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1. Investigating Structure 41
Jeremiah 52; 1 1.5 Drnn nxn, and 20.18 »nHS» Drnn. In the latter case
Lundbom says that 20.18 is meant to be read in the light of 1.5.
Jeremiah's question, 'Why did I come forth?' has an answer: Yahweh
called him before he came forth. 2 Holladay agrees with Lundbom
here, though he does not refer to his comment on 'words of in 1.1.
Holladay says that 20.14-18 is the last of Jeremiah's recorded
'confessions' which, 'in its position here, serves as an inclusio to
round off the confessions'.
Not all his examples are as attractive as these. For example, he
argues that 30.5-6 and 31.22b form an inclusio for the core of the
'Book of Consolation', chs. 30-33. 3 The words which suggest this are
"OT and -QJ (30.6) and nap] and naa (31.22b). The correspondence
between these is interesting, and there may well be an intended echo
of the 'men acting like women' theme in 31.22. However, there are
difficulties in establishing this, for (a) the meaning of the latter is
obscure; and (b) the most natural place to look for the beginning of an
inclusio would be 30.5b rather than v. 6. If that is so, we need to
explain why rrnn is not intended to form an inclusio with Tino, the
final word of 30.10. Perhaps it is a subsidiary inclusio, but if so, it
cuts across the one discovered by Lundbom. We might also point to
Di^tf in 33.9 as well as 30.5, and note that there we also find the verb
rri which is used parallel to Tin in 1 Sam. 14.15, and might be
considered the recognizable complement of a word pair.
Lundbom himself raises another difficulty, namely that Duhm
argued that 31.22b was an appendage. If this were established, it
would not necessarily rule out an intended inclusio, but we should
have to give the credit for it to an editor. 4
A further passage where Lundbom's work looks both promising
and insecure is 8.13-9.21. The root *p» and the word ]*« each occur
twice in 8.13, while 9.21 ends with the phrase *|OKo ]ve\. This is
persuasive—and might be even more so if we included *?:M and rf?aj in
8.13 and 9.21 respectively. However this might modify Lundbom's
1. Lundbom, Jeremiah, pp. 25-27.
2. Lundbom, Jeremiah, pp. 28-30; cf. Holladay, Jeremiah, p. 563;
cf. Architecture, p. 20.
3. Lundbom, Jeremiah, pp. 32-36.
4. Lundbom, Jeremiah, p. 33. Most commentators, however, seem to accept
31.2-22 as Jeremianic (cf. O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction
[Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965], pp. 361-62).