Abstract
Sound offers a significant but underappreciated point of entry into the book of Jeremiah. Drawing on R. Murray Schafer's concept of the ‘soundscape’ and other work on sound and sensory criticism, this article explores the significance of sound in constructing meaning in Jeremiah. The sounds of human voices mingle with the clamor of warfare, the vocalizations of animals, and cries of pain and suffering in a way that adds complexity to an already complex and layered text. Attending to sound also clarifies structure, as the text contains multiple nested soundscapes. Sound is likewise linked to gender, as in the use of marked feminine sounds such as lament. Reading Jeremiah with an ear to its sounds reveals previously unheard subtleties, while also offering a new way to perceive what is already familiar. It also demonstrates the usefulness of sound studies for reading the prophetic books.
Keywords
We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen. But this does not mean our ears are always open.
—R. Murray Schafer 1
Hear this, O foolish and senseless people
Who have eyes but do not see,
who have ears, but do not hear. (Jer. 5.21)
1. Introduction
The book of Jeremiah is a book filled with sounds. Cries, whispers, and the clamor of war echo across its pages. At points, the prophet's words vie with the speech of Yahweh or of other men for attention; at other moments, they simply fade away. Other sounds that the text evokes are softer, a sinister whispering or a whimper of pain. And music? ‘Jeremiah is on the whole too much concerned with howling and wailing to have much interest in music’, Jeremy Montagu notes, with a touch of disapproval. 2 And yet the shofar, the pipe, and the drum all sound in the text. There are also human voices, raised in lamentation, crying out in war, or making all kinds of other sounds. Animals likewise add to the clamor. The text is noisy, even chaotic. What does it mean to take seriously the soundscape of this text?
Sound is both an essential component of the biblical text and a largely neglected one. It maintains a greater importance than we as modern readers, steeped in visual culture, sometimes realize. Much of the Hebrew Bible is audiocentric, with sound providing meaning, richness, and a connection to the divine in the text. 3 Sound is especially significant in prophecy, which relies to a high degree on speech and sound to communicate its meaning. The soundscape, I will suggest, is key to understanding sound and sense in Jeremiah. This term, coined by R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project, describes the equivalent of a landscape in sound. The soundscape provides a useful way of thinking about sound not as a collection of distinct sounds (speech, animals, the sounds of nature), but as a complex and interrelated whole. In reading a text such as the Bible, the soundscape helps us consider the aural dimension of the text while moving beyond a strict focus on voice. Attending to the soundscape also helps broaden the object of study beyond sensory perception. In the case of the prophetic books, attention to sound is often limited to debates over audition and vision in the prophetic experience. While the senses are an important part of the text—and have received a recent increase in scholarly attention—they do not exhaust the issue of sound as such. 4
Listening to the soundscape provides a new way of understanding the text's constructions of meaning. In the case of Jeremiah, when we turn to the soundscape, there is much to hear. The prophet's voice is layered across a multitude of other sounds, even as Jeremiah himself repeats and ventriloquizes the sounds of others. The book of Jeremiah uses sound—and not simply vocal sound—to constitute and communicate meaning. Apprehending the sounds of the book of Jeremiah, is, as well, comprehending Jeremiah. To listen to the text is to begin to understand in a new way.
2. Understanding the Soundscape
The study of sound in the Hebrew Bible is typically undertaken as a study of the sounds of the language in the text. Sound may function as one category of literary analysis, directing attention to assonance, alliteration, and other forms of wordplay in the text. Sound may also be the object of a linguistic analysis, including questions of phonology and the relationship of Biblical Hebrew to other Semitic languages. The present study, however, will take a different approach, one that attends to the soundscape. My analysis brings together the biblical text with sound studies, and with the soundscape in particular.
While much of the field of sound studies emphasizes the question of ‘real’ sounds, either present or historical, Schafer's original definition includes musical compositions, literary works, and other texts as ‘sonic environments’ to be studied. 5 In The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Schafer offers the following definition:
soundscape: The sonic environment. Technically, any portion of the sonic environment regarded as a field for study. The term may refer to actual environments, or to abstract constructions such as musical compositions and tape montages, particularly when considered as an environment. 6
Schafer's definition is a broad one, intentionally so. The breadth of the definition also means that the study of soundscape brings together insights and approaches from a number of fields, including acoustics, ethnography, phenomenology, psychology, literary studies, music and musicology, and design. This seemingly eclectic approach helps unpack the question of sound, while also unseating the dominance of the visual. As Schafer himself notes, ‘A soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen’. 7
In perceiving and understanding such ‘events heard’, Schafer offers several key terms to help organize the soundscape. He distinguishes between ‘keynote sounds’, ‘signals’, and ‘soundmarks’. The first category, ‘keynote sounds’, take their name from music; the keynote refers to ‘the note that identifies the key or tonality of a particular composition … it is in reference to this point that everything else takes on its special meaning’. 8 The keynote sign likewise anchors the soundscape. Frequently, keynote sounds are natural, such as the sounds of animals or of landscape features such as gurgling brooks or crashing waves. Contrasted with keynote sounds are ‘signals’ and ‘soundmarks’. Signals hew more closely to what we think of as sounds or the objects of sound criticism; they are ‘foregrounded sounds and they are listened to consciously. In terms of the psychologist, they are the figure rather than the ground’ (the latter is associated with the keynote sounds). 9 Often, Schafer singles out sounds that warn (such as bells, whistles, and horns) or communicate codes (possible with all of the previous) as signals. The soundmark, meanwhile, is a ‘landmark’ in sound, and bears a special relationship to the community in which it is heard. 10 A fourth category, the ‘archetypal sounds, those mysterious ancient sounds, often possessing felicitous symbolism, which we have inherited from remote antiquity or prehistory’, is more difficult to trace in the text of Jeremiah, given the antiquity of the biblical text. With respect to this category of sound we might, instead, consider the history of interpretation, and they ways in which a sound such as the shofar brings together ancient and modern soundscapes. 11
In setting forth his principles for soundscape analysis, Schafer acknowledges the difficulty of studying sounds that have been lost, whether through the passage of time or the transformation of the environment (sonic or otherwise). He writes, ‘We are also disadvantaged in the pursuit of a historical perspective … sounds may alter or disappear with scarcely a comment even from the most sensitive of historians’. 12 Given these constraints, he often turns to the accounts of ‘earwitnesses’ from the past, among them a number of classical (and even a handful of biblical) texts. Interestingly enough, it is the very difficulty in perceiving the sounds of the past that leads Schafer to experiment with methods that demonstrate the applicability of soundscape studies for reading the Bible. His use of classical texts such as Homer, Hesiod, and the Eddas to describe the natural soundscapes of past worlds suggests, as well, the applicability of the method to biblical texts. 13 Schafer even makes brief specific reference to biblical material in his reading of apocalyptic noise, to which we will return below.
