Hebrew Bible Monographs 6. K. L. Noll Brandon University Brandon, Manitoba, Canada

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1 RBL 09/2006 Leuchter, Mark Josiah s Reform and Jeremiah s Scroll: Historical Calamity and Prophetic Response Hebrew Bible Monographs 6 Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, Pp. x Hardcover. $ ISBN K. L. Noll Brandon University Brandon, Manitoba, Canada This monograph is an extensive revision of the author s Ph.D. dissertation. The original dissertation and its transformation were completed at the University of Toronto. The volume includes nine chapters plus an introduction, full bibliography, and indices of authors and Scripture references. The bibliography and footnotes demonstrate the author s thorough familiarity with the history of scholarship, and the work is almost entirely free of typographical errors or other distracting mistakes, making it a pleasure to read. This reviewer is not convinced by the author s hypothesis and will be critical in many instances, but that should not be viewed as condemnation. Leuchter demonstrates mastery of his subdiscipline and is to be commended for his competent scholarship. Josiah s Reform and Jeremiah s Scroll is the most recent addition in a long line of highly subjective and equally implausible constructions of the historical Jeremiah. Junkies of the genre will be gratified by the presence of all the usual elements, including rearrangement of the received text, overwrought exegesis of individual passages, and a seemingly arbitrary selection of verses to be regarded as the ipsissima verba of the prophet. Leuchter demonstrates awareness of viable alternatives to a quest for a historical prophet, but chooses not to engage those fields of scholarship. The one exception is a brief critique of R. P. Carroll to be discussed below.

2 The title of the volume aptly summarizes its thesis. In this incarnation, Jeremiah becomes a court prophet in the service of King Josiah. He is an apologist for the newly circulating torah scroll mentioned in 2 Kgs 22. Even the death of Josiah and the failure of his political ambitions apparently does not undermine Jeremiah s Deuteronomistic loyalties, for the prophet begins a campaign against old Jerusalemite royalism, criticizing the temple complex from a Deuteronomistic perspective and ultimately producing a scroll that is read and rejected by King Jehoiakim. The thesis is defended in very careful detail through nine chapters that follow a chronological sequence. Chapter 1 invents (the verb has been considered, and it stands) an old tradition of the zophim, a group especially associated with Shiloh. These were Mushite tradents who performed the priestly, divinatory, and judicial leadership roles that the biblical Samuel is portrayed as having fulfilled. Chapter 2 attempts to show that Deuteronomy appropriates this tradition and reconfigures it in the service of the state. The old Shilonite zopheh becomes Deuteronomy s legal judge (Deut 17:9) equated with the prophet like Moses (18:18), and the office is transferred to the site of the central sanctuary, namely, Josiah s Jerusalem. Chapter 3 rehearses the conventional hypothesis that King Josiah had imperial designs on the Assyrian province to his north, the old kingdom of Samaria-Israel. But, according to Leuchter, a rift emerged between competing scribal groups, one favoring an old Jerusalemite royalism, the other defending an old Ephraimite ideology best preserved in texts such as Amos and Hosea. A mediator was needed. The role of Jeremiah is constructed in chapters 4 through 9 of the monograph. As a priest from Anathoth, Jeremiah stood within the old Ephraimite stream of Yahwism, and Josiah enlisted Jeremiah to defend the king s appropriation of that tradition. Alas, the northerners of Shiloh and elsewhere were too shrewd to be fooled by Jeremiah s thinly disguised Josianic propaganda (74). Jeremiah attempted several rhetorical strategies to win them over, and these are outlined in chapters 4 and 5. First, the prophet painted a rosy picture of restored hope that Josiah s religio-political innovations promised. When this failed, Jeremiah turned to invective, chastising the same audience for lack of fidelity to Yahweh. With the death of Josiah and the collapse of his agenda, Jeremiah reconsidered his allegiance to the royalism within Deuteronomy. At this time, Jeremiah advocated fidelity to Deuteronomy s concept of covenant and did so in opposition to reliance on potentially competing sources of religio-political centrality, such as king, priesthood, or sacred sanctuary. Chapter 6 describes the temple sermon of Jer 7:1 15 as a crucial turning point in Jeremiah s career, and chapter 7 outlines how this new emphasis in the prophet s message brought him into conflict with Josiah s royal heirs.

