Texts from a Prophet: How Jeremiah Saved Prophecy by Writing It Off

Jeremiah (chapters 40-44)¹ describes how Judahites – acting incomprehensibly – sabotaged Babylon’s plan to maintain a rump state in Judah after destroying Jerusalem.²

Gedaliah ben Ahikam, a naive Babylonian-installed governor, ignores Johanan ben Kareah’s warning and invites a suspected assassin to his holiday meal in Mizpah. The assassin, Ishmael ben Nethaniah, kills him; Babylonians; Judahites; and later slaughters seventy out of eighty Northern pilgrims, then takes captives and heads east. Johanan and his generals confront Ishmael, the hostages escape, and Ishmael flees to Ammon. The generals consult Jeremiah for guidance: stay or flee to Egypt? God’s message, to remain, is rejected by Azariah, Johanan, and others, who accuse scribe Baruch of manipulation. They go to Egypt, taking Jeremiah and Baruch for guidance. There, Jeremiah provides it, prophesying doom and critiquing their idolatry – and they reject it. He predicts the Egyptian community’s destruction and Pharaoh Apries’s downfall, but the community survives, and Apries doesn’t fall to Nebuchadnezzar as prophesied (Jer. 46:26). The prophet’s career ends in discredit, but his narrative is eternalized in his book.

For Want of a Canon, the Kingdom Was Lost

What motivated these actors, and what lesson is here for us? Schniedewind identifies diverse Judahite scribal communities: royal-historical, administrative, refugee, military, temple, landed-elite, and prophetic scribes, most of which are represented in the post-destruction remnants. Each had a curriculum of particular biblical books.³ Each curricular favorite was a “usable past” to interpret events – “keying,” in memory studies.⁴

Jeremiah provides evidence of text circulation in its suffusion with intertexts to the Prophets⁵ and Pentateuch⁶ (“Deuteronomic history”) and citation of Micah (26:18); by (initial) redaction, 586-539 BCE, these texts must have been available enough for audiences to ‘get’ Jeremiah’s allusions. And they yielded mixed messages.

Two distinct voices existed in pre-destruction Jerusalem: Jeremiah’s and the tradent of the Isaianic tradition, Hananiah ben Azzur, who upheld Jerusalem, Temple and Davidic line permanency. This proposition obsolesced in 587 BCE. Rom-Shiloni examines distinct later Judahite voices, in identity (favoring Babylonian exiles versus Judah remnants) and theology⁷ (justification, doubt or protest). In the immediate post-destruction period, however, we may see even greater viewpoint diversity, evidenced in protagonists’ decisions in Jeremiah 40-44 based on their backgrounds and intertextual clues, noted to some extent in academic literature but which we will now endeavor to more fully explore.

What emerges is that the tragic events surrounding Gedaliah’s assassination and the return to Egypt took place because each character interpreted events through the lens of a distinct biblical text, each conveying a different message. Jeremiah, despite his efforts, could not dissuade the protagonists from these views, not even with elocutions that evoked the greatest of Biblical prophets, Samuel or Moses. However, once the people were in Egypt, they were ultimately saved by Jeremiah’s final, original prophetic act of writing – composing the book of Kings. This work contextualized the hurban in light of more recent history, addressed the shortcomings of viewing events solely through the books of Joshua, Samuel, or even Jeremiah itself, and set the record straight such that recovery would be possible.

Gedaliah ben Ahikam, of the Shafanide Bureaucrats: The Book of Jeremiah

In exploring the viewpoint of Gedaliah we can try to recreate certain philosophies he espoused from textual references. Gedaliah hailed from a family of Temple administrators/literati. Grandfather Shafan, Temple renovation trustee, read a discovered Torah to King Josiah and, with father Ahikam, consulted Huldah, initiating Josianic reforms. Ahikam later protected Jeremiah from execution for prophesying the Temple’s destruction. Uncle El’asah delivered Jeremiah’s scroll to Babylonian exiles; Baruch read out Jeremiah’s prophecies from the Temple courtyard office of uncle Gemariah. Given choice of residence, Jeremiah naturally selected Gedaliah’s protectorate at Mizpah.