Still, in spite of this natural fit, biblical studies has been slow to embrace the soundscape. While the senses and sensory criticism have increasingly become a part of the discipline, the study of biblical soundscapes has lagged. This is especially true with respect to the Hebrew Bible. New Testament studies has seen a smattering of recent work on sound and the soundscape, much (but not all) of it centered on the gospels. 14 The performance context of biblical texts, including attention to aurality, has also been a focus. 15 However, the soundscapes of the Hebrew Bible and especially the prophetic books have received less attention. In the case of the prophetic literature, one notable exception is Aaron Schart, who has written on the soundscape of the book of the Twelve. His study, which makes use of Schafer's work, is nearly alone in applying the concept of the soundscape to the prophetic text. 16 I will take up his findings in greater detail in my own study of Jeremiah.
More often, sound enters into the study of the Hebrew Bible through sensory studies. Hector Avalos, for example, has called for a turn to sensory criticism, arguing that such an approach is ‘necessary to gain a better appreciation of how biblical authors conceptualize and treat embodiment’. 17 Yael Avrahami has also analyzed the senses, demonstrating that the Hebrew Bible contains a ‘septasensory model’, adding kinesthesia and speech to our familiar five senses. One of the central arguments of Avrahami's work is that the organization of the senses and sensory experiences does not conform neatly to modern categories; she likewise rejects simplistic attempts to construct a dichotomy between ‘the biblical’ and ‘the Greek’ (or ‘the West’). 18 She calls, instead, for us to attend to the biblical and to excavate its own native categories. Building on this work, I want to add an appeal for a greater scrutiny of sound. An attention to sound and soundscape offers greater insight into both the question of the senses and the production of meaning in the text.
The study of the soundscape is related to sensory questions, though it is not identical to them. While sensory criticism emphasizes the perceiving body and the relevant sensory organs (in the case of sound, the ear), the soundscape is concerned with sound more broadly. Nor is there a focus on a specific individual or individuals who hear—instead, it is sound itself that is the starting object of inquiry. Hearing is but one component (albeit an important one). And so it is from the senses to the soundscape that we will now turn.
3. The Soundscape in the Book of Jeremiah
Beginning to hear the biblical soundscape begins with understanding the meaning of the Hebrew לוק. In Biblical Hebrew, the same word, לוק, is used to mean both ‘sound’ and ‘voice’. לוק describes the vocalizations of animals, the crash of thunder, human speech, the sound of musical instruments, general din or clamor, and the voice of Yahweh (sometimes words, sometimes what Michel Poizat names ‘simple sonorous materiality’).
19
Many of these meanings, moreover, are activated in the book of Jeremiah. Assessing the term's use, Angela Bauer-Levesque concludes, ‘An analysis of the Hebrew word qôl (voice, sound, tone, noise, cry) in Jeremiah shows that this word occurs there in three different contexts: as qôl Y
a. The Sounds of the Prophet
The soundscape of the book of Jeremiah is entirely filtered through the voice and body of the prophet. Without arguing for a historical figure or singular author underlying the text—indeed, all signs point to otherwise—I introduce this observation to highlight that the text itself imagines some kind of unity across the corpus of the book, and this unity is localized in the prophet's body. Albert Cook observes, ‘Jeremiah knots his utterances about God's warnings through a presentation of his own person … the prophet is both a passive sufferer at God's hands through the people and an active communicator of God's message to the people’.
21
Cook notes the centrality of Jeremiah's body as a locus of suffering. I, however, direct attention to this body toward a slightly different end: the body as sensory and perceptual apparatus. In the case of the book of Jeremiah, there is no access to the soundscape that is not mediated through the prophet. Both sounds and their relative temporalities are filtered through, and sometimes warped by, the intermediary of Jeremiah. The soundscapes of present crisis and future destruction are layered upon each other, intermingled in the prophet's words. At points, the sonic features of the book are made explicit—Jeremiah uses the word לוק dozens of times. At other moments, we are left to infer the soundscape from Jeremiah's descriptions. The Oracles against the Nations (Jer. 46–51,
Before turning to the sounds of Jeremiah's present and imagined worlds, however, I want to remain with the sounds the prophet himself makes—the first degree of sound filling this prophetic soundscape. Most frequently, Jeremiah's sounds are cries, so much so that they become a personal keynote sound. In Jer. 4.19, the prophet cries out,
My insides! My insides! I writhe in pain! The walls of my heart!
My heart roars, I cannot be silent,
For I hear the sound of the shofar, the clamor of war.