3 Chapter 8 constructs the hypothetical Urrolle implied by the narrative of Jer 36, identifying passages that derived from Josianic days and other texts Leuchter believes to have been added as part of the many similar words mentioned in Jer 36:32. In chapter 9 Leuchter concludes that we can no longer speak of the prophet Jeremiah as a thinker whose work was brought into the Deuteronomistic fold only by later redactors (169). Poetry and prose texts of the scroll are permeated with the ideology of Deuteronomy, and this Deuteronomism derives from the prophet himself. As Jeremiah s message evolved, says Leuchter, a new religious ethos evolved as well. From the ashes of Josiah s failed royalism, from the bankruptcy of external symbols such as the temple, and from the construction and then reconstruction of Jeremiah s scroll in emulation of Deuteronomy itself emerged a new idea of scripture as the medium of revelation and covenant. The prophetic tradition evolves from an emphasis on figures to an emphasis on their written words (181), and the scroll of Jeremiah thus contributed to the fundamental ideology of the exilic literary canon and early postexilic Judaism, where Torah would rival and eventually supplant Temple as the defining characteristic of communal and individual identity (182). Although Leuchter is a master at constructing a carefully defended, linear argument, his exegesis of Jeremiah depends on a network of implausible assumptions about other biblical texts. For example, Leuchter treats the Former Prophets (and especially Samuel and Kings) as largely accurate accounts of the past, he depends on the minority hypothesis that a Hezekian edition of a Deuteronomistic History existed, and he assumes the equally minority view that a significant part of the Priestly material (including Gen 1) was in existence in the late seventh century B.C.E. Perhaps most egregious is Leuchter s treatment of Deuteronomy. Although Leuchter never summarizes what he believes to have been the content of the Josianic torah scroll, it would seem that the bulk of our received Deuteronomy was part of it, since Leuchter appeals to many sections of Deuteronomy that most exegetes would assign to later redactional stages (e.g., Deut 27). Moreover, Leuchter fails to engage the scholarship that concludes no portion of Deuteronomy was written in the service of King Josiah or any other Judean monarch. For all his creative exegesis about royally appointed Deuteronomistic judges, Leuchter s interpretation is less compelling than Lothar Perlitt s judgment: Im Dtn findet sich kein entwickelter Staatsgedanke ( Der Staatsgedanke im Deuteronomium, in Language, Theology and the Bible: Essays in Honour of James Barr [ed. S. E. Balentine and J. Barton; Oxford: Clarendon, 1994], , here 195). Thus, if one were to accept (as this reviewer does not) a plurality of Leuchter s exegetical conclusions, the portrait of Jeremiah that emerges nevertheless remains implausible as a historical hypothesis. This does not negate the complex exegetical fabric that Leuchter has produced, but the Jeremiah that Leuchter constructs is better viewed as the main