Gedaliah’s Do not be afraid to serve the Chaldeans. Stay in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you (40:9) echoes Jeremiah 27, a message to foreign kings that Gedaliah likeliest accessed in transcript. His full decree thematically and lexically parallels Jeremiah chapters 24, 27, and 29.⁸ The proverbial “book on his nightstand” was proto-Jeremiah.

Recent events validated that book. The return of exiles and harvest fulfilled God’s promise to Jeremiah after purchasing Hanamel’s field (32), promises which R. Yaakov Medan argues⁹ necessarily reference the near term, as Jeremiah was childless (16:2).

Gedaliah’s response to Johanan shows that he heeded the prophet’s call against deceit (9:2-8). Using Jeremiah’s keyword sheker, which appears thirty-seven times in the book – more than any other Biblical book, with Psalms in second place with only 22 – Gedaliah resolved to differ from Jerusalem’s doomed elites. Like Ahikam (26:24) he rejects any “shedding of an innocent’s blood” – avoiding even execution-by-proxy, let alone outright killing, of Ishmael at Johanan’s recommendation.¹⁰

Gedaliah followed Shafanide patron Josiah’s example. He too found the Temple and Judah in a sorry state, stemming from or teeming with injustice, bloodshed, neglect, and idolatry. Admittedly more “clean-up” was needed now, after its physical destruction, but the task remained manageable.

Gedaliah knew that Jeremiah prophesied that God would heal the land and restore the people with rejoicing, marriages, and flocks . . . and resumed Davidic rule (in MT only, 33:15-26, but also 23:1-6, 30:9).

The Babylonian akītu New Year festival enacted the Divine and kingly enthronement in the Neo-Babylonian empire that Gedaliah represented.¹¹ Nebuchadnezzar himself sought Marduk’s blessings through these New Year’s banquets:

[Du]ring the New Year’s festival . . . in the akītu(-house) . . . during banquets, during assembled gathering(s) of the great gods, bless me, Nebuchadnezzar (ii), the prince who is obedient to you, with blessing of good word(s) so that I may grow old . . . May I be the governor who grasps your holy hem for eternity. (Royal inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II 37, ii′ 33–42.)

Gedaliah believed Nebuchadnezzar deserved a proper vassal king. Shafanides served Davidic monarchs faithfully; so In the seventh month, Ishmael son of Nethaniah son of Elishama, who was of royal descent and one of the king’s commanders, came with ten men to Gedaliah son of Ahikam at Mizpah; and they ate together there at Mizpah (41:1). Gedaliah would enthrone King Ishmael and serve him, as his father and grandfather served David’s line before them. The first akītu after destruction provided the perfect occasion to fulfill Jeremiah’s prophecy, at a tašrītu New Year banquet with the Babylonian garrison.¹² Ruling elites of Judah, Babylonian vassal already for a decade, would be familiar with its customs.

Ishmael ben Nethaniah, of the Scribal Royals: The Book of Samuel

But this would have been unfamiliar to Ishmael’s grandfather Elishama (36:12-21) – Jehoiakim’s chief¹³ scribe who presided over the palace’s chamber of scribes when Jehoiakim burned Jeremiah’s scroll – an anti-Babylonian, out of power in that decade of vassalage. His grandson, tragically, did not read Jeremiah, with its promise of Davidic restoration, but rather the book of Samuel, the royal line origin story, and likely its scribal curriculum.¹⁴

Davidides had reason to suspect non-Judahites. Benjaminites held sympathies for the Northern Kingdom, and surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar before his Jerusalem assault.¹⁵ And there were scores to settle: Ahaz had instigated Assyrians against the North (II Kings 16:7); Josiah defiled their cultic sites (II Kings 23:15). Jehoiakim feared Northern survivors’ revenge, and indeed, contended with two prophets from Benjaminite lands, Jeremiah and Uriah ben Shemaiah, who demoralized his people by urging surrender to Babylonians.

