Question 1 : What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I belong body and

soul, in life and in death not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at
the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me
from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my
Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his
purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal
life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.
{Heidelberg Catechism)
Surely, God is our only comfort.
But beside this word we are so eager to hear, Jeremiah 15:15-21 also speaks
another word, one we in the church are perhaps less eager about. This other
word, confirmed in the lives of prophets and apostles and in the life of our
Lord himself, is that God who is our only comfort also calls us by his name (v.
16) to serve his kingdom, and if necessary, to bear reproach for its sake:
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds
of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great
in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.
(Matt. 5:10-12; cf. Jer. 15:15)
God who calls us to costly service is our only comfort; God who is our only
comfort calls us to costly service. Like Jeremiah before us, it is always before
these two ways of God that we in the church live and serve and pray.

J. GERALDJANZEN

Prof essor of Old Testament

Christian Theological Seminary

Jeremiah 20:7-18
PARTICULAR TEXTS, like particular experiences, arise and have their meaning
partly as the point of convergence of diverse vectors of energy flowing from diverse contexts. But such particulars are not merely the sum of such vector
forces. In some measure, such vector forces combine to produce a new force,
which transcends the sum of its parts, and which in its turn may then become
a vector in subsequent occasions. In this essay I will seek to identify contextual
vectors, ancient and modern, within which the particular meaning of Jeremiah 20:7-18 may be explored by the reader.
In the first place, Jeremiah draws upon the general form of Israel's psalms
in which the worshiper confesses loyalty to God and expresses bewilderment as

