Jeremiah 26. In chap. 26,
"the priests, the prophets, and all the people" (v. 7) demand a death
sentence for Jeremiah, because he has "prophesied in the name of God,
saying, 'This house shall be like Shiloh and the city shall be desolate,
without inhabitant'" (v. 9). Following this demand, the people establish a
quasi court, where the contenders present their arguments. Some participants
act as "prosecutors," others as "defenders," yet a clear
formal accusation is missing, and commentators are divided regarding its
identification. Some have suggested that the complaint was the impudence of
proclaiming the destruction of the temple, others define the charge as
blasphemy against God, and still others speculate that Jeremiah was accused of
prophesying falsely.
I support the third view for the
following reasons: (1) When pleading not guilty, Jeremiah does not refer at all
to a charge of blasphemy. On the other hand, he clearly rejects the accusation
of prophesying falsely. He opens his address to the accusers by saying,
"God sent me to prophesy against this house and this city all the words
you have heard" (v. 12) and concludes by stressing once again, "for
in truth God sent me to you to speak ... " (v. 15). (2) The prophet's
defenders repeat this declaration, "This man does not deserve the sentence
of death, for he has spoken to us in the name of our God" (v. 16). (3)
Scholars who advocate the blasphemy option refer to Exod 22:27 and Lev
24:10-16, "the punishment for blasphemy is death." However, Exod
22:27 does not mention a death penalty, and the incident in Lev 24:16 is not
mere blasphemy but literally cursing (‘ונקב שם ה) God's name, which is
definitely not what occurs in our story. On the other hand, death is indicated
as the punishment of false prophets in Deut 13:6, 18:20. (4) False prophecy is
the common denominator of the whole context, Jeremiah 26-29.
One has to wonder why the author
did not clearly explicate the accusation. I speculate that the omission is
actually intentional paralepsis, used to focus the reader’s attention on the reason
that Jeremiah’s opponents have derived such an absurdity from his
prophecy. The reason, as implied by Jeremiah’s words in 26:13 and by the
legal precedent of Micah (vv. 18-19), was that they erroneously
considered a prophecy to be an irreversible prediction of the future. They
dogmatically believed in the immanent, unconditional holiness of the temple and
therefore its indestructibility. Hence, they deduced that whoever prophesied
otherwise was necessarily a false prophet, since his prophecy would never come
true and he would fail the test of fulfillment. It is clear that the au- thor
expressed the opposite view through the words of Jeremiah, " ... correct
your ways and your doings and obey ... and [the Lord] will repent of the evil
which he has pronounced against you" (v. 13). Here the "test of
fulfillment" was principally rejected as irrelevant, and the distinction
between prophecy and soothsaying was emphasized. Nevertheless, the expression
of this concept of prophecy in our story was not unequivocal. Having written
his story from an exilic perspective, the author (and his potential readers)
knew that Jeremiah's prophecy had come true and that Jeremiah had passed the
"test of fulfillment." Thus, the narrative successfully "burned
the candle at both ends": the postulate that a prophet is not necessarily
a seer is expressed, and in any event, Jeremiah's virtue as a soothsayer has
been confirmed. The conclusion of the story regarding our subject is therefore:
theoretically a prophet's soothsaying ability could be disproved without
diminishing his reputation as a true messenger of God; practically, however,
Jeremiah has proved his virtue as a soothsayer. (Yair Hoffman, “Prophecy and Soothsaying,” in Tehillah
le-Moshe: Biblical and Judaic Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg, ed.
Mordechai Cogan, Barry L. Eichler, and Jeffrey H. Tigay [Winona Lake, Ind.:
Eisenbrauns, 1997], 228-29, emphasis in bold added)