Some argue for a Gibeonite pedigree for the Shafanide Ahi- prefix.¹⁶ If so, what an indignity – a temple-servant of Canaanite extraction, from Benjaminite territory, on David’s throne! Even if not, for Ishmael, the usurper in Mizpah was, at least, Saul redivivus. His secret visit from Johanan ben Kareah – a Northerner, given his and brother Jonathan’s yw- rather than yhw- theophoric¹⁷ – followed by an invitation for a New Moon feast, evoked Samuel scenes like Doeg’s slander of David, and terrifyingly, Saul’s plot to assassinate David at a New Moon feast (I Samuel 20). Elishamites missed hearing of akītu. Yates finds thoroughgoing parallels with David-Saul stories, where the Mizpah-crowned ruler (Saul) shows paranoia toward the Judahite (David), killing (Nob’s) many innocents, while David spares Saul, faces family hostage-taking at Ziklag, and defeats Saulides at Gibeon – all reversed here.¹⁸

Unlike David, Ishmael couldn’t decline what he had to presume was the invitation to his own murder. But Gedaliah was not Saul, ‘God’s anointed’ – so Ishmael struck preemptively. When Northerner passers-by indicated acceptance of the Benjaminite usurper,¹⁹ Ishmael killed seventy of them, too. He “liberates” Zedekiah’s daughters and other Judahites from the clutches of Northern collaborators, intending to convey them to the safety of anti-Babylonian Ammon. At Gibeon’s pool he recreates the final battle between Davidides and “Saulides,” the youths of Joab and Abner, in II Samuel 2:13, this time, Ishmael and his men against the rebel chiefs who were still at large.

But when the “Saulides” appear, all, even two of Ishmael’s own, defect – eight of ten remain (41:13-15). The foiled Messiah and his team flee to Ammon.

The Northerners bring the rescued Judahites specifically to Geruth Chimham, “the habitation of Chimham,” which David provided for Northerner Barzillai’s son after his aid in Absalom’s defeat (II Samuel 19:39). If Johanan and his men are Chimham, then Ishmael, whom they defeated, is Absalom. Ishmael’s massacres to restore Davidic honor paradoxically rendered him as cast in the image of Absalom, a bad apple who dishonors his father – an anti-David.

Johanan ben Kareah, of (or Among) the Northern Military Scribes: The Book of Joshua

The book of Joshua, with its idealized Ephraimite ruler,²⁰ is a candidate for northern-kingdom scribal curriculum.²¹ Its treatment of military operations and borders would help Egyptian-māhîr-like scribes train in Levantine geography and logistics.²²

Johanan’s trajectory parallels Joshua’s. Both were military leaders – Joshua as tribal chieftain and general of Israelites with pre-Exodus military experience; Johanan as Judahite army commander. Both follow a leader into a stateless political “wilderness” with initially fugitive survivors in encampments. Both were involved in gathering and transmitting intelligence. Like Joshua in the Eldad and Medad episode, Johanan advises eliminating an internal threat. In both cases, the leaders reject their counsel and question their judgment (Jer. 40:15-16, Num. 11:26-29, Ex. 32:18). For both, the key victory was a Gibeon rescue in which the enemy turned tail (Josh. 10:42).

Joshua remains in his predecessor’s shadow; Moses’ authority is the source of his own throughout his book.²³ During the spies episode, Joshua hesitates (evidenced by his silence in Numbers 13:30), seeing the conquest as conditional upon the peoples’ loyalty to God’s law.²⁴ This anxiety about following God’s will shows in the recurring theme of fear and insecurity in Deuteronomy and Joshua’s first twelve chapters.²⁵ Joshua’s one defeat at Ai, with just thirty-six dead, triggers crippling self-doubt akin to the wilderness generation.

In support/reinforcement of Joshua’s fear, God reveals that one person’s ‘polluting’ theft – Judahite Achan – caused this failure (Josh. 7:11), warning I will not be with you anymore unless you root out… what is proscribed.

After Gedaliah’s rebuke, Johanan and his men were absent when Ishmael attacked Mizpah. Gedaliah had served as a neo-Moses, urging the people do not be afraid (40:9) and following Gedaliah’s death, with more than double who fell at Ai – Johanan – the neo-Joshua – was filled with doubt. Gedaliah had advised to gather wine and figs and oil and put them in your own vessels (40:10) which reminds us of Achan, put it in their vessels (Josh. 7:11), breaking faith with the exiled brethren; only a reader of the scroll of Jeremiah sent to the exiles with the Shafanides – Gedaliah, but not Johanan – had reason to assume they would be gone for seventy years (29:10). Then Neo-Achan, Judahite Ishmael, figuratively ‘polluted’ the people before God with his murderous spree. Neo-Joshua questioned whether they could remain in the Land and if God could still ‘be with’ them (a point to which Jeremiah responds directly in 42:11, cf. Joshua 7:12 and the same word, itkhem, in Judges 2:1 at the end of Joshua’s career).

