Jeremiah’s Laments as Effective Speech

Abstract

In his laments, the prophet Jeremiah moves beyond the typical prophetic role of spokesperson. Rather than mediating a divine message, the prophet speaks to the deity from his own suffering. Scholars tend to see Jeremiah’s laments as presenting either a radically interior form of religion or a kind of community protest in which the “I” of the lament is a metonymy for the “we” of the nation. This paper will instead locate Jeremiah’s laments within a discourse on the effective nature of prophetic utterance. Understood in this manner, these laments portray the prophet as praying effectively for the destruction of Judah.