Who is Jeremiah’s direct audience? Although he lives and preaches in Jerusalem and addresses the locals his messages are also intended to reach beyond the borders. Some of his prophetic words are directed at those who remain of the Kingdom of Israel way up north. The language he uses in just one verse in today’s chapter indicates that he is also talking to the exiled Judeans, already in Babylon - and they don’t speak Hebrew anymore. There’s more than one verse in a foreign tongue hidden here, though. There’s an entire book ascribed to Jeremiah that few of us know anything about.
The context of this chapter is the ridicule of idol-worship. Jeremiah, like Isaiah before him, mocks the making of gods from trees that are crafted by artists, covered with gold. Man-made gods, he mocks, are like “a scarecrow in a cucumber patch.”
That’s when he slips into Aramaic - providing us the only sentence fully in Aramaic to be found in the Hebrew Bible - other than the later books of Nehemiah and Daniel. Why the sudden Aramaic which was the common language used by Assyrian elite and the rest of the non-Judean world? What this verse is telling us is more about its context than its content. Who are the ‘they’ addressed here? The answer to this question also gives us a hint to this mystery.
Robert Alter comments: “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 in Aramaic to their pagan captors.”
But what’s interesting about this communication with the exiled Judeans is that it’s not just this verse -- there is an entire lesser known book, not included in the Hebrew Bible, that is attributed to Jeremiah, and is addressed to his exiled siblings.
The Letter of Jeremiah, 72 verses long, is attributed to the prophet - allegedly written to the Jews who were about to be carried away as captives to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. It can be found in the Roman Catholic Bible, is included in Orthodox Bibles as its own book, and can be found in the Apocrypha of the Authorized Version. In the Greek Septuigant it is added to the Book of Lamentations, and fragments of this Greek edition were already found in the Dead Sea Caves. It seems not to have been deemed important enough to be considered for inclusion in the Hebrew Bible.
The main message of the letter is a warning against worshiping the local deities and forgetting the one true god. Biblical scholar Bruce M. Metzger suggests that "one might perhaps characterize it as an impassioned sermon which is based on verse 11 in the 10th chapter from the canonical Book of Jeremiah."
The irony of course is that while fighting hard against religious and cultural assimilation, Jeremiah (or whoever wrote this verse of letter in his name) is using the popular language of the empire to convey his message beyond the insular circle of the Hebrew-speaking Judeans. The particular-universal tensions that define Jewish identity go back to the very origins. Jeremiah is aware of the power of words and warns the people of loyalty to smooth talk that will lead them away from their ancestral legacy. In verse 8 of the letter he warns: “As for the idols’ tongue, it is polished by the workman, and they are gilded and laid over with silver; yet are they but false, and cannot speak.”
But did they listen? It’s hard to tell. Aramaic will prevail over Hebrew as the official language, for some time, and while the unseen deity of Israel would still proclaim the power through prophetic mouths - many of those left in Judah or already in Babylon will be lured into the local culture, just as they will adopt the language of the land. In many ways, these tensions still persist, as English and its terms replace the language of the ancestors for most Jews on the planet these days, and the divine message and meaning conveyed through many different veils.
But Jeremiah, tireless iconoclast, will continue trying, vision by vision, word by word. Mostly in Hebrew. Mostly in vain.
Then, like now, the people will keep saying, in many tongues - In the Man-Made God of Gold - more than the Spirit - We Trust.
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