Duhm,Mowinckel,and a Disempowered King: Protestant Liberal Theological Analysis in Jeremiah's Construction of Jehoiachin

Jehoiachin and his Oracle

By all accounts, King Jehoiachin in Judah is a most unremarkable and unimpressive character receiving little or no mention in Bible dictionaries or Hebrew Bible/Old Testament introductions (Waltke; Tappy; Hayes: xiv, 186, 298, 364; Collins: 340; Arnold & Williamson). His name is probably a throne name given to show his vassal-status, and he appears also as Coniah and Jeconiah (Honeyman). In the canonical account of the Hebrew Bible, he appears only briefly and his main purpose in the Biblical history seems to be that he was the king who surrendered to king Nebuchadnezzar. He was about 18 when he ascended the throne and reigned for little more than three months. He appears as the penultimate figure in Israel's history in the Chronicler and the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH). Importantly, however, he is the final king to receive a judgment oracle in Jeremiah 21:11–23:8 (known as the “King Collection”). The oracle against Jehoiachin reads:

‘The severity of this oracle stands in contrast with the treatment Jehoiachin receives in the rest of the book of Jeremiah, especially chapter 52. This highlights the seriousness of the problem in that it could be used to undermine Jeremiah's legitimacy, given the test of the true prophet in Deuteronomy 18, a test to which Jeremiah submitted himself in Jeremiah 37 (Roncace: 120–22). Following the lead of most critical interpretations, the first half of the judgment appears in prose, reflected in the paragraph style of the NRSV in English. The final three verses appear in poetic form, reflecting the critical consensus that the oracle is a compilation of both prose and poetry. Since the groundbreaking critical foundation laid by Bernhard Duhm, this is a standard way of trying to separate out redactional layers in the canonical text. According to this methodology, poetry signifies an earlier stage in the development of the text, closer to, if not actually, the words of the prophet Jeremiah himself. Most scholars believe that later scribal editors, following the lead of Baruch and Seraiah, sons of Shaphan (hence “Shaphanides”), added the prose sections. 2 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 34 report that Shaphan was the royal secretary (from several generations of royal secretaries) who discovered the Book of the Law in the Temple. According to Jeremiah 26:24, one of Shaphan's sons became an important and powerful protector of Jeremiah during the siege of Jerusalem. Two of his most prominent sons, Baruch and Seraiah, appear to have become caretakers of the Jeremiah archives in exile, in Egypt and Babylon respectively (Lundbom 1996; Brueggemann; Tov: 145–67; Carroll; Craigie, Kelly, & Drinkard, Jr.; Lundbom 1999).

Duhm, Mowinckel and the Oracle against Jehoiachin

Bernhard Duhm, the seminal figure in critical Jeremiah studies, postulated three sources for the contents of the canonical book of Jeremiah: the actual words of the prophet, poetry (source A); the words of his scribe, Baruch (source B), which were reliably biographical; and the words of later editors or redactors (source C) (Kugel 2007: 561; Hill: 3; Carroll: 32–35). In Duhm's opinion, Baruch

It is indeed true that, in specific areas, scholarship has progressed far beyond this initial critical framework (Thiel 1981; Weippert 1973; Maier 2002; Lundbom 2004; Stipp 1999; Fischer 1998; Fischer 1991). However, the precise problem here is the removal of the idea of disempowered king as a hermeneutical category, a direct result of Protestant liberalism's rejection of the foolishness of the cross, noted by Foucault above.

In Duhm's seminal work, Das Buch Jeremia, he describes his framework's liberating power, a framework that sometimes remains intact without much critical review (Childs 1977: 75):

Yet Duhm remained puzzled because “The book … like an unattended forest, grows and spreads itself (Duhm 1901: xx).

He expressed confusion over the fact that the book contained “the most glorious prophetic poems as well as pieces of rather low quality, an apparently significant thought content associated with a remarkably clumsy form” (Duhm 1901: vii).

