty to the traditional methodologies that have dominated the Western guild of biblical studies. Such a hierarchical model would keep feminist criticism firmly in a subordinate place, marginalized as an ancillary special interest with which traditional commentators need not engage. I intend the shift in scholarly framework and foci modeled in these pages to serve the goals of rigorous feminist interdisciplinary engagement. Equally important, this is meant as a warm invitation to non-feminist scholars to consider interpreting Jeremiah in a fuller register. Finally, I aim to encourage queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming readers to engage Jeremiah on their own terms, rigorously and joyously. If this commentary facilitates such engagement, I will be glad.

Feminist Convictions

­Feminist ­convictions ­that ­shape ­interpretation Commentators must choose that on which to focus. Space constraints mean that commentaries that pay attention to every text-critical issue, including minutiae, must devote less attention to sophisticated literary interpretation, by which I mean not speculation about preexisting sources and redaction-an older sense of "literary criticism"-but nuances of characterization, pacing and other dimensions of plot, the dramatic use of dialogue, the play of ambiguities and ironies, and so forth. Some philologically-focused commentaries have not engaged developments in translation studies and newer methods such as feminist criticism, failing to recognize that such methods offer much to help remedy narrow androcentric perspectives and views that are limited in their analysis of race, ethnicity, and class dimensions of texts and social contexts in antiquity and in the history of interpretation. Philological and historical analyses are sometimes performed as if their choices were being made in a neutral space, uncolored by interpreters' implicit understandings of language, gender, power, and cultural difference. This can leave major aspects of textual signification, historiography, and social ideologies uninterrogated or poorly explained. For example, norms of masculinity purveyed by ancient texts have not been critically engaged by biblical scholars in much depth until fairly recently. The intersectional interrogation of ideologies and effects of scholarly practices is urgently needed, for as Gale Yee observes, "intersectionality has not made a significant dent as a conceptual framework in biblical studies, except . among scholars of color."85 Feminist, womanist, queer, and other scholar-activists affirm the importance of this work. Reflecting on social injustice generally and epistemological elitism within the academy in particular, trans activist theologian Robyn Henderson-Espinoza reminds us of the importance of

recognizing the structural fallacies of supremacy culture, because when there is a culture of any supremacy, it creates hierarchies of dominance.. We all-even those who are bound up in supremacy culture-must find a way to be free. Part of the lie of oppression is that the social hierarchies in place need to be in place.86

Commentary-writing has been severely circumscribed by certain epistemological and methodological hierarchies within Western credentialed biblical studies. Esther Fuchs has reviewed the variegated landscape of feminist work, identifying two approaches that are held in dialectical relation: a first feminist approach "seeks to clarify the foundations of the field . establishing a genealogy of knowledge, and an evolutionary trajectory or a history of feminist ideas," while a second feminist approach "deals mostly with interrogations, destabilizing and disrupting foundational paradigms,...