The Tradition of the ‘Sinai Covenant’ and Jeremiah

On some characteristics of his way of acceptance of the tradition

Abstract

In the studies of the Old Testament prophecy it has been much disputed whether the so-called writing prophets, whose words betray that they were men of a marked individuality, had their official position, (somewhat in the same way as it is the case with the cult-officials, ) within the cultic institutions where the old traditions were dominant all over. In this paper we try to see this point in the case of the prophet Jeremiah to prove that he was basically independent of any such institution in his activity, by means of pointing out the ways peculiar to him in his acceptance of the sacred traditions.
The hypothesis is that the form of prophetic sayings originated in the secular legal proceedings (as it is indicated by H. Gunkel, recently with some modifications by H. J. Boecker), which enables us to look at the structure of prophetic sayings as composed of two main parts, viz., complaint (Anklage) and the declaration of judgment (Gerichtsankündigung). As complaints are possible only when they are made on the basis of certain criteria, which have been probably formulated out of traditions and whose contents have been determined by them, we may expect that we would be able to meet these very traditions through analysis of the prophetic complaints.
In order to determine the traditions of the nature described above in so far as they are accepted by this particular prophet and appear in his complaints, we analyse them with the view of singling out their cores on the presumption that they would have the characteristics similar at least to the kernel of the complaints part in secular legal proceedings.
Twenty-one cores which we have singled out from Jeremiah's complaints almost unanimously run that people have left Jahwe, their God, but not, as usually considered, that people have broken the laws of Jahwe. Here we see an instance of free interpretation given to the Covenant tradition which had in all probability been coupled with the laws and accepted as the basis for the laws. Such freedom as we have seen in our prophet's interpretation of the tradition proves his independence from the institutional restrictions.