Jeremiah

Clements is often lucid and moving on Jeremiah’s suffering, divine sovereignty, judgment, and hope, but I found the commentary weakened by speculative reconstructions and several exegetical or theological tensions. On Jeremiah 13:18–19 he insists that the oracle “must” have originated after Jehoiachin’s capture, although its command that the king and queen mother humble themselves makes much better sense while the king is still enthroned and able to respond. On 20:7–18 he treats verse 13 as a later scribal addition and says Jeremiah’s cry receives no explicit divine answer, overlooking the answer already present in verses 11–13: the Lord is with Jeremiah, his persecutors will fail, and God delivers the needy. His treatment of the new covenant is internally unstable: he first calls it “radically new” and declares that “the old covenant of the law is dead,” but shortly afterwards says it is not radically different, only a renewed form of the earlier covenant, without explaining how these claims cohere. Similarly, his argument for assigning Jeremiah 50–51 to a late period is weakened when he says it was “impossible” for Jeremiah both to urge present submission to Babylon and to announce Babylon’s eventual downfall, then immediately concedes that the positions are compatible once their different timeframes are recognized—the very distinction already made in 25:11–12, 27:7, and 29:10. Some theological formulations are also troubling: on chapters 14–15 he says Israel’s sins had become too immense for God to forgive “even on this occasion,” language that risks confusing God’s refusal to cancel an already decreed temporal judgment with an inability to forgive, and that sits uneasily with Clements’s own later acknowledgment that 36:3 offers forgiveness if the people repent. He twice overgeneralizes that nobody in Judah was innocent—even saying that every man, woman, and child shared the blame—despite Jeremiah’s repeated condemnation of shedding innocent blood and Clements’s own description of sacrificed children as innocent victims. Although he commendably denies that God acts capriciously and affirms the ultimate goodness of God’s purpose, he nevertheless describes God as “sometimes angry and violent,” an imprecise formulation that risks turning righteous judicial wrath into moral violence. Finally, he builds part of his reconstruction of Jeremiah’s anti-royal and anti-temple outlook upon an unproved genealogy: Jeremiah 1:1 says only that Jeremiah belonged to the priests at Anathoth, yet Clements moves from possibility to asserting that he was Abiathar’s descendant and then infers inherited political and priestly resentments. The result is stimulating and sometimes profound, but too conjectural and internally uneven to serve as a reliable stand-alone guide without regular comparison with more textually disciplined commentaries.

An effort by a critical scholar to deal with the final form of the text. [Full Review]