As at so many points across the book, Jeremiah finds himself compelled to cry. Not only does the prophet cry out, but he also describes his seeming need to do so, using the language of bodily compulsion. He cannot do otherwise; the cry rises from him, a force more elemental than will. The reference to the prophet's heart also suggests the sounds of the body as keynote sounds, grounding the text in a frantic heartbeat. Elsewhere, Jeremiah describes his cry as forced upon him by the distress of his people: ‘For the shattering of the daughter of my people, I am shattered, I mourn, and desolation has taken hold of me’ (Jer. 8.21). This distress is given double form, moreover, in Jeremiah's embodied experience (‘my heart roars’ (Jer. 4.19), ‘I am now making my words in your mouth a fire’ (5.14). Sound takes over and alters the prophet's body.
Jeremiah also repeatedly uses affective interjections. He interjects יוה (often translated ‘Ah!’ or ‘Alas!’) into his speech eleven times. The cry יוה is pronounced against the unjust and the enemies of Yahweh (22.13, 23.1), on the day of Yahweh (30.7), and over the body of the dead king (34.5). 22 This utterance is linked to lamentation for the dead and generally has an amplifying function. 23 Schart likewise argues that it ‘represents an onomatopoeic word that simply imitates someone screaming in pain’. 24 He elaborates,
One must imagine a long, protracted scream in a high pitch that slowly subsides and eventually changes to sobbing. The scream has a double function. On the one hand, it gives some measure of relief to the overly stressed nerve system from an overwhelming pain. This is a physiological reaction by which the body contributes to psychic relief. On the other hand, the cry serves as a signal to the group to which the individual relates/belongs, that one of its members requires aid as quickly as possible. Both functions are supported through the volume of the scream: the greater the pain, the louder the scream. 25
As described by Schart, יוה offers a dramatic soundmark in the text. Like the pure sound of Yahweh's voice, this cry interrupts the soundscape without resolving into words or communicating a specific meaning. 26 Instead, as with the howl of grief or the cry of ululation, it transmits pure suffering. Nor is יוה the only such interjection to color Jeremiah's speech; יוא, ‘Ah!’ or ‘Woe!’, occurs eight times (Jer. 4.13, 31; 6.4; 10.19; 13.27; 15.10; 45.3; 48.46). While the relationship between יוה and יוא remains complex, 27 they share, at least, the interruptive function. With either utterance, affect erupts into the text and permeates the soundscape.
In such moments, the blurring of subjects and speakers is activated. As A.R. Pete Diamond writes of Jeremiah's presence in the text more generally,
Jeremiah's persona recedes. Plot action is attenuated or disappears entirely. Enough presence is supplied for the figure of Jeremiah to provide an enfolding frame, a context for the speech. The degree to which a dramatic audience for the speech is filled in varies, but that audience, whether reduced to the figure of the prophet alone or expanded to include members of the Judean populace, engages and is engaged dialogically. 28
Voice crosses the boundaries between speakers and sounds. And yet the prophet's vocalizations are necessary for any other voice, any other meaning, to be sounded in the text.
Jeremiah's cries are complex; they are not, however, alone in the soundscape. Instead, his voice both anticipates and echoes a wide range of other cries across the landscape—cries of battle, cries of fear, cries of lamentation. The next sounds to attend to are the sounds of suffering.
b. Sounds of Violence, Pain, and Suffering
In the passage quoted above, Jer. 4.19, the prophet's distressed cry breaks forth in response to another sonic disturbance—‘the sound of the shofar, the clamor of war’. This clamor repeats in the verses that follow (4.20–21). Indeed, sound is frequently used in the book as a marker of distress. Besides the prophet's cries, the most prominent features of the Jeremianic soundscape are often the sounds of war, which fluctuate between signals and keynote sounds. The cries, for example, are so pervasive as to become keynote sounds, as is the generalized clamor of battle. Other sounds, however, function as signals, drawing the attention of the listener and functions as an ‘acoustic warning’. 29 Here, a clear example is the shofar, a horn used in both war and signaling. 30 The shofar is heard seven times in the book of Jeremiah, 31 and in every instance in which it occurs in Jeremiah, the shofar sounds an alarm. Chapter 6, for example, opens with:
Seek refuge, children of Benjamin, from the midst of Jerusalem!
Blow the shofar in Tekoa, and sound the alarm in Beth-Hakkerem
For evil looms from the north, and a great shattering. (Jer. 6.1)
As in the 4.19, the sound of the shofar is the first sign of a coming destruction. Imminent horror first reveals itself—first comes to presence—in sound. The warning sound, moreover, is both the standard means of warning (compare Isa. 18.3; Judg. 7.17–20) and a divinely commissioned intrusion into the soundscape. The sounding of the shofar serves as an intensification of the warning already mediated through the prophetic voice.
The shofar likewise anticipates the clamoring noise of warfare that is to descend onto the people. In Jer. 10.22, the coming destruction is figured in sound:
Hear! The sound of news is coming! A great din 32 from the land of the north,
To make the cities of Judah a desolation, and a home for jackals.
The association of loud sound with destruction and even apocalypse is noted by Schafer as well. Drawing on biblical as well as Islamic texts, he asserts, ‘The prophets had a vision of the end also making a mighty noise’. 33 He further elaborates,
It is as difficult for the human being to imagine an apocalyptic noise as it is for him to imagine a definitive silence. Both experiences exist in theory only for the living since they set limits to life itself, though they may become unconscious goals toward which the aspirations of different societies are drawn. Man has always tried to destroy his enemies with terrible noises. 34
This sort of sonic destruction occurs elsewhere in the prophetic corpus, most notably in Joel 4.14 (3.14 Eng.). Schart argues that םינומה םינומה, frequently translated ‘multitudes! multitudes!’ (
If one wants to imagine what kind of sound the text wants to create with these means, one ends up with a noise of unimaginable size. In the last battle of history, as envisioned in Joel 4, all the aggressive utterances of the nations join together to unleash the most extraordinary noise ever heard, a truly ‘apocalyptic noise’. 36
Sound is both marker and means of destruction. This is true as well in Jeremiah.
