Jeremiah under the Shadow of Duhm

About this book

"Jeremiah Under the Shadow of Duhm argues against a basic assumption of modern Jeremiah scholarship: that poetic form indicates authenticity. This assumption, introduced by Bernhard Duhm (1901) is founded on the Romantic identification of prophecy and poetry pioneered by Robert Lowth (1753). Duhm's assumption allowed him to create a biography of Jeremiah that closely resembles a Romantic Bildungsroman and a history of composition that brings the book into conformity with a reconstruction of Israel's religious history rooted in Romantic historicism. Although Duhm's compositional model and historical aims dominated Jeremiah scholarship for much of the twentieth century, in recent decades scholars have attempted to 'move beyond Duhm' to find literary coherence in the book. Unfortunately, their continued reliance on Duhm's assumption (to facilitate the use of poetic speeches as biographical evidence or of prose speeches as a unifying redactional frame) has kept them from recognizing the dramatic function of the speeches in Jeremiah 2-20. Jeremiah 2-10 and 11-20 emerge from Duhm's shadow as unified literary creations characterized by dramatic presentation and narrative progression"--