4 character in a late literary fiction dependent on the many texts available from the emerging religious canon of the Persian or early Hellenistic eras. Certainly it is possible that the historical Jeremiah was a spin doctor for a minor king with suicidal illusions of imperial grandeur, but even a sympathetic reading of Leuchter s monograph does not provide much support for the hypothesis. The book reads like a very sophisticated, closely argued, just so story. At the level of exegetical details, Leuchter s thesis rests on decisions that many will find problematic. For example, why prefer MT in places where experts in textual criticism suspect that the Old Greek preserves a superior text (e.g., [dealing with 1 Sam 1:1], 148 [treating Jer 8:10b 12])? Why attribute every theological nuance to a competing Yahwistic tradition (passim)? Why should the absence of a Masoretic dagesh in 1 Sam 1:1 be credited with silently preserving historical memory from the early Iron Age (22)? Why treat the obviously late gloss in Jer 10:11 (composed in Aramaic) as though it derives from the historical Jeremiah (142)? Why believe that Deuteronomy s prophet like Moses was intended to be a real public office, when Leuchter himself admits that the criterion for legitimation of this figure in 18:21 22 hopelessly undermines any flesh-and-blood person who attempts to fill that role (45 46)? Above all, why assume, a priori, that [b]iblical texts were not written casually but arise from pressing historical circumstances (15)? This last question requires serious consideration. I doubt that Leuchter s claim holds for Qoheleth, Job, Song of Songs, or even Genesis or Samuel. Perhaps the case could be made if the thesis is limited to prophetic literature, but if so, Leuchter is obligated to engage competing ideas about prophetic composition, such as the alternative approaches, each far more compelling than Leuchter s, advanced by Philip R. Davies, Pen of Iron, Point of Diamond (Jer 17:1): Prophecy as Writing, in Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (ed. E. Ben Zvi and M. H. Floyd; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), 65 81; and Martti Nissinen, How Prophecy Became Literature, SJOT 19 (2005): Perhaps the greatest problem with this very problematic monograph is the methodological assumption on which it rests. Leuchter, like many so-called critical exegetes, believes that it is not a difficult task to peer through a text and into an alleged real world behind that text. But an event or person from a real past need not be the catalyst for the creation of a text. Throughout ancient history, texts have generated texts. This is the case whether the text in question describes a person, such as the gnostic Jesus generated from the Synoptic Jesus (who is, himself, an invention from still earlier representations), or describes an event, such as the Trojan War of Dares and Dictys generated from the poetry of Homer and the Epic Cycle (themselves generated from earlier legends). The received form of the book of Jeremiah bears little resemblance to known archives recording prophetic activity in Mari or Neo-Assyria, so it seems more reasonable to search for parallels to Jeremiah s

5 emergence closer to home. In that case, it is worth noting that biblical Balaam bears little resemblance to his namesake at Deir Alla, Daniel is a fictional character, and Malachi is, at best, deeply problematic. Also, nameless prophets were invented for the book of Kings, named prophets were invented by the Chronicler, and even Leuchter believes that the speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy have nothing to do with a historical Moses. Throughout the Bible poets emulate other poets, plagiarism is common, conflation frequent, and invention the norm. In the face of these realities, a quest for a historical Jeremiah, like a quest for a historical Jesus, Isaiah, or Moses, is the pursuit of theologians, not historians. This crippling flaw in Leuchter s method is exposed by Leuchter s engagement with the approach of R. P. Carroll (3 6). Carroll is well known for his thesis that Jeremiah the prophet was invented over time from an original collection of anonymous poetry. In an unfortunate attempt to be clever, Leuchter contends that Carroll deconstructs himself when Carroll admits that his own academic research has undergone discernible evolution but denies us the ability to discern similar stages in the message of an Iron Age prophet. Leuchter writes, The irony is difficult to ignore (5). It is not, as a matter of fact, ironic at all. We have at our disposal the published redactions of Carroll s evolving thought, not to mention unpublished writings and eyewitness testimonies concerning the late scholar s thought and activity. This is the very kind of evidence that is lacking in the case of Jeremiah. In its place, as Carroll has demonstrated, we have indisputable textual evidence of supplementary redaction in the book of Jeremiah, as well as the invention of both prophecy and prophets related to this scroll (e.g., Baruch the scribe became, in later times, Baruch the apocalyptic seer). The irony in all of this is that the allegedly antihistorical stance of Carroll displays greater critical awareness of the historical realties and complex processes of literary production than does the historical research of Leuchter. One wishes that Leuchter had studied the text of Jeremiah as carefully as had the late and lamented R. P. Carroll. In sum, this monograph will be hailed as a significant contribution to the quest for the historical Jeremiah only by those predisposed to be convinced by the methodological approach that Leuchter so skillfully employs. For other subdisciplines within Jeremiah research, the monograph will represent the latest very competent installment of a quaint quest for a past that never was.