Another intertwining of sound and suffering is the use of sound to mark destruction that has already occurred. The sound of hissing, in particular, is used to identify locations of extreme destruction. Jeremiah 19.8 promises,
And I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at;
everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all of its disasters.
Here, wordless sound becomes a marker of revulsion and condemnation. Hissing is an indicator of shame; 37 the hissing at deserted places may also stem from an apotropaic practice intended to repel demons. 38 If so, this hissing is a rare example of an ‘archetypal sound’, a sonic trace of the past haunting the (textual) soundscape's present. The multiple layers of time in the passage are collapsed into each other, a collapse aided by the blurring in and of sounds. 39 Sound brings together past, present, and future destruction.
c. Lament and Other Feminine Sounds
Beyond warning and warfare, the soundscape of Jeremiah is also marked by lament. We have already seen that Jeremiah announces the violence that is coming. But the prophet is not the only one to interrupt the text with his cries, or to raise his voice in mourning beyond words. The voices of women mourning are also an important feature of the soundscape of the book of Jeremiah, and of the ancient Near East. Female mourners appear in Jer. 9.16–19 (9.17–20 LXX):
Thus says Yahweh of Hosts,
Call for the mourning women,
and send for the skilled women to come.
Let them hasten and raise a lament for us,
that our eyes may overflow with tears, and our eyelids drip with water,
For a sound of lament is heard from Zion,
‘How we are devastated! We are utterly shamed,
because we have forsaken the land, and we have been evicted from our homes.
For hear, O women, the word of Yahweh, and let your ears receive the word of his mouth
and teach your daughters a lament, and each to her neighbor a funeral song.’
Mourning is a traditionally female vocation, and the voices of the mourners are female voices that rise above the soundscape of devastation. This interlude of female wailing, moreover, is but one instantiation of feminine sound that emerges at a number of affectively charged points in the book of Jeremiah. As L. Juliana M. Claassens writes, ‘By means of the creative actualization of the lament tradition, the wailing women vocalized what the people needed to express. Their laments represented the community's response in the face of extreme trauma.’ 40
This textual representation of female vocality has, moreover, historical and contemporary parallels. Mireia López-Bertran and Agnès Garcia-Ventura describe ancient Mediterranean mourning practices:
When mourning, women create a pattern of sounds that can be considered music or at least as having some degree of musicality. In addition to proper laments, there are also stylised sobbing and breathing, breathlessness and syllabic prolongation as emotional intensifiers. In all cases, mourning materialises pain not only through the acoustics of screaming but also through bodily gestures. In many cases, women embody their pain with tears or by pulling at their hair or through other actions … The clearest examples of Phoenician mourners are the ones depicted on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos, who tear out their hair and rip their clothes … 41
At this moment, the soundscape of the text and the soundscape of ancient life (as we know it through archaeology, comparative ethnography, and material culture) collide. Bauer-Levesque writes, ‘The polyphony of women's voices in Jeremiah resonates as these texts are read or heard together with the actual, present-day contexts of the readers and hearers’. 42 There is a more specific parallel as well—the vocal act of ululation, known in Arabic as zagharīt 43 and in Greek as the ololyga. 44 This vocal act is still performed in the Mediterranean and Middle East, identifying the vocality of lament as an archetypal sound. In the text of Jeremiah, sound doubles the actions of the body, even as it inscribes mourning into the landscape. Indeed, the vocalizations of mourning constitute a soundmark in the text. Jeremiah's summoning of the mourners at once opens the experience of grief and introduces the sounds of women.
Mourning women are clearly prominent in Jeremiah. Nowhere is this more true than in the most famous female voice in Jeremiah, Rachel weeping for her children (Jer. 31.15). Rachel's weeping, and the comforting by Yahweh that follow, are key sites in the deployment of voice in the text. They also show the complex interplay of gender and sound. However, weeping is not the only sound that women make in Jeremiah. Instead, a series of feminine sounds occur, indexed to both suffering and rejoicing. The sound of a woman in labor is a common biblical trope to represent extreme duress (e.g. Jer. 4.31). Elsewhere, women make sounds of celebration and praise. Marriage is figured in sound; the phrase ‘the sound of mirth and gladness, the sound of the bride and bridegroom’ appears four times in the text (Jer. 7.34; 16.9; 25.10; 33.11 [40.11
Encompassing music and mourning, sadness and joy, the feminine sounds of Jeremiah touch on a range of life events, from birth to marriage to death. As such, they offer an individual counterbalance to the sweeping sounds of war and battle. Bauer-Levesque argues that these ‘women's voices … have the function of expressing contra-mindedness, voices that speak out against war, death, and destruction’. 45 The human voice, crying out over the birth or the death of a child, is a very different sound than the clamor of battle or the strident tones of the shofar, announcing the coming destruction. While the sound of the shofar, like the sound of lamentation, relates to the collapse of the social and/or political order, both their orientation and their sound are very different. Feminine sounds add complexity to the soundscape, heightening emotion while also reinscribing the domestic sphere and the joys and pains of everyday life.
d. Animals and Other Natural Sounds
The sounds of Jeremiah's soundscape are not merely human ones. Instead, the soundscape also includes a range of natural sounds. Frequently, these sounds come from or are associated with animals. Lions figure especially prominently in Jeremiah's imagery. In Jer. 12.8, for example, the sound of lions roaring represents the abandonment of the land:
My inheritance has become to me like a lion in the forest.
She has raised her voice against me—so I hate her.
This image occurs as well in Jer. 2.15:
Lions roar against him, they raise their roar.
They have made his land a desolation, and his cities have fallen into ruins 46 without inhabitants.
Indeed, the sound of lions represents both desolation and the return of the land to a more primal, uninhabited state. Thus the sound of lions is paired with the presence of jackals, hyenas, and so forth.