Johanan gathered them near Bethlehem, at Rachel’s tomb,²⁶ referenced by Jeremiah (31:14-16) – within the enclave of Rachel’s descendant Chimham of Manasseh within the portion of Judah.

With Joshua, the successor ‘Judges’ (ad hoc saviors), priests at Shiloh used the Ark, ephod and urim ve-tummim for divination. In the Achan incident as well as in Judges 19-21, and for Saul and David in I and II Samuel, divine response was binary and immediate; silence indicated disapproval of the leader.²⁷

Military divination was a respected science then, championed by Esarhaddon, comprising a quarter of texts in son Ashurbanipal’s library.²⁸ Johanan would have Jeremiah, from the Elide diviner-priest line,²⁹ consult God at Rachel’s tomb – a shrine, so as to serve as a divination site in the temple’s absence – for an immediate answer (42:6). But there was no response that day, or even a week on. Johanan’s fears were confirmed. The neo-Joshua would thus become the anti-Joshua, leading the remnant out of the Promised Land even in the face of Jeremiah’s later divine reply.

Standing Athwart History: Jeremiah I – Samuel Redivivus

Ten days later, God responds to Jeremiah, and the message is unexpected.

God had previously judged that cohort – the people remaining after the 597 BCE deportation were irredeemable ‘bad figs’, explaining Jeremiah’s silence (24:5-10). But suddenly, I will build you and not overthrow, I will plant you and not uproot is applied to that very remnant! The sword, famine and pestilence now strikes those who leave the land, not those who remain (42:8-22).

There is a threefold protasis and apodosis where rhetoric follows Moses, Joshua, and Samuel’s pattern of blessings and curses determined by covenant obedience or disobedience.³⁰ The prophetic opening “Thus said YHWH the God of Israel,” also opens one particular prophecy of Samuel: Samuel summoned the people to God at Mizpah and said to them, “Thus said the Eternal, the God of Israel: ‘I brought Israel out of Egypt, and I delivered you from the hands of the Egyptians and of all the kingdoms that oppressed you.’ But today you have rejected your God who delivered you from all your troubles and calamities. For you said, ‘No, set up a king over us!’. . .” (I Sam. 10:17-19)

Israelite kingship’s ‘original sin’ was denying the Exodus by trusting monarchy over Divine salvation. Now that monarchy has been terminated, if the people could, just this once, demonstrate their reliance on God as their sovereign, then God will finally have been mollified. The cycle of political uncreation can be reversed.

Despite his Elide background, Jeremiah looks to Samuel,³¹ the prophet adopted by Eli (15:1), rather than Elide divinatory ministry amid anarchy, for he sees Shiloh’s ruins remain an admonition (7:12). He preaches prosperity through devotion to God’s will, leading to repatriation and Davidic renewal. But all can be derailed, if the people deny the lesson of the Exodus in the one way they still can: by undoing it. Which is precisely what they proceed to do.

“Denial Is a River in Egypt”: Jeremiah II – Moses Redivivus

Cross-references between Jeremiah and Moses were first noted in rabbinic literature and subsequently in modern scholarship.

[T]here will be, God promised, a prophet like unto thee (Deut. 18:18) in the uttering of reproofs. As a matter of fact, you find that much of what is written of the one, Moses, is written of the other, Jeremiah: the one prophesied forty years, and the other . . . the one prophesied concerning Judah and Israel, and the other . . . the one – people of his own Tribe rose against him, and the other . . .; the one was cast into a river and the other . . . ; the one was saved by a maidservant, the other . . .; finally, the one came with words of reproof, and the other…³²

Also, God (in the rabbinic reading) consigns both to celibacy (Moses after his marriage to Tziporah, begetting two children and separating from Tziporah); both pray for people and are commanded not to; both are bidden to write their words. Phrases from Exodus and Deuteronomy reinforce this parallel.³³

In Egypt, Jeremiah references Moses’ Pentateuchally unmentioned role of reproving the fetishes of Egypt, known through his contemporary Ezekiel (Ezek. 20:5-9). Like Moses in Ezekiel’s telling, Jeremiah fails to curb idolatry. Jeremiah has exhausted his threats, having already promised doom for the Egypt yeridah. In Exodus, Your ancestors went to Egypt seventy persons; and God YHWH made you numerous as heaven’s stars (Deut. 10:22); after Eisodus, Only few survivors of the sword shall return from Egypt to Judah (44:28).