It was not a new observation about the prophets, but one that Luther had first expressed (Luther: 152). However, what does this mean for Duhm's interpretation of the oracle against Jehoiachin? Most of the text falls away as “inauthentic,” or, at best a mixture of authentic and inauthentic, based on literary style. Even though he acknowledged that Baruch, whom he regards as reliable, if somewhat boring, was probably the one who merged the original Jeremianic poems together, such as we see in 22:24–27, 28–30, he regards only verses 24 and 28 as genuine (Duhm 1901: 179–80). Verse 25 is a later addition which is not worthy of the style of a great man like Jeremiah. One can see Duhm's reasoning process at work, though without explanation of its grounding, in this passage

If one does not agree with Duhm one has no sense of style! Verses 29–30 are a matter of pure indifference to Jeremiah, who, according to Duhm, believed that the entire matter of Jehoiachin ended when he went into captivity (Duhm 1901: 180). They were words that would interest only the curious, a cheap prediction after the fact (Duhm 1901: 180; Hermisson: 254; Thiel 1973). Thus, for Duhm, evaluating literary style became the way to separate the true words of the prophet from his interpreter Baruch and all later editors and redactors.

Nowhere in his biblical studies, however, does he tell us his standard for judging literary style, although he does not hesitate to criticize other scholars for their lack of it (Duhm 1901: xxii). One could assume that Duhm and his audience shared a collective understanding of what constituted good literary style—that which was acceptable to educated European elites in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. However, he published another book in which one may deduce his criteria for style, The Ever-Coming Kingdom of God. In that book, he makes the following statements:

This may remind one of Hegel and Nietzsche, in which case Duhm wants to take us to Jesus as the (purely human) one who stands for the final Synthesis (thus Arianism). Jesus thus repristinates and updates the older prophetic style of Jeremiah, which had been eclipsed by Ezekiel and his scribes (Duhm 1911: 43–47). For Duhm, Jeremiah's spirit is that which asserts its dominance in the name of Yahweh, using the emblems of the signet ring and the vessel in the oracle against Jehoiachin, both symbolic actions of royal power in ancient near East, as the markers of his authentic words (Friebel: 119–20). It could appear problematic that Duhm has not revealed to his readers his clear appropriation of Hegel and Nietzsche into Christian theology. However, that would be to misunderstand the Zeitgeist of his time, as Aschheim argues:

The use of religious myth as a reaction against Christianity was not new, having been a tactic of Julian's in his polemic against the Christians (Limberis: 385–86). Moreover, just as with Julian, the idea of myth served the purposes of empire, a point Williamson argues in reference to Germany (Williamson: 9).

Mowinckel and his Legacy

Duhm's successor in Jeremiah studies was Sigmund Mowinckel, who emphasized the existential experience of the word as he imagined the prophet would have experienced. Building on Duhm, Mowinckel added a fourth source, D, an additional source of later redactions (although it is interesting to note that while Mowinckel was adding sources for Jeremiah, he became less convinced of the E source in the classical documentary hypothesis.) (Mowinckel 1914: 22, 24, 31, 52). Further, Mowinckel added redactors for each source, thus increasing to at least eight the number of hands involved in the production of the text (Mowinckel 1914: 18). This is an important progression—the more literary-critical studies progressed, the more they tended to see differences that in turn pointed to different sources. Mowinckel did, however, point out that it was increasingly difficult to identify different sources by literary criticism the further one was removed from the chronological time of the prophet, and that the purpose of source identification was not to determine “authentic” versus “inauthentic,” but rather to discern earlier versus later additions to the text (Mowinckel 1959: 111). Mowinckel, as his thought progressed, became more aware of this danger of scholarship dissolving into an endless process of source-division so that one could never understand the developed tradition (Mowinckel 2002: 8–9).

Still, in one important way, Mowinckel carried forward and modified Duhm's legacy: he believed in the primacy of the oral tradition as carried by the charismatic, ecstatic prophet (an idea that probably originated from some ideas of New Testament prophecy, but as Schniedewind observes in the debate between David Aune and E. E. Ellis on this issue, this does not appear to be a reliable picture of New Testament prophets and prophecy [Schniedewind: 244–45]). Scholars tend to forget this part of Mowinckel's research in an analysis of his work. At the core of Mowinckel's project was the desire to go behind the text and find once again the primitive charismatic ecstatic in which the spirit of true religion remained. He sees this figure particularly in a scene he imagines from Jeremiah:

Never mind the fact (as he admits) that this never actually happened, or that examples of behavior even approaching this rarely appear in the canonical text. Further, what Mowinckel describes is more in keeping with the reaction against Christianity much later in the revival of pagan prophetic practice by Iamblichus in the 3^rd century (Makrides: 153–54). In fact, for Mowinckel the very lack of this evidence points to the absolute ascendancy of the written text over the charismatic spirit, which the deadening hand of written tradition submerged (Mowinckel 2002: 83–99). How, then, could Mowinckel detect when the actual prophet was at work, versus his later redactors? Again, as with Duhm, the critical consideration is literary style. Here, Mowinckel gives us musical metaphors:

Remembering Nietzsche's interest in music and myth, one hears the powerful influence of Wagner and Nietzsche. Yet, it is as if Mowinckel wishes to hear the violin solo without the rest of the orchestra. It is as if there were no composer standing behind the work who does not appear on stage, who designed the parts to work together in both their dissonance and harmonies. The word of God and the word of man keep their separate identities in the canonical text. It is true that for Mowinckel the traditioning process turned the canonical text into a Gordian knot that no one can now untie. Yet traditioning and canonization for Mowinckel also represent the final stage of any religious tradition prior to its demise, the last stop before death (Mowinckel 2002: 13). All that remains for Mowinckel is to attempt an extraction in the hopes of gleaning a few words of God in the canonical book of Jeremiah (cf. Gunkel: 22–23).

How, then, does this affect his understanding of the oracle against Jehoiachin? First, the entire section of 21:11–22:30 is from the hand of the redactor of source A (thus closer to the ipsissima verba of Jeremiah). He identifies, against Duhm, 22:24–30 as entirely of source A (Mowinckel 1914: 20–22). For Mowinckel this means that this oracle is the original, or at least nearly original, ecstatic speech of the prophet. The prophet had lost control of himself under the influence of the spirit of God, even though the first part of the oracle, 22:24–27, is prose, not poetry.

However, is Mowinckel's idea of “inspiration” helpful in understanding the text? Mowinckel seems to identify “inspiration” as that which happens in the psychological interior of the prophet, as opposed to what he calls a mechanical dictation theory of inspiration, although in this he was using a popular 19^th–20^th century straw man (Mowinckel 1959: 11–12; Silva).

Further, while Mowinckel has no desire to attempt to separate genuine from spurious words in the canonical book of Jeremiah, it nevertheless remains true that he believed that it is an inseparable mingling of divine word and human word, of which the only value lies in the divine part (analogous to Nestorianism in the inability to affirm the full interplay of divine and human in the production of the text [Cross & Livingstone]). The key point here is that Mowinckel, while by now separated from the search for myth in modern Germany that created the cultural climate in which Duhm operated, has adopted a similar reading strategy, valorizing some portions of the text, and dispensing with others. Having dispensed with the need for romantic notions of poetry as the core of cultural mythmaking, he now uses the same category in support of the new Protestant doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture. Although the theological topics are different, the same categories, methods and results are in place. It is a methodology in which a disempowered king such as Jehoiachin has no place.

The New Protestant Theological Agenda

None of this would have meant very much for our study of the oracle against Jehoiachin, except that there were two theological developments, represented in Jeremiah scholarship by Bernhard Duhm and Sigmund Mowinckel (although they did not originate with them), that profoundly affected exegetical practice. Here a problem emerges that is not purely philosophical, but also theological (Gadamer: 274; Frei: 224; Baden: 13–33; Childs 1979: 40). It has long been a commonplace in biblical studies that the 19^th century ideal of the Romantic poet, considered authentic because of his or her originality and individuality, supplied the basis for many stylistic decisions in biblical studies. Yet, this conception fares poorly of late in literary studies and deserves a recasting in biblical studies as well (Hermerén: 130–31; Shaw: 86). Duhm's refined definition of style has a strong impetus from an unlikely source, Nietzsche, who would not have approved of its use in a Christian setting. Both scholars participated in the attempt begun in German critical scholarship to redefine Protestantism at a confessional level (although there is no indication that earlier Protestant orthodoxy needed such a move was necessary to take account of the new methodologies (Muller: 144–45)). I do not mean to suggest that Duhm and Mowinckel deliberately wrote their exegesis to support the new Protestant confessionalism of the 19th century. Rather, the new liberal Protestant theological agenda notably had no place for a conception of disempowered kingship such as we find in the oracle against Jehoiachin in 22:24–30.