Of such animal sounds, Schafer writes,
Many of these sounds, such as the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, or the laughing of hyenas, have such striking qualities that they impress themselves instantly on the human imagination. They present intense acoustic images. One hearing and they will never be mistaken or forgotten in a lifetime. They are among the great sounds that make history. Men who have heard tell of them only from the lips of the bard will shudder at the thought of them. 47
This is certainly true of Biblical Hebrew, which has, as Brent Strawn observes, ‘at least nine terms for the lion's vocalization’. 48 Given this, ‘it may well be the case … that the Hebrew vocabulary is reflecting nuances and subtleties apparent only from first-hand experiences with the lion’. 49 Here the real-life Judean soundscape enters into the world of the text. Indeed, the book of Jeremiah includes multiple expressions for the vocalization of lions. 50 Further, some of the expressions of leonine vocalization in fact describe human speech. Nebuchadrezzar roars like a lion in 51.34. So too does Yahweh in Jer. 25.30.
Shifting from lions to animals more generally, we find that at other points in the text, it is the absence of animal sounds that is of consequence. In 9.9 (9.10 Eng.), Jeremiah commands,
I will lift up weeping and wailing for the mountains, and lamentation for the pastures of the wilderness
For they are burned so that no one passes through, no sound of cattle is heard,
The birds of heaven and the animals have fled.
Here, it is the absence of domesticated animal sounds—in many ways, the audible inverse of the roaring of lions—that marks the desolation of the landscape. Indeed, the command to weep and to wail for the mountains and wilderness seems an attempt to fill the overpowering silence with something, even the sound of weeping.
A final function of animal sounds in the text is as part of the soundscape of warfare, as in the snorting of horses and the clamor of chariots in battle (Jer. 8.16). The sound of the animals—in this case, the war stallions—is the sound of a technology of war. As such, it adds another layer, this one animal in origin, to the soundscape of violence and crisis.
e. The Embedded Soundscapes of the Oracles against the Nations
Against the sounds that fill the primary soundscape of Jeremiah, the sounds of the Oracles against the Nations constitute a second, embedded soundscape. The Oracles (Jer. 46–51,
Unsurprisingly, the dominant sounds of the Oracles are sounds of violence and war. The Oracle against Philistia brings together a number of the elements of this imagery:
Thus says Yahweh,
Behold! Waters are rising from the north, and they will become an overwhelming torrent.
They will overflow the land and what fills it, the city and those who dwell in it.
People will cry out, and all who dwell in the land will howl.
At the sound of the stamping of his stallions, at the clamor of his chariots, at the din of their wheels
Parents do not turn back for their children, because their hands are so weak.
Here, the sounds of wailing and crying out are layered over the clamor of battle. The natural and the artificial mingle, the sound of horses and the clattering of chariots, overwhelming the land like the metaphorical torrent that opens the passage. This sound of horses is again linked with the sound of ‘the roaring sea’ in the Oracle against Babylon (50.42, see also 51.55).
These soundscapes share, too, a proliferation of cries. The Oracle against Egypt notes, ‘The nations have heard of your shame, and the earth is full of your cry’ (46.12). Jeremiah 51.54–55 (28.54–55 LXX) reads:
A voice! A cry from Babylon!
A great shattering from the land of the Chaldeans!
For Yahweh is devastating Babylon and silencing her loud noise.
Their waves roar like mighty waters, the clamor of their noise resounds.
In Kedar, meanwhile, ‘a cry shall go up: “Terror is all around!”’ (49.29), echoing Jeremiah's own words in 6.25 (cf. also 20.3–4, 20). Though this cry rises from the landscape in general, the prophetic speaker does cry out elsewhere in the oracles. To Moab, Jeremiah announces, ‘Thus, I wail for Moab, I cry out for all of it, I moan for every inhabitant of Kir-Heres’ (Jer. 48.31 [31.31
Thus my heart groans for Moab like pipes 51
and my heart groans for the people of Kir-Heres like pipes
For the abundance they have made has perished. (Jer. 48.36 [31.36
Here, at least, the voice of the prophet adds an element of compassion to the landscape (though no such compassion is to be found, it seems, in many of the other oracles, such as the Oracle against Babylon). Sound also serves in the Oracles to document and commemorate disaster. In the Oracle against Babylon, the voices of messengers are essential to the communication of the message (even as the voice of the prophet plays a similar, if anticipatory, role). And as elsewhere in Jeremiah, the sound of hissing signals repudiation, thus, ‘Edom shall become an object of horror; everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its disasters’ (Jer. 49.17; compare the function of cursing in 49.13).
Overall, the sounds capes of the Oracles have a denser aural texture than the remainder of the book of Jeremiah. In their inventory of repeated imagery and language, sound plays a central role. The signal sounds—the clash of battle, the hisses, the clamor of horses, even noise itself—loom louder. In particular, the desolation that Jeremiah foretells is enacted, to a significant degree, in sound. But sound does not simply serve to enhance the vividness of what is to come. Instead, it also blurs the boundaries between selves, between speakers and spaces. The sound of destruction that Jeremiah foretells against the others blurs, as well, into a sound of violence against his own people. Similarly, there is a certain ambivalence in the sounds produced. The immediate referent for these sounds of pain is the suffering of others, and yet Judah faces a similar coming destruction. The soundscape thus brings with it an uneasy familiarity. These are sounds that have been heard before.
f. Implied Sounds and Soundscapes
If the soundscapes of the Oracles against the Nations add to the soundscape of Jeremiah by embellishing the sounds of violence that figure, if briefly, in the primary soundscape, then there is another set of texts that likewise add to the sonic richness of Jeremiah, though in another way. These are the narratives of Jeremiah's symbolic actions, such as his performance with the loincloth (Jer. 13) and breaking of the jug (Jer. 19), as well as the whole scene of the reading of the scroll (Jer. 36). These narratives do not include explicit sonic details. And yet their implied sounds add to aural landscape of the text, as well as its overall complexity.