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to why God has dealt otherwise than the worshiper had been led to expect.
This general form is elsewhere nuanced in two somewhat different contexts:
among the prophets, where the complaint arises over the prophet's fate while
pursuing the prophetic vocation (e.g., H a b . ; see CBQ, 1982), and in Job, who
becomes the archetypal confessor/plaintiff. In the second place, 20:7-18
comes as the climax, or rather the nadir, of a series of such confessions in Jeremiah, the previous instances of which are 11:18 12:6; 15:10-21; 17:12-18;
18:18-23. Thirdly, these five poetic complaints give an inkling of Jeremiah's
experience as narratively portrayed later in the book, where Jeremiah's arrest
is followed by increasingly grave stages of confinement, from house arrest to
prison to pit, then brief respite at the hands of the Babylonian occupiers, to
final descent into Egypt. Writing of this narrative via dolorosa, Gerhard von
Rad has suggested that "Jeremiah's death apparently formed no part of this
account" (O. T. Theology II [1965], 207). T o the contrary, given the connotations of Egypt in the Bible generally, it is no coincidence that the confessions
which "shade off into darkness" and show him walking "a road which led
ultimately to abandonment" (Von Rad), find their nadir in Jeremiah
20:14-18, an exact confessional analogue to the narrative ending in Egypt.
One might even hazard a thematic if not chronological correlation between
Jeremiah's brief liberation by the Babylonians and the brief surge of praise in
20:13 before the final descent.
A fourth context is provided by the call account in 1:4-18, itself a particular reflex of the wider context of prophetic call accounts. Among other items
in which Jeremiah's call resembles that of Moses are his reluctance to go and
speak and God's repeated assurance that, having sent him (1:7), God will be
with him (1:8, 19). This polar tension between sending and being with (cf.
Exod. 3:10, 12) will be seen to lie at the heart of Jeremiah's dilemma as voiced
in his confessions. Meanwhile, the analogy between Moses and Jeremiah
heightens the irony of his biographical ending in Egypt, after the assurances in
his call, and helps us to appreciate all the more the reasons for his darkness in
20:14-18.
A fifth and wider context must now be brought into view. According to
Thorkild Jacobsen (The Treasures of Darkness, 1976) three millennia of Babylonian religion may be traced in terms of three fundamental metaphors for
the gods. In the fourth millennium the gods were powers immanent in the
phenomena of nature, powers willing to come to specific form as the phenomena. In the third millennium the gods transcended nature and society as royal
figures who had created nature and society as artefacts and slaves to serve
them. In the second millennium, among some Babylonians, the gods became
also personal deities, divine parents of their h u m a n children, responsible for
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their birth, nurture, protection, and guidance. Within this metaphor the god
was said to be with the h u m a n devotee as the power within the individual for
success. Jacobsen maintains that, whereas in Mesopotamia itself this "personal
religion" gave way in the first millennium before the resurgence of older
modes of perception of the divine activity, through Israel's ancestors (Abrah a m / S a r a h , et al.) it gave Israelite religion much of the latter's definitive
character; though in the latter development Yahweh became the divine father
not of the individual but of the community and nation as a whole (e.g., Exod.
4:21-23; Hosea 11:1; Isa. 1:2-3).
T h e eccentric but seminal thesis of Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976) contributes to this picture. In his view, the period 1500-800 marks the rise of individual consciousness in the ancient Near East. At the beginning of this period the gods still
speak loudly and clearly as vocal presences within the head of the barelyindividuated members of the community. By the end of this period the divine
voices no longer speak clearly or univocally, and people become distracted by
the conflict in what they hear or by the silence which increasingly displaces the
immanent voices. What emerges is a growing solitariness within the individual
and with it a growing self-consciousness vis--vis the gods and the community.
At this point we may return to consider a sixth context to Jeremiah 20:7-18.
The pericope comes immediately after Pashhur's challenge to Jeremiah.
Just as Zedekiah had struck Micaiah for his solitary opposition to the 400 prophets (I Kings 22), so Pashhur beats Jeremiah who stands in solitary opposition
to the prophets of national well-being. Who speaks, any more, for Yahweh?
At times it is not clear even to Jeremiah (20:7). Having publicly excoriated
Baal-worship as cistern-building (a social, structural-functional form of religion) which forsakes Yahweh the fountain of living waters (2:13), he privately
accuses Yahweh (15:18) of being a disappointing/deceitful brook whose
waters fail (l'ne'mn,
are not reliable/faithful). In response to Yahweh's
questionable reliability, both the confessions and the biography show Jeremiah enacting a Joban steadfastness in which doubt and patience define one
another and in which even the momentary wish for non-existence is but the
dark coloration of the light of faith and unquenchable vocation. Von Rad's
words are apt at this point:
It is still Jeremiah's secret how, in the face of growing scepticism about his own office,
he was yet able to give an almost superhuman obedience to God, and, bearing the immense strains of his calling, was yet able to follow a road which led ultimately to abandonment. . . . Again, if God brought the life of the most faithful of his ambassadors
into so terrible and utterly uncomprehended a night and there to all appearances allowed him to come to utter grief, this remains God's secret (p. 206).
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T h e secret has, perhaps, to do with that aspect of any experience (or text) in
which it in some measure transcends its context and achieves the standpoint
from which to transform its inheritance into a novel legacy.
But these words lead us to consider a seventh context for Jeremiah's confessional complaints: the divine milieu. I have suggested that his dilemma lies in
the tension between "I am with you" and "I send you." Who is it that is with
Jeremiah? It is not only Yahweh the dread warrior (20:11; cf. Exod. 15:3); it is
also Yahweh the Solitary One ('ehad; Deut. 6:4; Zech. 14:9; Job 23:13 and
31:15). This Yahweh, who has called the people into the most intimate (Exod.
24:9-11) and comprehensive (Deut. 6:4) of covenants, has been abandoned by
the covenant people (Jer. 2:1-6, 13), is no longer known by them (2:8), and is
left to a divine grief which no one can share (8:18 9:3).
If Heschel is right in interpreting the prophetic experience as a participation in the divine pathos, are Jeremiah's complaints evidence of such a participation? But if the divine pathos consists not only in an ontological solitariness
of Yahweh as God, but also in an existential solitariness as deserted covenant
partner, how does Jeremiah share in that pathos? Is it possible that only in the
blackness of his own sense of isolation from both people and Yahweh can
Jeremiah enter most deeply into an incomprehensible fellowship with God in
suffering for the people? And is not the depth of such suffering and the refusal
to heal it lightly (15:18a; cf. 6:14) the measure of Jeremiah's loyalty both to
the people and to Yahweh? Conventionally, "witness" connotes presence and
"sending" absence. Is it possible that the two in this instance are one? T h a t the
sense of absence communicates, strangely, a presence?
Whitehead gives three pithy characterizations of religion where it has
emerged beyond herd emotion (Religion in the Making). (The first is often
quoted in ignorance or in despite of the other two usually in order to criticize its excessive individualism.) (1) "Religion is what the individual does with
his own solitariness." (2) "Religion is world-loyalty." (3) "The world is a scene
of solitariness in community. . . . T h e topic of religion is individuality in community." If Israelite religion emerged in the first instance as a communal version of the personal religion of second-millennium Mesopotamia, the individual dimension nevertheless also developed pari passu with the communal.
This was reflected in the second personal singular form of the decalogue, for
example, and in the fact that the single archetypal prohibition in Genesis 2 is
given, not to the community but to the individual; yet, that community has its
function in the mutual help to be given in fulfilling the earthly vocation. This
individual dimension is portrayed not only in the great figures of Abraham,
Sarah, Jacob, Rachel, Moses, Miriam, Samuel, Elijah, Jeremiah, Job, the Servant of Yahweh, and Lady Wisdom, but also in the large numbers of the
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psalms of individual complaint and confession, psalms which, in their

