Notes for Sept 15 Readings

Jer. 4:11-12, 22-28

I am not sure why we have the break, but we start with what I assume would be a terrible sirocco as a judgment that goes far beyond cleaning. Yet why the phrase my poor or foolish people? Is the punishment going too far?

I do not know which was first, but the waste and void phrase in v. 23 has clear verbal links to Gen. 1:2. Brueggemann notes this  passage in his Theology of the OT. That creation account emphasizes life, and here it seems to disappear, both plant and animal life. I suppose one could use this as a guide to the planetary threats of greenhouse gas pollution as dire warnings. At v. 25  no one is the human one, adamah, so now we get Gen. 2 in the picture. The effects of evil become a theater of desolation.

Even with this anti creation theme (see Fretheim) God is not considering a complete destruction. God's interrelated world has human action, including evil, have an effect on nature. Creation exists within a complex of forces and actions.
Even so, Jeremiah envisions cosmic mourning. Katherine Hayes has asserted that mourning or drying up are meanings for a-b-l and that word is connected to the land eretz.

Brueggemann in a Jeremiah commentary-prophetic work “is not a blueprint for the future. It is not a prediction. It is not an act of theology that seeks to scare into repentance. It is, rather, a rhetorical attempt to engage this numbed, unaware community in an imaginative embrace of what is happening ... because ... evil finally must be answered for.”