As a reading attuned to Schafer's categories quickly illuminates, the keynote sounds are different here. Instead of the sounds of animals (or, in the Oracles against the Nations, of unspeakable violence) forming the background, the aural background is formed from the sounds of everyday life. The workshop of the potter, the dwelling place of the king—these are human spaces, filled with human sounds. Neither are the sign acts primarily concerned with creating soundmarks, preferring instead a visual registry of symbolism. (Here an exception is the reading of the scroll in ch. 36, though we might note as well that the burning of this same scroll—the scene's climax—is fundamentally a visual spectacle.)
Still, we might think about the role of sound in these spectacles as part of a larger sensory complex. As Avrahami notes, ‘The correlation between sight and hearing in the Hebrew Bible is self-evident. There are frequent parallels between sight-hearing and eye-ear in the context of knowledge, learning, and understanding.’ 52 This interplay of sense, in ways sometimes unfamiliar to the modern reader, adds complexity the discourse of the senses. We cannot simply export our own modern understanding of the senses—as discrete, independent modes of perception—onto the text. Instead, the senses are intertwined in complex ways. At the same time, attending to sound helps correct a modern bias toward vision as the most important of the senses. 53 What we might take as a primarily visual spectacle is also an auditory one. The spectacles with the loincloth, the jug, and the scroll, involve the whole body. They point as well to the multiple ways in which sound is implicated—as distinct from the other senses, but also as bound up in them.
g. The Sound of Yahweh's Voice
The issue of implied sounds and soundscapes suggests another voice, one that thus far has only appeared at the margins of this reading: the voice of Yahweh. The divine voice is at once central to the text and often ellipsed within it. This is the case from the opening lines of the book, which describe Jeremiah's prophetic calling. Jeremiah 1.9 describes Yahweh placing his words into the prophet's mouth, suggesting that the vocalizations of prophecy always carry traces of their divine origins. Whenever the prophet speaks, his words evoke this initial connection. The voice of Yahweh likewise works as a way of cultivating—and disciplining—the relationship to the people. Obedience is repeatedly figured as an act of listening, a usage so familiar in Biblical Hebrew that we sometimes forget that its meaning is organized around sound and voice.
Yahweh's voice also features in the text to evoke memory. He orders Jeremiah to remind the people of the command given to the people upon deliverance of Egypt:
You will say to them, thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel:
‘Cursed be whoever does not hear the words of this covenant, which I commanded your fathers on the day I brought them forth from the land of Egypt, from the iron-smelter, saying, Obey my voice and do all which I will command you and you will be my people and I will be your God’. (Jer. 11.3–4)
Here, Yahweh invokes his own voices as a means of reinscribing obedience in his people. ‘Obey my voice’ crosses temporalities; it is both a command given to ‘your ancestors’ and, through the presentness of sound, to the you to whom the utterance is directed. The voice thus bears the burden of much of the theological labor in the text. It likewise establishes relationships, past and present.
It is not only to recall the covenant and demand obedience that Yahweh's voice sounds in the text, however. At other moments, it functions as a pure sonorous agent of destruction, as when he promises to destroy Judah, figured as an olive tree, with a rush of sound (Jer. 11.16). And yet the absence of the deity's voice can be as threatening as its presence. Elsewhere, suffering is effected through silence. Diamond describes the disconcerting presence of ‘rare regions of the scroll where Y
h. Crises of Sound and Sensory Perception
In both absence and presence, the sound of Yahweh's voice can indicate difficulty, especially in the relationship between deity and people. This is not, however, the only use of sound to mark crisis. There is one additional significant deployment of sound in the book of Jeremiah to consider—the use of sound to indicate problems of perception and understanding. A failure to hear, or to hear properly, marks a larger problem in the world of the text. In Jer. 5.20–21, the prophet is instructed:
Proclaim this in the house of Jacob,
and make it known in Judah,
Here this, O foolish and senseless people
who have eyes but do not see,
who have ears, but do not hear.
This image is a familiar one in the prophets (cf. Isa. 6.10; 29.9–10). It likewise occurs at multiple points in Jeremiah. The people's refusal to heed the prophet is thematized as an inability to hear. Avrahami argues that such passages add negative valence to sensory disability, creating an ‘associative pattern’ of ‘foolishness—sin—deafness—blindness’. 55 Elsewhere in the text, aural knowledge is accepted as a criterion for decision-making; Jeremiah's enemies argue he should be put to death because ‘he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your own ears’ (26.11). And yet despite this audiocentrism, the people remain alienated from the warning sounds that dominate the soundscape of Jeremiah. And this foolishness is figured as a failure of hearing.
The inability of the people to hear leads, in the final chapters of the book, to another thematization of the senses. In ch. 39, Zedekiah is forced to witness the execution of his sons and of the nobles of Judah, then blinded. The king's blindness bears heavy stigma in the biblical text and its world; it may also represent a challenge to the king's masculinity (cf. Jer. 31.7–9). 56 The king of Judah can now only relate to the world in the way that his people were unable to do so: through hearing. 57 At the same time, the loss of vision for the king directs attention to the soundscape and its aural features. This suggests the possibility of reading the representation of the senses not simply as a judgment on disability, but rather as a shift in focus, to a new emphasis on sound.
4. Listening to Sound in Jeremiah
Attending to the soundscape and the layered sounds of Jeremiah offers a new way to encounter a familiar text. The book of Jeremiah, like many prophetic texts, plays with boundaries of all sorts. The first is time. Prophecy is oriented toward the future, and yet it is also bound to the past. Its predictions are colored by past traumas, such as the fall of the Northern Kingdom. There is likewise a slippage between the future as certain event and the future as subjunctive contingency. The layered registers of voice and sound in the text embody these multiple possibilities. Listening is a sense that facilitates, even encourages, multiple and conflicting forms. It is possible—often, even, unavoidable—to encounter multiple sounds at once. The work of organization comes later, in listening and processing. The book of Jeremiah enacts this sort of experience of sound.
