Priestly John, the jester

Olga Fabrikant-Burke asks after Jeremiah's false prophets.

Jeremiah exists in two versions, everyone-else's and the Greeks'. So his Divine word comes to us after much skub already. Even the pure-r Greek is, itself, a product of earlier skub because, if nothing else, not all those translators were on the level. OFB is excavating deep. But let's hear her out.

Jeremiah's foil was one "Hananiah". OFB is looking into "Hananiah's" speeches and finds them to depend on Jeremiah's own words. She believes the easiest solution is that Hananiah exists, only, to be the parody and ape of Jeremiah. Hananiah even acts as (malicious) exegete of the Divine Word. And the easiest solution to that, is that Hananiah never existed in the material plane; that he is a narrative character, of Jeremiah's narrative editor. Traditionally Baruch.

To back her up, somewhat, I propose that a court prophet shouldn't happen. I've noted here that the Zionist court by then owned plenty of homespun pious text: the Deuteronomist, his History up to Josiah, and a royal(ist) Psalter. Jeremiah would have inherited, in such courtly literature: YHWH's Rescue Of Jerusalem under Hezeqiah, and then the great religious restoration under Josiah. Josiah's thus-theocratic court could call upon its priests. The Deuteronomist, as OFB notes, had warned against false prophets. The priests would then call out Jeremiah as being the false prophet here exactly because he claims prophecy, which "we don't need anymore".

If Jeremiah's Hananiah didn't exist, his scribe Baruch has permitted to us critics a similar authorial-liberty. We may imagine our own character - as the court's fool. Maybe call him... "John". At least allied to that clumsy author of Psalm 78, if you read this blog.

Jeremiah, living in times of priestcraft, also inherited a prophetic tradition. But then so had the priests. At first Josiah's priests might have trouble with the (vast) antiAssyrian rantings of Amos, Hosea, and of Nahum and Isaiah 1-33 (latter who, might be the same guy). After Josiah though, all those rantings could be repurposed. The Syrians will tell Herodotus how Babylon may as well be Assyria's new capital. Jeremiah could look like he was preaching a gospel alien to that of Nahum, more like the position of weak king Ahaz and of puppet Manasseh (there was yet no "penance of Manasses").

In hindsight Jeremiah was proven right. If John existed, and I allow a clown like him could exist, his japes got reinterpreted in the light of False Prophecy. He got promoted, if you will, from the weapon of the loyal priests, to the mouthpiece of Melkor.