Jeremiah: Pain and Promise

by Kathleen M. O'Connor (Translator)

Whether dealing with collective catastrophe or intimate trauma, recovering from emotional and physical hurt is hard. Kathleen O'Connor shows that although Jeremiah's emotionally wrought language can aggravate readers' memories of pain, it also documents the ways an ancient community-and the prophet personally-sought to restore their collapsed social world. Both prophet and book provide a traumatized community language to articulate disaster; move self-understanding from delusional security to identity as survivors; constitute individuals as responsible moral agents; portray God as equally afflicted by disaster; and invite a reconstruction of reality.

Genres: Theology, Old Testament

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

Kathleen M. O'Connor is author of several books including The Wisdom Literature (Liturgical Press, 1990), Jeremiah: Pain and Promise, and Lamentations and the Tears of the World. She is the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament, emerita, at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, and also taught at the Maryknoll School of Theology in Ossining, New York. She is active in the Catholic Biblical Association of America and the Society of Biblical Literature.

Reviews

[Sandra Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Viewing from the lens of trauma and pain, Kathleen opens a new window for us to view God, Jeremiah, people of Judah.

It widened my view of God without simplifying and reducing the collective and personal trauma of the people and Jeremiah. It left me with amazement and eagerness to feel the pain and learn more.

She did it humbly and amazingly in her scholarly and biblical efforts, as well as offering practical insights through psychological study in trauma and pain.

The only concern is that this lens might blind us from viewing it with the real historical context, and it all colours with trauma and pain. I also don't quite agree with the point of "re-victimizing" the victims.

Still, I enjoy this book a lot and it’s worth the read.

*Love this quote in Epilogue:*
We humans cannot absorb the bitter truths of our own history, the revelation of our destructive potential, except through the mediation of art (the manifestation of our other, our constructive potential). Presented raw, the facts are rejected: perhaps not by the intellect, which accommodates them as statistics, but by the emotions -- which hold the key to conscience and resolve. We numb ourselves, evading the vile taste, the stench. But whether neutralized into statistics or encountered head-on without an artist-guide (as if Dante wandered through Hell without a Virgil), the facts poison us unless we can find a way both to acknowledge their reality with our whole selves and, accepting it, muster the will to transcend it.

[George Kogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a remarkable, compelling look at the complexity of the book of Jeremiah through the prism of trauma and disaster studies. A stellar interdisciplinary contribution to Old Testament biblical theology.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I don't know if I agree with the book and its assumptions entirely, I will say that it was an incredibly insightful read and made a powerful argument. Reading Jeremiah through this lens does have particular power and gives us vision for our lives today. It also makes sense of this historical work and why it was constructed the way it was. I enjoyed the read and now have much more research to do on the book of Jeremiah to determine my thoughts on the assumptions and conclusions made in this book. I appreciate the argument the book makes and its process, while remaining hesitant to entirely embrace it's conclusions.

[Margie Dorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

O'Connor gives a whole new perspective on Jeremiah, as "a work of resilience, a survival manual, a literary anthology, and a work of theological art." It was written to help traumatized victims of unimaginable disaster cope and continue. For those of us who have not experienced utter destruction, it is hard to understand how this difficult portrayal can be at all helpful, and yet I am now able to see the book of Jeremiah as having its place, and why it has been said that Jeremiah was the last true prophet because everyone who came after him was only repeating him. This is a perspective I will bring with me to future discussions of this complex writing.

[Laure Hittle · Rating 3 out of 5]

ot before been adequately addressed. However, it often feels as if O’Connor is reading Jeremiah exclusively through that lens, minimizing or simply misreading historical, literary, and theological aspects of the text. For example, she frequently over-synthesizes metaphors (suggesting “incest” because Jerusalem is pictured as both a wife and a daughter, rather than recognizing that these are separate images within a multi-layered attempt to communicate through multiple means and from multiple ANE cultural angles). Despite her uniquely valuable recognition of the trauma the book’s original readers faced, her literary facility leaves much to be desired, and her theological conclusions can at times be harrowing. (i do appreciate her raising these questions and concerns, however—we sanitize too much. The text, and G-d within the text, needs to be wrestled, not defended. But we have a full canon affirming that G-d is defined by love, holiness, righteousness, justice, and truth. The difficult texts we encounter must not be made the interpretive key to the whole but must be interpreted in light of the whole—which is not to say they become less horrifying or challenging, but that we must keep wrestling). She says on p. 31 that love is a recurring theme of the book, but much of the rest of her book fails to incorporate this theme or even defies it, instead characterizing G-d almost exclusively as wrath-filled and violent. She needs a much more coherent theology of love and wrath. As it stands, this view of G-d supports abuse. That she is able to view the G-d presented in Jeremiah as able to feel and express grief and anguish elevates her view of Him among many scholars who would limit His emotional landscape to wrath only, but neither of these analyses fully reckon with His presentation in scripture (or with modern western, especially American, cultural misogyny which permits men the sole emotion of anger). If G-d is experiencing trauma, as O’Connor asserts, more can be done to recognize the complexity of His experience; simultaneously, more can be done to investigate how this deeply emotional book coheres with other portrayals of G-d in scripture. A full investigation is beyond the scope of this study, but a nod would be appropriate.

It seems to this reader that trauma and disaster is a necessary lens which i applaud and thank O’Connor for addressing, but which she has not yet finished wrestling herself.

[MaryAnne]

This book impacted me, and like it did for the author, it redeemed my view of the book of Jeremiah. Long before trauma-informed studies were a buzzword, Kathleen O'Connor applied the emerging understanding of the effects of trauma on individuals and on societies to the book of Jeremiah. The readers were people of Judah who had survived brutal attacks by Babylon and who were left behind when their loved ones were deported. With individual PTSD and with societal structures in chaos, they needed to begin rebuilding their lives and community. How to heal? Jeremiah, traumatized himself, puts unspeakable wounds into metaphor, image, poem, prayer and promise that jerk erratically through time--just like the shards of violent memories that haunt the people. He leads a benumbed people with hearts of stone back into feeling, invites passive victims into active engagement, becomes a personal stand-in for their unspeakable pain and is perhaps, responsible for the people of Judah not disappearing as a community like their earlier deported sister, the people of Israel.

[Brianna Daly]

Me and Jeremiah are not on speaking terms:-) This book was brutal at times, but a helpful look at exile through a trauma theory lens. I have some serious issues with some of O’Connor’s takes, but she did good (HARD) work here.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic resource!

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Used for a local study on Jeremiah for a bible study. Very insighful as to the trauma in Israelite history and the effort to find a meaning that offers explanation, hope and healing.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Neil White · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very insightful look at Jeremiah through the lens of disaster and trauma studies. Kathleen O'Conner's little work helps to provide some meaning in the disordered meaning that is Jeremiah's world. Her insight into the need to create meanings in a world that has been wrenched out of control by crisis (in Judaism the collapse of the Davidic monarchy, the Temple and Jerusalem-the world as they knew it) and through the poetry, prose, judgment and grace, the pain and the promise she points to an act of healing and re-establishing identity in the wandering chapters of Jeremiah. I wish I would have read this earlier in my work through Jeremiah.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look into Jeremiah's words as an attempt to heal a community shattered by traumatic violence. The best part of her work is her explanation for the chaotic structure of the book as intentionally set up to reflect the condition of the reader's lives. As they read, they would have to do the work of piecing together meaning and interpretation as they pursue the path do recovery.