'Scenes From a Marriage'—According To Jeremiah

Abstract

The episode of the peculiar marriage of Hosea is not the only description of a peculiar marriage or family life related to a prophet and his mission. Such is the episode of Num. 12, in which the subject is the Ethiopian wife whom Moses married, and in which, strangely enough, God mentions the standing of Moses as a prophet. At Isa. 8.2 the prophet 'approaches' the prophetess, and a son is born to them as a prophetic symbol. This probably explains the action of prophets whom Jeremiah accuses of adultery, which is related to their prophesying (Jer. 29.23; cf. 23.10-14). Also the term is related to adultery (cf. 2.3 etc.). In a similar way we can grasp 23.23-24 within the context of such accusations; cf. in Num. 5.13. Jeremiah himself held the opposite ideology concerning relationship with women (16.1ff.).

As in Hosea the first prophecies of Jeremiah contain a retrospective of a ruined marriage (chs. 2-3). Many of the sequences of metaphors are related explicitly or implicitly to the cycle of 'Scenes from a Marriage'. This essay proposes a connection between the seemingly sporadic metaphors, e.g. the vine, as a metaphor of a woman (2.21), and the metaphor of the washing of the (v. 22)—actually a term used for stains of menstrual blood—which is also symbolized in the ancient world by wine. Similarly, other expressions, such as 'I am not defiled', 'to be clean', and others, appear in a context of accusation of adultery (Num. 5). In this chapter we have the phenomenon of a metaphor within a metaphor: the prophet is speaking of the unfaith ful with metaphors (an untamed animal, a restive camel), and appears to forget that the hated-beloved woman, with whom he is settling accounts, does not really exist and is only a metaphor. Does such intensive occupation with this topic spring from some personal (traumatic) experience?