In the new Protestant theological agenda of Duhm, leadership must be strong, virile, and victorious. Wicked kings merit punishment for their wickedness, but destroying a king as this oracle announces, with no stipulations of covenant wrongdoing, and leaving him helpless and impotent creates a figure of a weak, failed, cutoff leader that simply did not fit the new theological system (Duhm 1911: 6–9; Mowinckel 1914: 11; Lorberbaum: 9–10). Further, Duhm's cultural context was part of a milieu that was experiencing a time of pressing demand for all German scholars to define the myth of national Germany in the late 19^th century (Williamson: 283). Although Duhm and his generation of scholars are not responsible for how others later used the aims they shared, this project generally was to have disastrous consequences in the creation of a national myth that deliberately excluded Jews not only from citizenship, but also from participation in the German church, thus creating the horrific caricature of religion known as the Deutsche Christen church, against which some such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, argued vociferously (Bonhoeffer: 505).

Duhm and the German Myth

According to Foucault, the removal of the foolishness of the cross is an even more important intellectual turn in Germany than Enlightenment consciousness. This became the intellectual climate in which Nietzsche, much to his chagrin, appeared enmasked under Christian terminology. This included the work of Bernhard Duhm and affected his ability to understand the function of the oracle against Jehoiachin.

“Myth” had become a category in 19^th century Germany and remained essentially a German enterprise until the end of the 19^th century, used to locate a sacred narrative that embodied the ideals of a community or nation (Williamson: 9; Oxtoby & Segal). Nietzsche's intent was to unite the historical-critical methods of philology to a program of aesthetic-religious reform (Williamson: 237). This was exactly the kind of reform aimed at within the Protestant liberal and mediating theological positions, although retaining the terminology and nomenclature of Christianity (Williamson: 296–99; Childs 1979: 40; Aschheim: 15). Of course, there were strong prudential reasons for Duhm to avoid any direct mention of Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not approve of the liberal or mediating Protestantism that Duhm and most of the German theological guild espoused. Further, Nietzsche's vociferous attacks on Christianity had made him unwelcome in the German academy, which the state still supported and expected the academy to turn out Christian ministers for the state-supported church. There can be no doubt that Duhm saw his work as keeping only the nomenclature of Christianity, but radically overhauling its substance to the point where it was unrecognizable by any earlier definition. In this, he fits the notion of the “strong poet” every bit as much as Nietzsche does (O'Hara: 152). This created the crisis of faith and the need to create the Vermittlungstheologie of Germany (Aschheim: 201). One can see this process at work in Duhm, who said,

On the one hand, of course, Duhm worked on the text itself, and accurately saw stylistic details. On the other hand, there are undoubtedly times when his stylistic sensitivities come from something other than the text. And at the heart of that is not only the problem of Enlightenment philosophical bias, but the theological agenda of German Vermittlungstheologie, its radical overhaul of Christian theology, and rejection of any sort of the foolishness of the cross in its classical sense. Thomas Mann has analyzed this in his soul-searching work, Dr. Faustus. Duhm fits the figure that Thomas Mann creates in Prof. Kumpf, the paradigmatic middle-of-the-road German theologian, a juicy “lecturer of an … intermediary conservatism with critical-liberal infusions” whom the main character Adrian Leverkuhn first confuses with the devil (Mann: 104–05, 241).

