Canter Bridge

With an unusual dramatic touch, Jeremiah faces off against a YHWH-prophet whose message of good news and spectacular deliverance from the Babylonian besieger must have sounded with a welcome ring in encircled Jerusalem. Hananiah’s symbolic and verbal artistry can be understood in a manner that aligns them with the more lyric moments of the book of Isaiah or even the consoling passages within the book of Jeremiah itself.

Yet Jeremiah calls them sheqer. They are for the considered tradition that places them before us the worst of lies, the empty promise of a prophet who has become decoupled from the severity of YHWH’s recompense for the debased people that it is Jeremiah’s lot to serve with harsher sentences.

The reader who wants a bit of dramatic relief, the believer who comes to a text like this hoping that things cannot get this bad, that eleventh-hour salvation is always forthcoming, all of these will depart this passage either challenged to think differently or put off by Jeremiah and depressed by the book that bears his name.

It seems terribly ungracious to speak so finally of Babylon’s ‘yoke of iron’, replacing as it does the ‘yoke of wood’ that was Jeremiah’s prophetic prop until the well-spoken Hananiah shattered it in episodic promise that YHWH is always the de-yoker, the un-slaver, the liberator of his Israel.

For Jeremiah, such a one-dimensional perception of the divine presence that haunts Israel’s history is just one thing: sheqer. He has no mitigated, nuanced word for it. Hananiah and his ilk traffic splendidly in good news lies.

There is a moment, says Jeremiah through the heavy darkness of the moment, when the best one can do is to serve the Babylonians. YHWH in that passage of his impassioned accompaniment of his Israel has grown too weary of the game for any changing of mind.