character as "common prayer," bespeak the existence in Israel of numbers of
individuals who, anonymous to the public and to history, are known only to
Yahweh as loyal participants, wittingly or not, in the divine pathos.
T h e dimensions of the contemporary context for Jeremiah 20:7-18 are
manifold; only brief suggestions in some directions can be offered here. One
two-headed issue is perhaps germane. In some circles still, religion is a strictly
individual affair, issuing in a purely transcendent salvation of the soul; in
other circles, religion is chiefly a communal affair, bent on an immanent salvation of society. My characterizations are of course gross and oversimplified,
but the reader will recognize the issues to which I refer. On the one hand there
is an overlooking of the concomitant feature of the individual dimension of
biblical religion, in the burden of solitariness and suffering as a participation
in the life of the community and of God. On the other hand there is observable
in some quarters a distinct tendency to reduce Yahweh to functionalist
categories under the aegis of sociological analysis. Yahweh becomes a "servomechanism" for the society (Norman Gottwald) or the humanly constructed
hero-figure in a story which Israelite society tells in constructing a social world
of meaning as a way of overcoming the chaos of ultimate non-meaning. T h e
story, however, does not report on something beyond the manifold social context, does not make an ultimate reference, but is a humanly constructed web
of meaning in "an essentially meaningless environment" (Leonard L. T h o m p son, JBL 100:343-58 [No. 3, 1981]). Such currently-emerging views of religion accurately analyze what was earlier described in Jeremiah 2:13a. They
cannot account, finally, for the Israelite experience attested in Jeremiah
2:136, an experience of a power and a presence energizing social renewal and
cohesiveness (Exodus and Sinai) and at the same time enabling the emergence
of a solitary consciousness whose extreme form occurs where all sense of social
support and cohesion, h u m a n or divine, either is negatively experienced as
against one or is experienced as absent altogether, yet where the harrassed/abandoned solitary individual persists in solidarity with the divine and h u m a n
covenant community, toward renewal and transformation (e.g., Jer.
31:31-34). Such a solitary consciousness serves a Presence which, in its covenant loyalty to the community, at times must announce the end of all orders
and structures of meaning and life (Jer. 4:23-26), a Yahweh who not only
leads Israel out of the chaos of the wilderness into the orders of Canaan
(Thompson), but who as often leads or drives Israel out of corrupt orders and
back into the wilderness. It is time for biblically-oriented communities and
leaders to take us beyond the false dichotomy inherent in inherited metaphysics of matter/spirit bifurcations, beyond the split between social-material

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functionalism and individual-spiritual transcendentalism, in a covenanting

path which incorporates the genuine concerns of both and wherein Yahweh is
both high God of people and world and personal God of the individual.
It is, finally, poignant that the final redactor of Jeremiah this prophet to
the nations (1:10) who displayed such an intensely solitary suffering consciousness as the interior substratum of his socially active life should have appended to the final scene of the biographical narrative a personal vignette involving
just Jeremiah and his biographer. (Cf. 1:10 with 45:4; and 45:1-5 with
44:26-30.) In response to Baruch's own complaint, which but for this passage
would have remained one of the many anonymous ones, Jeremiah offers a pastoral word which for all its stringency may be supposed to have offered the
deepest comfort. This is but a firstfruits of how Jeremiah's transcendent solitariness issued as a social vector of transforming energy, available for the
wider world of subsequent occasions (cf. I Cor. 1:3-4;.

W E R N E R E.

LEMKE

Professor of Old Testament Interpretation

Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer

Jeremiah 31:31-34
being asserted or promised by this passage? T h e opening
phrase, "behold the days are coming," points to some unspecified time in the
future. It is found very frequently in the Jeremiah tradition, where it appears
to be chiefly editorial in character and can refer both to times of judgment as
well as to times of salvation (see Jer. 7:32; 9:25; 19:6; 23:5,7; 30:3; 31:27,38;
33:14). In our text it obviously refers to a time of salvation. T h e indefiniteness
is further underscored by the phrase "after those days" in verse 34, which is
unique to this passage, having no exact parallel elsewhere in the Old
Testament. At this unspecified time in the future, Yahweh promises to make
"a new covenant" with his people Israel, by which must be meant here the entire nation, or its descendants, and not just the former Northern Kingdom of
Israel. As is well known, God's relationship to Israel in the Bible was conceptualized through a series of covenants, of which the best known and most important were the Mosaic or Sinaitic, the Abrahamic, and the Davidic. T h e
relationship between God and Israel envisaged by these covenants had become
problematical for many as a result of the destruction of the nation in 722 and
587 B.C. Consequently it is not surprising that a promise concerning the
restoration of that relationship should be conceptualized in the form of a
W H A T IS REALLY

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