The idea of the “foolishness of the cross” need not confine one to a particular theory of atonement in Christian theology, since once can understand it as simply a subset of the broader hermeneutical category of disempowered king proposed by Lorberbaum. It is simply the notion that the death of Jesus as a common criminal under Roman law transforms into his triumph as eternal Son of God. This is the “madness of the cross” which Foucault referred to, which disappeared in 18^th century Europe. The difficulty is not a problem, of course, for the Shaphanide editors of Jeremiah's works, for whom such a theology would be something of an anachronism. It is, however, a problem for liberal German Protestantism, which believed the substitutionary atonement theory of the cross too intricately connected with primitive barbarism and human sacrifice to keep any longer in Christianity. By making this move theologically, the liberal and mediating German Protestant establishment had also removed a potential hermeneutical category for understanding the Jeremianic portrayal of Jehoiachin. Jehoiachin was a weak and disempowered king who suffered humiliation, only later, against the express oracle of Jeremiah, to find a position of power in a new context and a new world empire, or so Jeremiah 52 leads us to believe. Neither liberal nor mediating Protestantism, of the brand in which Duhm and his German contemporaries took part, had much conceptual space for such a notion.

There is no need for contemporary scholars to adopt positions either for or against the idea of the fooliwhness of the cross to do adequate and accurate scholarly work on Jeremiah. However, we should recognize the theological agenda that was an integral part of Duhm's foundational work, since it shaped his own personal goals and the uses to which he believed texts could function in his contemporary German Protestant church, and sometimes still is unchallenged for Jeremiah studies today.

Re-laying the Critical Foundation

Bernard Levinson argued for a reappraisal of critical methodologies and their relationship to the biblical text:

The figure of Jehoiachin in Jeremiah appears deliberately cast as a complex dramatic figure whom later tradition rehabilitates on a symbolic level, believing that in so doing it stays faithful to the prophet, not divergent from him. A number of Josiah's descendants already have served dramatic purposes (Seitz 1989: 20). Yet, it seems that the singularity of the judgment oracle against Jehoiachin and his dramatic reappearance at the end of the book, clearly by a later editor's hand, perpetuates him in some specific way for the continuing consideration of the remnant in exile and post-exile. Figuring out what role, exactly, Jehoiachin is to play, however, has proven difficult (Rosenberg: 381), though there are some hopeful possibilities.

In Kings, he serves in dramatic fashion to show the end of the Davidide line in a way similar to Mephibosheth for the line of Saul (Schipper 2005: 523–27; Schipper 2006: 118). Julian Morgenstern noted that part of that development could have grown out of historical experience, in which Evil-Merodach included Jehoiachin in a Babylonian ceremony as a vicarious substitute for the king. In this ceremony, two prisoners, one of whom died, and the other (in this case, obviously, Jehoiachin) received freedom, which signaled penitence and resurrection for the king. Given the timing of Jehoiachin's release, Morgenstern believes that Jehoiachin's release was part of that ceremony (Morgenstern: 414–18; Aytoun; Fishbane: 493–95). Rosenberg argues that the Jehoiachin story passed on into a cycle of accounts that culminated in the depiction of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 (Rosenberg: 385). Although such a culmination at Isaiah 53 may be unlikely, Rosenberg is an example of scholars who think Jehoiachin shares thematic resonances with other texts about hope and suffering. As the hopes of the people of Israel passed in turn from Jehoiachin, and then to Zerubbabel at the authorization of Haggai, only to be disappointed again, it would have been only natural that this unfinished story would have moved forward in a perpetual theme of hope for a long-suffering people (Aytoun: 38–39; Barth: 56–57; Hermisson: 270).

Perhaps this hope prompted Matthew to include Jehoiachin as a transitional figure in the royal genealogy of Jesus (Moore: 91; Waetjen: 99). His presence, after receiving condemnation by the Deuteronomic historian in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles along with the rest of Israel's kings, two scholars believe, testifies to the “attenuated hope” that the Shaphanide scribes left for the exiles in the person of king Jehoiachin in Jeremiah 52 (Murray: 247; Seitz 1985: 87–88). While he appears at the end of the DtrH and Jeremiah as a possibility for the restoration of David's line, the restoration and second-temple writings give no sign this ever occurred. The hopes for the revival of the royal line seemed to have died with his death in Babylon.

The figure of Jehoiachin sits awkwardly in the middle of the book of Jeremiah and appears, just as unexpectedly, at the end in peace. The varying interpretations of Jehoiachin in canonical and deutero-canonical texts likely reflects the difficulties of the exiles (and extending into the postexilic period as well) in assessing their situation after the word of the prophet had come true (Schniedewind; Clements: 220). Thus, Jehoiachin stays in the canon as a complex and complicated dramatic figure for later generations of readers as well.

