Canter Bridge

When the Bible traffics in unconditional promises and everlasting guarantees, the modern reader easily loses the thread. This is in part because our view of history is less dramatic than that assumed by large portions of the biblical narrative.

We read such promise as verbal guarantee of an uninterrupted status quo. On the contrary, the narrative itself posits a dilemma that YHWH cannot or will not leave unresolved. Its point of reference is not the each-minute-of-all-minutes status of a promise, but rather the final outcome of history or of some large segment of history. YHWH is presumed to rule sovereignly over the story and to promise that a certain outcome will stand. It is understood that interruption and hiatus will from time to time be the experience of the people, a matter that creates both tension and expectation. (more…)

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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. (more…)

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Jeremiah comes down to us not only as the weeping prophet. He is also a most realistic seer.

The text allows us to intuit the presence of many prophetic good-timers, making their rounds in the streets of besieged Jerusalem and claiming against the evidence of the Babylonian troops just over the wall that YHWH would never allow his prime-time city to be destroyed. They proclaimed an imminent miracle, an inviolable city, and an unconditional divine choice. (more…)

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