Literarily, this is the final speech of Jeremiah’s – it uses shaked (44:27), creating an inclusio with his first (1:12). And it is a tragic failure – the people do not heed him.

Jeremiah’s prior prophecy was thus fulfilled: God said to me, “Even if Moses and Samuel were to stand before Me, I would not be won over to that people. Dismiss them from My presence, and let them go forth!” (Jer. 15:1). As Samuel or Moses, as an oral prophet, in the almost-final analysis, Jeremiah was a failure.

Throwing the Book (of Kings) at Them: Jeremiah III – Joseph and Judah

TB Bava Batra 15a provides a list of authors of the books of the Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah features prominently: Jeremiah wrote his own book, and the book of Kings, and Lamentations.

The erstwhile Hebrew Bible was insufficient as post-Hurban guide. The book of Kings’ style resembles Babylonian king lists, particularly Chronicle ABC 1 (MC 16-17), widely available in the Neo-Babylonian period.³⁴ Kings used existing archives, but its presentation style is crucial: it responds to diverse weltanschauungen from book-traditions and scribal guilds by contextualizing Temple and royal history in writing, “coda-fying” the Hebrew Bible’s historical books. Not only does it combat the polytheistic understanding of Israel’s recent troubles (44:15-19), framing success and failure as contingent upon fealty to the one God, but it also undermines all of the text-derived fallacies of 40-44:

Contra Azariah and Johanan in rejecting Jeremiah’s Samuelic oration, choosing return to Egypt, expecting safety: the Great Civilization is most uncivil. Pharaohs are exposed as unreliable and subversive, from a daughter corrupting Solomon, fostering rebels, raiding the Temple under Rehoboam, to murder of Josiah and Jehoahaz and Apries’ betrayal during the Nebuchadnezzar conflict.

Contra Johanan as sign-seeking Joshua, divination is absent from Kings. At key moments, Jehoshaphat consults God’s prophets Micaiah and Elisha, and unlike Johanan, shows patience with false starts and delays. Elisha, called Kareah (bald), emerges as one Johanan should have followed – also in a Moses-Joshua relationship, but he dons his mentor’s mantle and reverses Elijah’s Jordan-crossing exile prefiguration.³⁵ Johanan completes the exile, instead.

Contra Ishmael’s re-litigation of the David-Saul vendetta, Jeremiah itself (41:9) explicitly directs readers to Kings. Bloody North-South wars were dreadful, and Jehoshaphat was more righteous than Asa because he ended them. Jehu’s divinely sanctioned massacres failed to qualify him before God. Northern sedition is problematized: their secession was sanctioned by Divine assent through Ahijah the Shilonite, and the South more betrayed the North, enlisting foreign foes – Asa with Aramean Ben-Haddad, and Ahaz with Tiglath Pileser.

Contra Gedaliah’s simple-hearted pursuit of immediate Davidic restoration, Kings reveals: God warned Solomon that Davidic succession was conditional (9:4-5). Regarding Gedaliah’s credulousness, the book records ten assassination plots – kesher, a metathesis for sheker – culminating with Josiah’s father Amon. Any reader of pre-Shafan history would have taken better care.

Backtracking to Jeremiah’s pre-destruction opponents: unlike Isaiah’s time, Kings details how Jeremiah’s followed Manasseh’s irreparably sinful half-century reign, dooming Jerusalem. Chronicles’ account of Manasseh’s repentance (and stories complicating the righteousness of anti-Omride [i.e., anti-syncretist] kings Joash, Amaziah and Uzziah) distracted, and so was omitted.

Also, Kings contextualizes the book of Jeremiah’s messages. The significance of Jehonadab ben Rechab’s asceticism and God’s praise for it (Jer. 34:6-19) becomes clear through the Jehu narrative, where Jehonadab witnesses a bloodbath foreshadowing Ishmael’s actions (10:15-31).

