1. The poetic oracles, the biographical prose, and the "C" material, prose speeches felt to have style and concerns in common with the writer of Deuteronomy (Louis Stulman has complained that Duhm and others "treat the 'C' materials with some disdain").

2. He divides it only according to its meaning: Chapters 1 through 25, 26 through 45, and 46 through 51. Chapter 25 is his critical turning point, his "hinge." This is not all unique to Kessler, and only the beginning of the subdivision possible to the text; particularly chs. 1-25 are often addressed as a unit. Louis Stulman, as an example, further divides that into four or five "Macro-Structural Units" framed by chs. 1 and 25, which act as "a temporal edifice for the punctilinear poetry (and prose) of chs. 2-24." But Kessler's scheme is a simple and sturdy one for the beginning student to latch onto, so for the nonce I have.

3. In discussing the meaning of any symbolic action by Jeremiah, we would be remiss not to consult with Jeremiah's and Ezekiel's Sign-Acts by Kelvin Friebel, a book devoted entirely to the somatic antics of these contemporary prophets. But we are disappointed. No sooner does Friebel name the passage than he dismisses it as never having happened, and there is no further discussion of it than what can be contained in a single prodigious footnote. In this note he offers four reasons (though he numbers them five) to regard the passage as entirely figurative.

First, he complains that the sword and cup are a mixed metaphor (precisely the oddity that inspired the present paper). But this presumes that the sword and cup are interchangeable in meaning, a question I do not regard as settled. Moreover it is not clear why a prophet might not enact half of a mixed metaphor. Jeremiah is told only to carry a literal cup while warning, verbally, of a sword that is to come.

Next Friebel cites the occurrence of "the hand of Yahweh" as a sure sign that the passage is a vision, rather than an event literally enacted. Twice the divine hand is mentioned. But its role is the most passive one could ask for, an indirect object, holding the cup only, nothing like its primary-actor significance in the volley of mentions by Ezekiel that Friebel cites on page 32. And not one of the other conditions he's earlier listed for regarding a passage as vision rather than sign-act is present here.

Third, the extensive list of foreign nations to which Jeremiah is to convey the cup is deemed "hyperbolic." But Friebel himself simultaneously accepts that Jeremiah has traveled personally to the Euphrates just to bury his underwear! Or rather, he doubts any such trip--but in order to discuss the loincloth passage anyway, he performs a strongarmed interpretative twist, concluding that Jeremiah made use of some nearby river merely to "allude" to the Euphrates. This conclusion, apparently, is based only on the inconvenience of literal travel and the lack of any specific textual indication of a location in Babylon--or any beyond the name of the river itself, which he admits is specific.

A bit of interpretation, certainly not more strained than that, can easily save Jeremiah another long hike in 25:17-26, and Friebel himself holds the key to it. In discussing Jeremiah's yoke in chapter 27, Friebel laboriously reconstructs the meeting of foreign delegates, come together perhaps to plot against Babylon. Just as Friebel has Jeremiah delivering custom-made yokes to each representative, Jeremiah could have taken advantage of a time like this, even the very same period, to appear before a number of foreign dignitaries with his cup and his challenge. He is never instructed to travel to the many listed countries, after all, but only to "make all the nations to whom I send you drink it." Will an envoy not do for a king in the case of a cup as well as in the case of a yoke?

Friebel's fourth and fifth reasons amount to a single argument, which is that a rival reading of the passage can be supported with nearby verses, and that he favors this reading--which interprets Jeremiah's account of performing a metaphorical action as itself a metaphor for being a prophet in general. But at the risk of being flip, there is always another plausible reading (as shown in the preceding paragraph). One gets the feeling that Friebel simply isn't interested in the passage.

It is not my errand to show that Jeremiah did in fact carry a cup around. But it seems to me that given the frustrating reality of Jeremiah--its lack of corroborating sources--if he says he did (and it was clearly his wont to employ props of that sort) it seems far from obvious that he did not. And it being reasonably debatable, it is a loss to deny the passage Friebel's thoroughgoing scrutiny.

4. There are a few passages in Jeremiah that look like traces of this idea of conditionality; in 15:2 a simple little poem is recorded that enumerates the familiar trio of disasters--sword, famine, and pestilence--often mentioned by Jeremiah, and then adds an option not usually included, captivity, as its conclusion. Nowhere on the list is freedom; but of course submission to captivity is precisely Jeremiah's prescription for those who would avoid worse fates.

5. There is actually some reason for suspicion that a sort of wordplay is going on in the Hebrew. Here, let it be understood, I am well and truly out of my depth. But here is what little I know.

