LEST ANYONE think that I've given up on the Brueggemann lectures on Jeremiah, I haven't. I would recommend a free resource to that book so caught up in the invasion and exile of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires an old but useful book, Assyrian and Babylonian Literature: Selected Translations by Robert Francis Harper, including the introductory material. I don't know the extent to which his thinking and research may have been overtaken by more recent scholarship - we're all at the mercy of what the experts of a given time think about things we don't know much about but it's bound to be more informed about it than I am. One of the things I've concluded is that sometimes the old, old-fashioned experts are no more and in some cases less biased than the newer ones, sometimes that is reversed and it's hard to know which is which until you've read a lot more than I'm ever going to be able to dedicate to this side-issue. My habit of looking for supplementary material can turn into a bad habit of getting side tracked if not derailed entirely. Especially when I've got work in the garden to do. I refuse to take Voltaire's advice of tending my own garden while the world burns. He can go to hell on that one.
I have decided to list links to the four lecture-sermon-Q&As for those who want to listen ahead of where I'm getting with them.
I would also recommend you read commentaries on Jeremiah from a number of sources. I'm finding the one in the Christian Community Bible, from a 1970s liberation theological point of view to be congenial and interesting in both its agreements with Brueggemann and its differences. I am finding the book to be as complex as he warned it was in his first lecture, going through five kings into a central catastrophe around which the entire Old Testament was consolidated and expanded into the enormously complex and varied entity we have now. I think it is one of the most useful things I've read in relation to the American and democratic catastrophe we are in the midst of even as our natural world is catastrophically altered and perhaps destroyed at our own hands, our own prophets suppressed by the last four Republican-fascist presidents, from Reagan, the Democrats unable to do much about it due to the corruption of our democracy mentioned here earlier today.
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