Jeremiah under the shadow of Duhm: An argument from the history of criticism against the use of poetic form as a criterion of authenticity

This study argues against the use of poetic form in the book of Jeremiah as an indicator of the authentic speech of the prophet. This critical method, introduced by Bernhard Duhm (1901), has exerted a pervasive and pernicious influence over the last century of Jeremiah scholarship.;Part I demonstrates that Duhm's identification of poetic form with authentic prophetic speech is an instance of Romantic poetic theory, which has roots in Robert Lowth's argument (1753) that the Hebrew prophets were poets. Furthermore, the resulting biography of Jeremiah in Duhm's work parallels the biographies of Romantic poets, and the Grafian reconstruction of Israel's history, which Duhm's compositional history of Jeremiah is intended to support, is an instance Romantic historiography, which also has roots in the work of Lowth.;Part II observes that the forms in which Duhm's theory dominated twentieth-century Jeremiah scholarship---the three-source compositional model (best known in Sigmund Mowinckel's Types A, B, and C) and the reconstruction of Jeremiah's early ministry (as represented by John Skinner's biography of the prophet)---were heavily influenced by contemporary intellectual currents (particularly classic Protestant liberalism) and that they present formidable obstacles to perceiving the purpose and coherence of the extant forms of the text.;Part III argues that scholars employing methods designed to overcome these obstacles (characteristic of late twentieth-century biblical scholarship) have been hindered by their continued adherence to Duhm's foundational assumptions about poetry. Because of their failure to break free from the dominant biographical methods or compositional assumptions, rhetorical studies of Jer 2-10 and redactional studies of Jer 11-20 have failed to perceive that these chapters offer extended dramatic presentations unified by narrative progression. Their inability to achieve their aim of illuminating the structure and purpose of the present form of the text suggests the need to reexamine the compositional models and biographical reconstructions which rely on the use of poetic form as criterion of authenticity.