Circumscribing the Prostitute: The Rhetorics of Intertexuality, Metaphor, and Gender in Jeremiah 3.1-4.4

 

Mary E. Shields

Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004 - 184 pages

In Jeremiah 3.1-4.4 the prophet employs the image of Israel as God's unfaithful wife, who acts like a postitute. The entire passage is a rich and complex rhetorical tapestry designed to convince the people of Israel of the error of their political and religious ways, and their need to change before it is too late. As well as metaphor and gender, another important thread in the tapestry is intertextuality, according to which the historical, political and social contexts of both author and reader enter into dialogue and thus produce different interpretations. But, as Shields shows in her final chapter, it is in the end the rhetoric of gender that actually constructs the text, providing the frame, the warp and woof, of the entire tapestry, and thus the prophet's primary means of persuasion.

 

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The Greek Text of Jeremiah: A Revised Hypothesis

 

Sven Soderlund

Continuum International Publishing Group, 1985 - 304 pages

 

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The Polemics of Exile in Jeremiah 26-45

Mark Leuchter

Cambridge University Press, 2008 - 320 pages

Scholars typically view Jeremiah 26-45 as a collection of episodes constructed during the Babylonian exile that attempts to prove the authenticity of Jeremiah's prophetic status. But Jeremiah's prophetic legitimacy was already widely accepted during the period of the Babylonian exile. These chapters serve a different purpose, namely, to provide a response by the Deuteronomistic scribes to the rise of the Ezekiel tradition and the Zadokite priesthood that threatened their influence among the exilic population. By subsuming their work within an existing and earlier collection of Jeremianic literature, the ideology and political agenda of the Deuteronomists was fused with the literary legacy of a widely-respected prophet, giving rise to a larger literary collection that left a profound and lasting impression on Israel's intellectual and social history.

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Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel

Sharon Moughtin, 

Oxford University Press, 2008-08-15 - 314 pages

Sharon Moughtin-Mumby explores the complex, and potentially subversive, power of metaphor as a tool of persuasion in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. Often, such language is used to speak of the worship of gods other than Yhwh, of undesirable cultic practices, or of political alliances with foreign nations. Evaluating several schools of language and biblical criticism, including a traditional approach, a feminist critique and a literary-historical investigation, Moughtin-Mumby brings lucid new readings with a fresh perspective to these dramatic texts. The study emphasizes the importance of context for understanding metaphorical meaning and challenges previous scholarship which has read such language in terms of the traditional concept of "the marriage metaphor" and the hypothetical background of cultic prostitution

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