prophecies like screaming toddlers: how we got here

So I recently spent like 4 weeks studying Jeremiah through Trinity Anglican, and in this post I took some time to reflect on it, including some just factual stuff but also what I gained from it personally.

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I learned several things through the study. One is that Jeremiah is arranged more like an anthology than a chronological compilation of works, and that this was done with a purpose. Much like experimental types of literature (I'm thinking of surrealism, modernism, dadaism, that sort of thing), the book of Jeremiah is intentionally chaotic. It doesn't just work on you through the meaning of the words you read - it uses form to affect you too, thus mimicking in you the confusion and frustration of the people of Israel at the time of their deportation to Babylon. I liked learning that, it's pretty meta. And helps me push through the frustration to try and make meaning.

The class also helped a lot with that meaning making, thank goodness. We learned that Jeremiah's work occurred in the 40 years just before/during/after Judah's deportation to Babylon, and that he spends his ministry announcing that the people have broken their covenant with God, and therefore consequences - in the form of takeover by and deportation to Babylon - are coming. Now I cannot lie to you - I am TERRIBLE when it comes to history. That subject matter just doesn't stick with me very well, no matter the format. So there is a lot more that got discussed that I really would have to put in a lot more effort to retain, but I did learn some of the names of the different kings, and I have the notes to reference how they fit into the general story of the time. All this contextual information is WAY more than I had to work with before when attempting to read through the prophet Jeremiah.

Similarly, the class teased out of the text some of the major stages of Jeremiah's life and walked us through them. I really appreciated that about Ashley (the teacher): her gift for painting a picture of everything that would've been happening, of how all the pieces fit together.

So we learned that it is unusual for a prophetic text from the Ancient Near East (ANE) to include any information about the prophet, his or her life - nevermind his or her thoughts/feelings about the messages they had to deliver. And yet those things are included in the text of Jeremiah: who he was, things he did, his opinions of what God asked him to say. So, just as the form of the text is equally as important as the meaning of its words, the life experiences of the prophet himself, and his opinions of his message, bear just as much meaning as his actual message. I had no idea.

A key feature of the book of Jeremiah are all the "symbolic action reports" God tasks him with. These are things that God asks Jeremiah to do, and then turns the actions into symbols by ascribing meaning to them. They are part of the prophetic message, enacted metaphors. It makes sense that God would include these, really, even more sense if you know anything about how basic metaphor is to human understanding of reality, or if you consider embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is the idea that physical reality affects our thoughts. For instance, one study found that, if you're carrying a heavy clipboard, you will take a conversation more seriously; another, that if you're carrying a heavy backpack, you'll judge the top of a hill to be further away; yet another that if you hold a warm drink you will feel more emotional warmth toward the people you're talking to. These are small indications of how closely our understanding is tied to our bodies, so to me it makes sense that God - all-knowing, wise, creator of the human experience - would understand this about people and use the physical actions of his prophet to communicate with his people on a level more than verbal. Plus they were just weird things to do, and he had to know that would stick in people's minds and make them wonder.

Anyway. I really appreciated hearing a more in-depth analysis of some of the action reports, like Jeremiah "redeeming" the field his family member came to sell to him after the town it was in had been ransacked by the Babylonians, and God asking him to agree to buying the field. A field which happened to be in Ben-hinom, later known as Gehenna, which, when Jesus mentions it in our New Testament, is translated as "hell". So Jeremiah had to buy back a piece of hell, redeem it. What beautiful foreshadowing.

So I've brushed up on a good bit of history in this class, and been privy to some excellent exegesis (meaning explanation of the what scholarship has learned about particular passages of text to help us better understand them); but what I valued the most about the class was learning more about the actual chronological life of Jeremiah in his context. Getting a picture of who he was and how he fit into the situations that were going on around him.

This was the most valuable piece to me because, to me, it makes his message more digestible. It can be really hard to read the prophetic books. It feels like the prophet says the same things over, and over, and over, and they are painful, confusing things to read. Israel gets called a prostitute, accused of infidelity, told they will be destroyed, told how they will be destroyed... the threats and accusations and complaints get overwhelming. The reader is left in the difficult position of not knowing who to identify with - you understand Israel, their actions seem reasonable, yet God is clearly very upset with them. So you feel guilty because you understand, but also know that God is technically righteous, so shouldn't he be in the right? So does that make you just as bad as the Israelites? God's voice is confusing too. Can he really mean all those terrible things? Isn't it all kind of overwhelmingly intense? Who's right here?

Basically, it feels like walking in on a pair of kids who are already 5 minutes into a fight. You want to sit them down and get them to tell you what happened, so you can get a clear picture, and form an opinion, so you can figure out what's just. But instead of clarifying, they just keep shouting, and now they're shouting at you. Taking this class gave me exactly what I wanted: the chance to sit everyone down and learn about what went down to get us to this level of rhetoric in the first place; the chance to see how the rhetoric fit into the sequence of current events. It spaced it out, it explained the intensity of emotion going on on both sides, and, bonus, also explained the whole anthology, out-of-order thing, which really intensifies the confusion factor.

Also, getting to learn about Jeremiah's life and the different kings and characters (by reading those bits of text that talk about it all at once) really humanized it for me. Knowing how Jeremiah felt about the messages he delivered (because it's written down in parts of the book), knowing that he had a "tragic phase" and just talking about the life of the man who spoke the words somehow helped me know how to feel, because it placed the words into a story, with people in it. It's hard to explain, but it kind of feels like turning the volume down to a level where you can hear what's being said.  Hah.

So thank you, Trinity, and Ashley, for that. I hope to sit down with the material again soon and tease out the timeline a little more, but for right now this is good. It will probably help me understand Isaiah and Ezekiel too. Hah!