So how are contemporary readers and hearers to “hear the word” of the prophet concerning Jehoiachin? According to Duhm, one must recognize the strength of will within Jeremiah over Jehoiachin as if it were God himself. According to Mowinckel, one must peel away the secondary and tertiary levels of written tradition so that one can enter the internal charismatic, ecstatic experience of the prophet as he announced the judgment against Jehoiachin. Both strategies seem to lead away from the text, not toward it. Granted, few, if any, seriously attempt to follow this path as a means of understanding the recorded words of the prophet anymore (Blenkinsopp: 55). Such attempts lead to an analysis of the world behind the text, instead of the text itself. It requires us to project ourselves into cultural circumstances so far distant from us that re-creating them for ourselves as readers and hearers of the text is a practical impossibility. Further, it cuts off the unmistakable evidence within the canon of an editorial process (i.e., chapters 21–23, 36, 52) that plots a trajectory of an inexplicably renewed figure of Jehoiachin.

We can appreciate this trajectory if we account for Protestant theological views that undergird the 19^th–20^th century framers of Jeremiah research. The new Protestant doctrine of inspiration led to an inability to understand the role of the canon in a traditionary process. For many, the canon was simply an arbitrary point in the literary development of the text with no great significance in and of itself (Seitz 2007: 167–68). However, an attempt at a retreat to an imagined Israelite primitivism à la Gunkel, Duhm and Mowinckel will be no more successful than the romantic movements that preceded it. On the other hand, with the advent of critical scholarship, a pre-critical, harmonizing reading of the text no longer satisfies either. Childs argues:

This is exactly what the Shaphanide editors of the book of Jeremiah did, as John Calvin noticed well before the advent of critical scholarship (Calvin: chapter 45:1; cf. Henry: bk. Jer 45:1; Barton & Muddiman: chapter 45:1).

This scribal activity had profound implications on a much broader scale than merely literary. Contemporary scholars such as Mark Leuchter and others have opened up new paths for understanding the political processes that shaped the text we have today (Leuchter 2008: 6–7, 19, 21, 73, 159; Leuchter 2006: 174). James Kugel has helpfully pointed out how these processes shaped the legacies of other Israelite prophets in later periods (Kugel 1997: 19–20; Kugel 1997: 161–62). Maier, Sharp, Plant, Huwyler and Cohen point out the political implications of Jeremiah's prophetic ministry during the Babylonian period (Maier 2008: 27–28; Huwyler: 193–205; Cohen: 381; Plant: 29–30; Sharp: 56, 123–24; Barth: 56–57). Feldman provides a plausible reconstruction of the Babylonian political situation that would explain Jehoiachin's later treatment in Babylon (Feldman: 24). Blenkinsopp points out the close connection between religious renewal and political reform in Israel during this time as well (Blenkinsopp: 139). To the credit of the later scribal tradents, they allowed the stories to remain as they were so that future generations could find a meaning in them, which their faith told them, would come in time (Hermisson: 270). In fact, it is impossible to understand the concept of the disempowered king aside from the specific political example of Jehoiachin and his oracle (Lorberbaum: 86–87, 169). All of these could prove fruitful areas of further research in the textual legacy of the relationship between Jehoiachin and the text of Jeremiah.

Nevertheless, critical scholarship advanced this relationship much further, in allowing readers to see the layers of tradition that developed as succeeding generations struggled to appropriate the words of the prophets for themselves. It errs whenever it sees this tradition as a dead accretion. To complete this process and “hear the word” of Jeremiah today requires accounting for the vestiges of a psychologized Protestant liberal doctrine of inspiration, and its removal of hermeneutical categories for disempowered kings. Only then can we hear the complex figure of Jehoiachin as his significance resonates through succeeding ages. Only then can one see how the trajectory begins, but does not end, in the canonical record of the book of Jeremiah. Jehoiachin progressed from unremarkable king to tragic sufferer to dramatic figure of grace and restoration through atonement, contributing to the developing suffering servant motifs in an unfinished national story that would become important to later interpreters.