An intertextual connection that may highlight Jeremiah’s ultimate triumph are the thoroughgoing³⁶ parallels to the Joseph story. Avigail Rock showed that linguistic and thematic cross-references become especially prominent in chapters 40-44.³⁷ Like Joseph and his brothers, Jeremiah and the Judahites decamp to Egypt due to familial conflict. When Judah delivers an oration contextualizing their situation to Joseph (Gen. 44:18), Joseph responds by acknowledging divine purpose in his exile to ensure family survival (45:5). Jeremiah’s Kings likewise provides context for the Egyptian Judahites, who then recognize divine sovereignty, prosper, and ultimately support their Babylonian brethren when they return to Jerusalem.

Jeremiah declared negative prophecies reversible (28:8-9). So despite his pronouncements, Jeconiah could redeem himself (52:31-34); likewise even Pharaoh Apries – who subsequently allied with Nebuchadnezzar, which was consonant with Jeremiah’s counsel, and authorized the Temple to Yahō at Elephantine³⁸ after the mercenaries’ revolt, advancing henotheism, then monotheism, among Egyptian Jews. Egypt’s Yahō-worshippers later established ties with Jerusalem’s High Priest and embraced Biblical text, having it translated under the Ptolemies. By Roman times, Philo (Cherubim 49) called himself Jeremiah’s disciple. Egyptian Jewry’s ‘execution’ was thus stayed until Trajan, seven centuries on.

Epilogue: A Textual Commemoration

Jews observed the ‘fast of the seventh’ after these events (Zech. 7:5), later called tzom Gedaliah, on the third of Tishrei. Gedaliah’s assassination begins the ‘ten days of repentance’ of reflection and prayer, centered about text. The Rosh Hashanah musaf-prayer deploys thirty texts as proof for Divine kingship, memory and redemption. The prophet’s voice – Jeremiah as Samuel, Moses and himself – reaches worshipers through text. Throughout this period, amidah-insertions reference the ‘book of life’ – amid uncertainty, worshipers pray that in God’s own text, contra Jeremiah 40-44, Israel will read and be read properly, and inscribed for life.

Footnotes

1. I am indebted to my brother Ariel Holzer, a sounding board for this, and to Prof. Shalom Holtz for critiques of a prior draft. ↩

2. Lifschits argues for complex editorial development while Goldstein favors one editor. See Oded Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem (Eisenbrauns, 2005), 304-359, and Ronnie Goldstein, The Life of Jeremiah [Hebrew] (Mosad Bialik, 2013), 130-157. Re accuracy, see Yair Hoffman, “History and ideology: The case of Jeremiah 44,” JANES 28:1 (2001), 43-51. I am indebted to Prof. Shalom Holtz for these. I presume a unitary editorial process. ↩

3. William M. Schniedewind, Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes (Princeton University Press, 2024); idem., The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩

4. Barry Schwartz, “Rethinking the concept of collective memory,” Routledge international handbook of memory studies (Routledge, 2015), 8-21, 15. ↩

5. Robert P. Carroll, in J. Cheryl Exum, and David JA Clines, eds., “Intertextuality and the Book of Jeremiah: Animadversions on Text and Theory,” The new literary criticism and the Hebrew bible (JSOT Press, 1993): 55-78, 69. ↩

6. Dalit Rom-Shiloni, “Jeremiah and inner biblical exegesis,” in Louis Stulman and Edward Silver, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Jeremiah (Oxford University Press, 2021), 282-308. ↩

7. Idem., Exclusive inclusivity: identity conflicts between the exiles and the people who remained (6th-5th centuries BCE) (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013); Voices from the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2021). ↩

8. Mark Leuchter, The polemics of exile in Jeremiah 26-45 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 122. ↩

9. Yaakov Medan, Haftarat Behar: Emunat Yirmiyahu ba-Geulah, May 10, 2022, archived at https://etzion.org.il/he/tanakh/neviim/sefer-yirmeyahu/haftarat-behar and accessed August 26, 2024. ↩

10. Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel (Princeton University Press, 2017), 82-83. ↩

11. Céline Debourse, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), 51-72. ↩

12. See Tova Ganzel, “First-Month Rituals in Ezekiel’s Temple Vision: A Pentateuchal and Babylonian Comparison,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 83:3 (2021), 390-406, regarding akītu elements in Ezekiel. ↩