The oddity begins, for me, in the final verse of chapter 25. For the penultimate line, the RSV gives "because of the sword of the oppressor." The Tanakh, for the same line, gives "because of the oppressive wrath." Somehow the same word can be rendered both as "wrath" and as "sword"?

"Sword" is simple enough: . "Wrath" is a little harder, since there are a handful of possible synonyms. ("anger") couldn't be mistaken for , surely, but perhaps ("heat; rage, wrath; poison") could conceivably be in the ballpark, depending how elastic the rules are in Hebrew poetry. Closer yet is a verb, , "to become angry," which depending on its conjugation might bear a greater or lesser resemblance to . Looking these things over I had particularly high hopes that , as a masculine singular third-person perfect, might be the right kind of verb to conjugate to , and resemble very closely indeed.

This guess proved ill-founded, in the end. According to the JPS side-by-side Hebrew and English Tanakh, the word in question is , and what's more it's the very same word (well, with a slight variation in vowel markings) as is translated (in both texts) as "anger" in the next and final line. Does that sound similar enough to to pass for a double entendre? Something induced a translator to render it "sword." Geoffrey Parke-Taylor notes in passing (p21) that , a segolate noun, might originally have read which perhaps sounds a little more like . Unless the Hebrew ear, tuned to consonants, is dissuaded from making a play on words without all the consonants lining up.

Then again, when I asked a helpful Hebrew-speaking librarian to translate the line for me, she peered through her glasses at it and matter-of-factly read out, "because of the anger of the pigeon." Little is definite in this language.

It must also be noted, that, back in 25:15, it turns out to be in that cup, aside from wine. Surely it is wrath, but can it be an accident that the same word might legitimately be rendered "poison"? Could these three ideas--wrath, a sword, and poisonous wine--have been to some extent associated already in the tradition Jeremiah and his audience were familiar with? If wrath can be a sword, and wrath can also be poison to drink, then an artful prophet has his tools laid out for him if he wishes to present his people with a choice of two forms YHWH's wrath can take.

6. Parke-Taylor asserts (p22) that this formula was becoming standardized over the course of Jeremiah's long editorial process, and notes the preeminence of "'the sword' as the predicted agent of destruction" (p21). This is still the same metaphorical sword, in any event.

7. see 47:7.

8. Again Jeremiah is sent to a (moderately) foreign people with wine to thrust upon them. But this time it is good that the wine be refused. Could Jeremiah, or his editor, possibly have told the story of his visit to the Rechabites without being reminded of the other time he was sent as a cup-bearing emissary? Who would draw up such a conspicuously parallel account without using it to comment in any way on its antecedent? In any event this wine is nothing but wine, without metaphorical significance at all; it is the Rechabites' loyalty to their father that is the symbol within YHWH's larger discourse on Judah.

9. What does it mean for non-Israelite nations to drink YHWH's wrath? Their submission to YHWH's judgement seems a lot to ask. Then again, people are sometimes willing to appease the neighbors' gods, or YHWH wouldn't have such complaints to make about his people burning incense to Baal and pouring out libations to the queen of heaven. What ever did happen when Jeremiah carried the cup of wrath to the nations, after all? He tells us in 25:17 that he carried out this duty, but he brings back no report of the response. Did any of the nations consent to drink? Perhaps the nations against whom Jeremiah's oracles never specify a sword, or those whose fortunes YHWH promises to restore in the latter days (a different set)? Or is Jeremiah's silence on the response of the nations the best sign that Friebel is right, and he never carried any cup to anyone?

10. 51:39 and 51:57 raise a different, subtler question: why turn the image of poisonous drunkenness against the Babylonians at all? What choice has ever been laid before them? At no time in the book of Jeremiah has any instruction been issued for the attention of Babylon; they are, in fact, doing exactly as YHWH wishes, and then getting punished for it without any conditionality at all. Strangely, in the last verses of Jeremiah's cataclysmic oracle against them, these mild-sounding threats of intoxication are included--and references to the sword are not.

As in the case of chapter 35, I am helpless to explain why Jeremiah, or any editor of his, would muddy a working metaphor this way. Perhaps a later editor, beginning to understand the cup of wrath as a direct curse, added these verses to a text that previously used the image more sensitively. Or perhaps, of course, there was never any idea of conditionality in the first place--but I don't believe these puzzling instances in chapter 51 are enough to dispel all evidence in favor of it.

11. Everything is more complicated, of course, on the other side of the line: to seek (as Duhm and his historicist successors do) for the original intention of each author, sorting one inferred writer from another, is to resign oneself to settling for unverifiable theories. To make matters worse, Duhm himself is no help to me, nor is his like-minded contemporary S. Mowinckel; as far as I am able to make out, neither author's book on Jeremiah has ever been translated from German to English.

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