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The figure of Jeremiah has captured the imagination of people from the sixth century B.C.E. until today. His passionate poetry, full of arresting images of lewdness and violence alongside expressions of tenderness and glimpses of transcendence, has nourished deep spirituality as well as radical politics. Some of his idioms are part of the common lore ("Can the leopard change his spots?" and "There is a balm in Gilead"). But it is Jeremiah as exemplar of the spiritual struggle of a faithful soul in its tumultuous life with God who has most powerfully influenced readers, especially for the past four centuries. In the culture of the modern West Jeremiah is a Promethean figure in his struggles with God, yet accessibly human in the expression of his emotions. An intimation of this figure inhabits the biblical book, but the complex character that Western culture now calls Jeremiah came into being slowly, with the building up of interpretations by faithful readers over the centuries. The Blackwell Commentary on Jeremiah would guide the reader through some of these interpretations with the aim of illuminating the deep influence that the book of Jeremiah and Western culture have played on each other.

A unifying theme of the commentary would be the way in which the developing sense of the self in the West has shaped interpretation of Jeremiah, and reciprocally, the contribution that the interpretive history of the book of Jeremiah has made on the idea of the self. Emphasis on the self-conscious inner life of the prophet is apparent in translations and commentaries as well as artistic renderings and literary allusions, especially from the fifteenth century forward. Interpretive traditions increasingly tell the story of a prophet with a strong personality and deep inner life. The shift in emphasis from the prophet as bearer of the message of Yahweh to the prophet as spiritual giant wrestling with God is unmistakable over the long trajectory of reception history. Yet the influence also worked the other way, because the book of Jeremiah translated into English actually contributed to the emerging vocabulary of the self in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The commentary will highlight the various ways that Jeremiah has affected the cultures in which it was read.

The main body of the commentary would be arranged in the order of the biblical book, but would follow the density of the interpretive tradition in its larger divisions.

Part I
Jeremiah 1 The Call
Jeremiah 2-6 Poetic Oracles
Jeremiah 7, The Temple Sermon
Jeremiah 8-11 Poetic Oracles
Jeremiah 12 The Confessions (including parts of chapters15, 17, 18 and 20)
Jeremiah 13-20 Prophetic Signs (the loincloth, the drought,
Jeremiah's celibacy,
the potter, the smashed jar, Jeremiah in the stocks)
Jeremiah 21-22 Against the kings
Jeremiah 23 False Prophets
Jeremiah 24 The Basket of Figs
Jeremiah 25 The Cup of Wrath
Part II
Jeremiah 26 Jeremiah's Trial
Jeremiah 27-28 The Book of Consolation (including the New Covenant)
Jeremiah 32-33 The sign of the worthless real estate and promise of hope
Jeremiah 34 The story of Zedekiah's deceit about slaves
Jeremiah 35 The Rechabites
Jeremiah 36 King Jehoiakim cuts and burns Jeremiah's scroll
Jeremiah 37-39 Jeremiah and Zedekiah in Jerusalem's last days
Jeremiah 40-44 Stories of the prophet after the fall of Jerusalem
Jeremiah 45 Jeremiah's advice to Baruch
Jeremiah 46-51 Oracles against the nations, especially Babylon
Jeremiah 52 Narrative of the fall of Jerusalem