13. Samuel Yeivin, “Families and Parties in the Kingdom of Jehuda,” Tarbiz 12:4 (1941), 241–267. ↩

14. Schniedewind, Who Really Wrote, 68. ↩

15. See summary in Noah Whitney David Crabtree, The Prophet from Anathoth: Benjamin-Judahite Identity Negotiation and the Formation of the Book of Jeremiah, PhD. Diss. (The Johns Hopkins University, 2023). ↩

16. Joseph Blenkinsopp, in Russell Hobson, “Jeremiah 41 and the Ammonite Alliance,” JHS 10:7 (2010), 1-15, 6. ↩

17. Schniedewind, Who Really Wrote, 87-88. ↩

18. Gary E. Yates, “Biblical studies: Ishmael’s assassination of Gedaliah: Echoes of the Saul-David story in Jeremiah 40:7-41:18,” The Westminster Theological Journal 67:1 (2005), 103-112. ↩

19. Hobson, ibid., 14. ↩

20. See Zev Farber, Images of Joshua in the Bible and their Reception (de Gruyter, 2016), 109-122. ↩

21. Daniels, Quinn, “Inscribing the Northern Kingdom of Israel’s Eastern and Southern Interests,” Archaeology and Bible: 61-97. ↩

22. Schniedewind, The Finger, 131. ↩

23. Joachim J. Krause, “Post mortem mosi: conceptualizing leadership in the book of Joshua,” in Katharina Pyschny and Sarah Schulz, eds., Debating Authority: Concepts of Leadership in the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets (de Gruyter, 2018), 193-205. ↩

24. Yaakov Medan, Ki Karov Eilekha: Be-Midbar (Yedioth Aharonoth, 2021), 257-260. ↩

25. Nili Wazana, “The Fear Factor: The Motif of Fear in Joshua 1–12 in the Light of ANE Sources,” Die Welt Des Orients 51:1 (2021), 100-115. ↩

26. Nadav Na’aman, “The Settlement of the Ephrathites in Bethlehem and the Location of Rachel’s Tomb,” Revue Biblique 121:4 (2014), 514-529, Hagai Ben-Artzi, “Where is our Matriarch Rachel Buried? A New Study” (Heb), Bar Ilan Daf Shevu’i 893 (December 2010). ↩

27. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, “The Power of Revelation in 1–2 Samuel,” Political Theologies in the Hebrew Bible (Brill Schöningh, 2023), 227-241. ↩

28. Krzysztof Ulanowski, Neo-Assyrian and Greek Divination in War (Brill, 2020), 38-39. ↩

29. For the irony in this, see Keith Bodner, “An Ironic Overture in the Book of Jeremiah,” Irony in the Bible: Between Subversion and Innovation (Brill, 2023), 217-228. ↩

30. Walter Brueggemann, A commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and homecoming (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), 389. ↩

31. William L. Holladay, “The Background of Jeremiah’s Self-Understanding: Moses, Samuel, and Psalm 22,” JBL 83:2 (1964), 153-164. See other textual links between the two prophets in Graeme Auld, “Jeremiah-Manasseh-Samuel: Significant Triangle? Or Vicious Circle?,” in Hans M. Barstad and Reinhard G. Kratz, eds., Prophecy in the Book of Jeremiah (de Gruyter, 2009), 1-10. ↩

32. William G. Braude and Israel J. Kapstein, Pesikta de-Rab Kahana (Jewish Publication Society of America, 2002), 342 (13:6). ↩

33. Benedetta Rossi, “Reshaping Jeremiah: Scribal strategies and the prophet like Moses,” JSOT 44:4 (2020), 575-593. ↩

34. Paolo Merlo, “Babylonian Historiographic Tradition in the Book of Kings,” Biblica 100:4 (2019), 594-600. ↩

35. Elhanan Samet, Pirkei Eliyahu [Hebrew] (Yediot Aharonot, 2009), 500. ↩

36. Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary (Westminster Press, 1986), especially 703. ↩

37. “Reflection stories” to the events of Joseph and his brothers in the book of Jeremiah and their meaning (Hebrew), archived at https://www.hatanakh.com/lessons/סיפורי-בבואה-למאורעות-יוסף-ואחיו-בספר-ירמיהו-ומשמעותם and accessed on September 7, 2024. ↩

38. Hussein Bassir, “Neshor at Elephantine in Late Saite Egypt,” Journal of Egyptian History 9:1 (2016), 66-95. ↩