In Alter’s introduction he points out a few traits that are unique about the Book of Jeremiah. First, Alter gets into a bit of history. “Of all the prophets, Jeremiah is the one who conveys to us the most vivid sense of the man behind the words…. Jeremiah, a priest from the town of Anathoth near Jerusalem who was active from the 620s B.C.E. until the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586, tells us a good deal about himself because of his continual anguish over his prophetic calling…. A century before the beginning of Jeremiah’s mission, the northern kingdom of Israel had been overwhelmed by Assyrian invaders. A large part of the population was deported to sundry locations elsewhere in the Assyrian empire…. The other major event that stamped a strong mark on Jeremiah’s prophecies was the sweeping religious reforms instigated by King Josiah beginning around 622 B.C.E…. The exclusive centralization of the cult was thus associated with Deuteronomy’s persistent preoccupation with backsliding into paganism and with the notion that the worship of strange gods would lead directly to national disaster and exile as punishment for the people’s failure to honor the covenant with its God…. All this is translated into Jeremiah’s central message…. So often Jeremiah’s prophecies are bitter denunciations of the people’s wayward behavior accompanied by dire predictions that this will lead to scorched earth for the kingdom of Judah and exile for its inhabitants…. This sort of message, delivered at a time when Babylonian forces (597 B.C.E. and again in 587-586) were besieging Jerusalem, could not have made Jeremiah a very popular figure.” Alter describes the language in the Book of Jeremiah specifically, “As a poet he does not exhibit a great deal of either the verbal virtuosity of Isaiah son of Amoz or the metaphoric brilliance of Second Isaiah…. Many of the poems use stereotypical phrases, and a considerable portion of the prophecies is delivered in prose.”
In Jeremiah 1:15, Alter relates what he sees as the deficient poetical style of this prophet, “each set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem…. What emerges is a rather surrealistic picture of kings on their thrones sitting in siege against Jerusalem. It should be noted that many scholars, including the editors of the Biblia Hebraica, read all or most of the section beginning with verse 14 as poetry. To this translator, however, all these verses do not seem to be sufficiently tight metrically to qualify as verse; however, as is often the case with high-rhetorical prose, they exhibit loose approximations of the parallel structures of poetry.”
The Book of Jeremiah, like the Book of Deuteronomy, is focused on blasphemous and idolatrous acts more than worldly wrongs. Alter states of Jeremiah 2:34, “the lifeblood of the innocent poor. Remarkably, this is the very first reference in the book to a sin of perpetrating injustice rather than a cultic trespass.” The notion of exile first comes up in Jeremiah 5:19. Alter relates, “thus shall you serve strangers in a land that is not yours. Here the prophecy of exile—an immanent threat throughout Jeremiah’s career—is made explicit. Serving strangers is measure-for-measure retribution for serving alien gods.”
The issue of the worship of pagan gods is a theme that is returned to again and again. In Jeremiah 10:6, Alter points out, “Because none is like you, O LORD. In antithesis to the absurdity of idol worship, the prophet launches on a kind hymn to God’s greatness. The phrase “none like you, O LORD” echoes the “Who is like You among the gods, O LORD” of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:11), but, significantly, “among the gods” is deleted because Jeremiah, at this relatively late moment, no longer imagines that there may be other, punier gods alongside YHWH.”
Alter kindly details random points of interest in his footnotes. In Jeremiah 10:11, “Thus shall you say to them. This entire verse is in Aramaic, being the only complete sentence in Aramaic in the Hebrew Bible apart from the Aramaic sections of Nehemiah and Daniel. There have been suggestions from Late Antiquity onward that Jeremiah is addressing the group of Judahites exiled to Babylonia in 597 B.C.E., who would have been constrained to speak Aramaic to their pagan captors.” Alter also describes translation decisions and his reasonings in his detailed notes. In Jeremiah 17:9, he reveals, “More crooked the heart than all things. While the adjective ‘aqov certainly suggests “deceitful,” as many translations reflect, the root meaning of “crooked” is worth preserving. This is an etymology of Jacob’s name, as the angry Esau reminds us in Genesis 27:36.” Alter also notes when the scripture holds greater historical significance. In Jeremiah 18:6, he relates, “like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand. This entire sentence was imported for an impressive liturgical poem in the Yom Kippur service. The symbolic use of the potter harks back to the version of creation of humankind in Genesis 2, where God fashioned—the potter’s verb yatsar is used—the human creature from the soil.”
In Jeremiah 25:17, Alter describes an unusual occurrence in prophecy, “And I took the cup from the hand of the LORD. This is a bold and quite uncommon move: the metaphoric cup of wrath seems to become an actual cup that the prophet takes from God’s hand. Such quasiphysical proximity between God and prophet is altogether unusual. But since the cup is, after all, symbolic, the prophet’s taking it from the hand of the LORD finally must be understood as a purely figurative act, and that understanding is confirmed by his making the nations drink from it, an act that could not be literally performed.”
Finally, Alter notes a poetic exception from common biblical form in Jeremiah 50:25, “for the LORD of Armies has a task / in the land of the Chaldeans. This is a striking instance in which instead of the usual semantic parallelism in the second half of the line of poetry, a surprise is sprung. The word “task” in itself might seem innocuous, but when it is followed by “in the land of the Chaldeans,” and after the mention of weapons of wrath, the task turns out to be a grim mission of destruction throughout Babylonia.”
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