Writing Up Jeremiah

This book seeks to place before a broad audience essays on Jeremiah and the book of Jeremiah. A poem featuring Jeremiah is also included. There are technical essays on text criticism, form criticism, and rhetorical criticism; scholarly articles on the scribes who figure in the Jeremiah tradition; and more popular lectures given to beginning students and lay audiences on this important prophet in ancient Israel. Also included is an essay on how the author went about writing his three-volume Jeremiah for the Anchor Bible commentary series. These thirteen essays are collected to be read with profit by scholars, beginning and advanced students, adults in Bible study classes, and people anywhere who want an introduction to important issues in the study of Jeremiah and the book bearing his name. If these aims are realized, the book will have achieved its goal.

""Jack Lundbom's long-time attention to the rhetoric of this prophet is unmatched in scholarly literature and provides a fresh approach to the meaning of the final form of the text. He also defends a new understanding of the shorter text of Jeremiah known from the Septuagint and from some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that deserves to be debated at the highest levels. This book also applies the insights of Jeremiah to Christian life today.""
--Ralph W. Klein, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

""Jack Lundbom is an expert in Jeremiah studies. More than twenty-five years of his research on this prophet come alive in this new book, a collection of articles on important topics, like the rhetoric of the book of Jeremiah, the new covenant, and the figure of Jeremiah's confident Baruch. Lundbom's essays cover a wide horizon, ranging from questions regarding textual criticism to his experiences writing the Anchor Bible commentary.""
--Georg Fischer, SJ, University of Innsbruck, Austria

""Jack Lundbom has been writing groundbreaking studies of Jeremiah since the 1970s, climaxing with his massive Anchor Bible commentary. These essays are the perfect way into his lifetime's work. They display his distinctive approach to the variant texts of Jeremiah, his insights into the scribes who crafted the book, the method of rhetorical criticism he applies so fruitfully in his commentary, and not least some central topics in Jeremiah's teaching.""
--Graham Davies, University of Cambridge

""Jeremiah Essays grants unusual access to the background, perspective, and process of his major, three-volume commentary on Jeremiah. These essays reveal Lundbom as the mature, wide-ranging scholar and author he is in his own right. . . . This is must reading for any serious student of Jeremiah.""
--Marvin L. Chaney, San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union


Jack Lundbom is currently Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. He is author of Jeremiah: A Study in Ancient Hebrew Rhetoric (1975; 1997), a three-volume Jeremiah in the Anchor Bible commentary series (1999; 2004), and a two-volume Deuteronomy commentary (2012).