Kathleen M. O'Connor

Kathleen O'Connor is, frankly, a giant in Jeremiah studies; she occupies Walter Brueggemann's (her teacher's) chair of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. In fact, her dissertation on Jeremiah's confessions is a key basis for my own work on Jeremiah.

This book, then, represents the mature reflections of a scholar who has devoted much of her academic life to this book. That alone is recommendation enough to read it, but I think I can (and should) say more. First, this book is a record of how she has shifted her understanding of Jeremiah with the help of trauma/disaster studies. Frankly, before reading this book, I did not know such an academic field existed, so I experienced a doubled pleasure--a fresh reading of Jeremiah and an introduction to an entirely new way of reading ALL exilic and post-exilic OT texts. I also found it instructive that this book was not simply a "summary" of her lifetime of teaching but a move in a new scholarly direction from the pinnacle of success. This certainly says something about O'Connor's quality and courage as a scholar; but I think it says MORE about the nature of the book of Jeremiah. Like her, I've found Jeremiah constantly pushing me in new directions, raising new questions, unsettling official answers.

O'Connor's key point is to address the jumbled nature of the book. I don't want to give away the points she makes with such careful clarity, so I'll just say this: she convincingly argues that the "logic" of the book's structure reflects the "logic" of trauma. This "traumatic hermeneutic," if I could coin a phrase, is absolutely stunning in the clarity it brings to some of the long-standing mysteries of the book of Jeremiah. O'Connor, through a sampling of texts (this is NOT a full-on commentary on Jeremiah), touches on each of the major features of the book, offering the enlightenment of a "disaster" perspective.

I've done a bit of reading in Jeremiah studies over the last few years, and I've learned this much: It's a rare thing for a book to represent a "ground-shift" in basic approach. There are certain canons of Jeremiah studies that I'm not sure will ever shake loose. Even O'Connor at some small points seems to be "pandering" to this status quo: I mean, I can't for the life of me figure out why, near the end of her book, she brings up Duhm & Mowinckel's classic source theory of and McKane's "rolling corpus" theory; in all honesty, it contributes nothing to her work which offers, I feel, a much BETTER explanation of the book's origins and composition than either of those earlier approaches.

This book is an important book. And this book is a GOOD book. I don't just mean that it is well-written (it is), or well-researched (oh dear Lord, it is), or well-structured (yup it is). I mean that this is a book that does what, I feel, all biblical scholarship should do: calls us to renewed relationship with the One Whose story IS the story of Holy Scripture. I didn't just find a new understanding of Jeremiah here; I found new ways of understanding and relating to God and God's people. That's the best recommendation I can give.… (más)