The Prophets by Norman Podhoretz

Author:Norman Podhoretz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

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ALTHOUGH WRITING A proper “Life and Times of Jeremiah” would no more be possible than doing a similar job on Isaiah, the scholars, mercifully, have left us with only one Jeremiah. What plagues them—and us—here is the authenticity or the authorship of this or that chapter of the text.I Still, Jeremiah differs in one important respect from Isaiah or the other books of the classical prophets who came before him. Whereas they are all very stingy with biographical information, Jeremiah’s is full of details about him and his life, and many of his oracles are precisely dated as well. Much of the biographical and autobiographical material is scattered and out of chronological order, but it can be sorted out with the help of sources outside the Hebrew Bible. Yet even on its own, this material supplies us with a fairly good basis for sketching a fuller portrait of this most human of the prophets than we can of any other.

We know, to begin with, that Jeremiah was born in the village of Anathoth near Jerusalem around 640 B.C.E. (making him about eight years younger than Josiah). We know that he came from a relatively prosperous priestly family whose ancestral roots were in the North (where the traditions underlying the book of Deuteronomy, or the book itself, may very well have originated and then been brought South by refugees after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C.E.). We know that (like Samuel) Jeremiah was called to be a prophet while still a boy of twelve or thirteen. We know that he later acquired a secretary or amanuensis, Baruch the son of Neriah, to whom he would dictate many of his prophecies and who would write them down.

As to his familiarity with Deuteronomy, we know—or can confidently infer—something about that, too. This was still a period when priests were not only cultic functionaries, but were also trained to be custodians and teachers of the law (in Hosea’s phrase, “the knowledge of God”). Judging from his earliest prophecies, the young Jeremiah was already steeped in Deuteronomy by the time he began preaching, and it continued to be the major influence on his thinking, as witness the more than two hundred citations from it in his own book. Yehezkel Kaufmann:

The inaugural vision of the young Jeremiah [in 627 B.C.E.] antedates the discovery of the book in the Temple, yet it is pervaded by the figures and language of Deuteronomy. The book must have been an element in Jeremiah’s education; he studied it in his youth in the priestly school of Anathoth and absorbed its language and spirit. To him the book was “the Torah of God,” and he regarded it thus to the end of his days.

There has been much dispute over Jeremiah’s attitude toward the Josianic reforms. This is another issue on which I am disinclined to swell an already overcrowded field of speculations. To me, however, it seems almost inconceivable in the light of his relation to Deuteronomy

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