Sound also brings about a blurring of space in the text. The Oracles against the Nations are distinct from the rest of the text, and yet the contents of their soundscapes overlap. The Oracles thus bring sonic depth to the representation of coming calamity in the primary text of Jeremiah. Sound likewise blurs the boundaries between prophet and deity. A related blurring occurs through the use of sound metaphors in the text. The references to animal sounds, for example, evoke a natural setting that rests uneasily against the imagery of the city and the cultivated fields. And yet the overall effect is to increase complexity, adding to the literary effect.
The most significant sonic blurring in Jeremiah, however, involves not time or space but speakers. Attending to sound offers new insights into the critical problem of the relationship between the prophet and the deity. As Diamond writes, ‘Y
It is not only Jeremiah, of course, in which sound plays an important role. There is sonic richness across the prophetic books. The soundscapes of Isaiah and Ezekiel, and much of the Book of the Twelve, remain to be explored. And yet they too are filled with sound—the ‘apocalyptic noise’ of Joel that Schart highlights, the voice demanding to prepare the way in (Isa. 40), the rushing sound of the chariot in Ezekiel's theophany and, later, the rustling of dry bones (Ezek. 1; 37). There are the keynote sounds that fill the landscape—human voices, the sounds of animals, the words of Yahweh as voiced by the prophet. There is also, frequently, the clatter of war and violence, staged as much in sound as in image. What a sound-oriented reading of these prophetic texts will yield may resemble the soundscape of Jeremiah; it may also be strange. In either case, by seeking the construction of literary and other soundscapes, we can better perceive the plurality and sonic richness of the Hebrew prophets.
In the call story of Jeremiah, Yahweh famously reaches out and places his words into Jeremiah's mouth—a striking image, and one that has attracted no end of commentators and imitators, beginning as far back as Ezekiel (Ezek. 3.1–3). In reading this text and the prophecies that follow, readers have often been drawn to the prophet's mouth. This article has argued that we as readers should attend to another organ: the ear. It is not always easy to listen to the text. The soundscape is layered, multiple, in tension with itself. And yet listening to sound opens valuable new ways of thinking about, and within, the biblical text. Perhaps we are finally ready to hear the prophet's words in 13.15: ‘Hear and give ear!’
Footnotes
1.
R. Murray Schafer, ‘Open Ears’, in Michael Bull and Les Back (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader (Sensory Formations; Oxford/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004), pp. 25–40 (25).
2.
Jeremy Montagu, Musical Instruments of the Bible (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), p. 92.
3.
Hector Avalos, ‘Introducing Sensory Criticism in Biblical Studies: Audiocentricity and Visiocentricity’, in Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper (eds.), This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (SBLSS, 55; Atlanta: SBL 2007), pp. 47–59.
4.
On the senses, see Avalos, ‘Introducing Sensory Criticism in Biblical Studies’; Louise J. Lawrence, Sense and Stigma in the Gospels: Depictions of Sensory-Disabled Characters (Biblical Reconfigurations; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible (LHBOTS, 545; New York: T&T Clark International, 2012). Sensory criticism and disability studies are often linked in the larger field of biblical studies; see, for example, Rebecca Raphael, Biblical Corpora: Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature (LHBOTS, 445; New York: T&T Clark International, 2009); Jeremy Schipper, Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible: Figuring Mephibosheth in the David Story (LHBOTS, 441; New York: T&T Clark International, 2009). Specific to sound, see further below.
5.
R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), pp. 7–9.
6.
Schafer, The Soundscape, pp. 274–75.
7.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 8; italics original.
8.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 9.
9.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p.10.
10.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p.10.
11.
See further Montagu, Musical Instruments of the Bible, pp. 19–24.
12.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 8.
13.
Schafer, The Soundscape, pp. 16–22
14.
Louise J. Lawrence, ‘Exploring the Sense-Scape of the Gospel of Mark’, JSNT 33 (2011), p. 387–97; Margaret Ellen Lee and Bernard Brandon Scott, Sound Mapping the New Testament (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2009); Dan Nässelqvist, ‘Translating the Aural Gospel: The Use of Sound Analysis in Performance-Oriented Translation’, in James A. Maxey and Ernst R. Wendland (eds.), Translating Scripture for Sound and Performance: New Directions in Biblical Studies (Biblical Performance Criticism, 5; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), pp. 49–67.
15.
For example, William Doan and Terry Giles, Prophets, Performance, and Power: Performance Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (New York: T&T Clark International, 2005).
16.
Aaron Schart, ‘Deathly Silence and Apocalyptic Noise: Observations on the Soundscape of the Book of the Twelve’, Verbum et Ecclesia 31.1 (March 2010), art. #383; online: 
. See also Schart's longer German article on the topic, ‘Totenstille und Endknall: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der Soundscape des Zwölfprophetenbuchs’, in Christiane Karrer-Grube et al (eds.), Sprachen, Bilder, Klänge: Dimensionen der Theologie im Alten Testament und in seinem Umfeld: Festschrift für Rüdiger Bartelmus zu seinem 65. Geburtstag (AOAT, 359; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2009), pp. 257–74.
17.
Avalos, ‘Introducing Sensory Criticism in Biblical Studies’, p. 58.
18.
Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture, p. 278.
19.
Michel Poizat, ‘“The Blue Note” and “The Objectified Voice and the Vocal Object”’, Cambridge Opera Journal 3.3 (1991), pp. 195–211 (208).
20.
