Jeremiah For Advent

AS I ALWAYS say, RMJ does the best Advent posts around.   Today's is especially good.

I have been encouraging People to read Jeremiah in the wake of Trump finally winning an election because there is nothing I know of that better says how we got to this nearly as well or now we might get out of it.   I'll make it easy for you, here's that favorite narrator of the later 20th century,  the actor Alexander Scourby reading Jeremiah from one of the King James Versions.  I'd have preferred a more modern translation but, as the late Ned Rorem pointed out when asked why he always used the KJV for his bible settings, it's in the public domain.   

Still, as a performance - AND ALL OF SCRIPTURE WAS ALWAYS MOSTLY READ AS A PERFORMANCE, it is very good.  I'd suggest taking it one chapter at a time, it's pretty hard going to do all at once.   Jeremiah didn't write all of it at once, after all.  As Walter Breuggemann has pointed out,  Jeremiah was essentially a protest poet, he may well have sung it like Bob Dylan would.