Angela Bauer-Levesque, ‘Jeremiah: When Wise Wailing Women and Prophetic Pornography Show the Way into Exile’, in Luise Schottroff, Marie-Theres Wacker, and Martin Rumscheidt (eds.), Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012) pp. 319–33 (327–28).
21.
Albert Cook, The Burden of Prophecy: Poetic Utterance in the Prophets of the Old Testament (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 44. Cf. also Mary E. Mills, Alterity, Pain and Suffering in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel (LHBOTS, 479; New York: T&T Clark International, 2007), pp. 111, 117.
22.
יוה also occurs four times in 22:18; the remainder of the occurrences are in the Oracles against the Nations (Jer. 47:6; 48:1; 50:27,
23.
See also Gunther Wanke, ‘יא und יה’, ZAW 78 (1966), pp. 215–18.
24.
Schart, ‘Deathly Silence and Apocalyptic Noise’, n.p.
25.
Schart, ‘Deathly Silence and Apocalyptic Noise’, n.p.
26.
In addition, יוא occurs eight times (Jer. 4.13, 31; 6.4; 10.19; 13.27; 15.10; 45.3; 48.46).
27.
See further Wanke, ‘יאֹ und יהֹ’; Delbert Hillers, ‘Hôy and Hôy-Oracles: A Neglected Syntactic Aspect’, in Carol L. Meyers and Michael Patrick O'Connor (eds.), The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday (Festschrift David Noel Freedman; Special Volume Series/ASOR; Philadelphia: Eisenbrauns, 1983), pp. 185–88.
28.
A.R. Pete Diamond, ‘Interlocutions: The Poetics of Voice in the Figuration of Y
29.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 10.
30.
Montagu, Musical Instruments of the Bible, p. 22. The shofar also had ritual uses, as Montagu describes. See also Theodore W. Burgh, Listening to the Artifacts: Music Culture in Ancient Palestine (New York: T&T Clark International, 2006), p. 31.
31.
Jer. 4.5, 19, 21; 6.1, 17; 42.14; 51.27.
32.
Heb. שער. This term is associated both with the din of battle (Jer. 47.3; Nah. 3.2) the rushing sound of an earthquake (Isa. 29.6), and the earthquake itself (without particular reference to sound) (Ezek. 38.19; Amos 1.1)
33.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 27.
34.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 28.
35.
Relatedly, Thomas Edward McComiskey, The Minor Prophets: An Exegetical and Expository Commentary. I. Hosea, Joel, and Amos (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 309 n. 14, writes, ‘םינִוֹמהֲ (hordes!) is ambiguous; it can refer either to crowds (Vulgate popular; Aquila συναγωγαί; Theodotion πλῆθη), or to noise or tumult (ἧχοι
36.
Schart, ‘Deathly Silence and Apocalyptic Noise’, p. 4.
37.
Lyn M. Bechtel, ‘Shame as a Sanction of Social Control in Biblical Israel: Judicial, Political, and Social Shaming’, JSOT 49 (1991), pp. 47–76 (72).
38.
Martin Noth, Könige. I. 1 Könige 1–16 (BKAT, 9; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2nd edn, 1983), p. 199.
39.
John Hill, ‘The Construction of Time in Jeremiah 25 (MT)’, in A.R. Pete Diamond, Kathleen M. O'Connor, and Louis Stulman (eds.), Troubling Jeremiah (JSOTSup, 260; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 146–60 (154).
40.
L. Juliana M. Claassens, Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Reimagining God's Delivering Presence in the Old Testament (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2012), p. 27.
41.
Mireia López-Bertran and Agnès Garcia-Ventura, ‘Music, Gender and Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean: Revisiting the Punic Evidence’, World Archaeology 44 (2012), pp. 393–408 (402–403).
42.
Bauer-Levesque, ‘Jeremiah’, p. 329.
43.
Jennifer E. Jacobs, ‘“Unintelligibles” in Vocal Performances at Middle Eastern Marriage Celebrations’, Text & Talk 27 (2007), pp. 483–507.
44.
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), p. 125.
45.
Bauer-Levesque, ‘Jeremiah’, p. 329.
46.
Reading with qere' and MSS ותצנ. The ketib is התצנ.
47.
Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 38.
48.
Brent A. Strawn, What Is Stronger Than a Lion? Leonine Image and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (OBO, 212; Fribourg: Academic Press, 2005), p. 345.
49.
Strawn, What Is Stronger Than a Lion?, p. 345.
50.
Jer. 2.15; 25.30; 48.31; 51.34; Strawn, What Is Stronger Than a Lion?, pp. 363–65.
51.
Hebrew םיללח, pipes or double pipes. Burgh, Listening to the Artifacts, p. 29.
52.
Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture, p. 69.
53.
Hector Avalos, ‘Introducing Sensory Criticism in Biblical Studies’.
54.
Diamond, ‘Interlocutions’, p. 54.
55.
Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture, p. 213.
56.
Saul M. Olyan, Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 121, 128. For an alternate view of blindness in the text and readerly bias, see Kerry H. Wynn, ‘The Normate Hermeneutic and Interpretations of Disability within the Yahwistic Narratives’, in Avalos, Melcher, and Schipper (eds.), This Abled Body, pp. 91–101.
57.
On the strategic deployment of disability in the Deuteronomistic History, including the parallel account of Zedekiah in 2 Kgs 25, see Jeremy Schipper, ‘Disabling Israelite Leadership: 2 Samuel 6:23 and Other Images of Disability in the Deuteronomistic History’, in Avalos, Melcher, and Schipper (eds.), This Abled Body, pp. 103–14 (112).
58.
Diamond, ‘Interlocutions’, p. 58.
59.
Diamond, ‘Interlocutions’, p. 62.
60.
Michel Poizat, ‘“The Blue Note”’, p. 210.
61.
On the eroticism of listening, see as well Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 12.