Some First Thoughts on Jeremiah: God and Sexual Assault

Some First Thoughts on Jeremiah: God and Sexual Assault

July 10 2022

By AFBR

Jeremiah is interesting. It is, according to scholarship and how it reads, a jumbled-up mixture of oracles and prophecies attributed to the prophet Jeremiah during the pre- to mid- Babylonian exile imposed upon the Hebrews around 587 BCE and following, lasting some 50 to 70 years.

The book was added to by redactors for decades around this date and the timeline is not chronological, which makes it a little hard to follow, but it kind of makes sense if you take the overall grand narrative themes around, especially, punishment by exile for Israel/Judah (the Hebrew people – God’s covenant people) and return to Jerusalem and restoration via a new covenant.

We can’t take any book of the Bible (I don’t think; there may be a few exceptions that just don’t come to mind right now) as one work by one writer over one period of time. The books, and Jeremiah is no exception, is a mixture of voices and traditions, as stated above. But one can still trace interesting and horrifying oddities, questions, and inconsistencies within and across books of the Bible. Let’s consider a key theme in this work – sexual imagery and assault.

In Jeremiah 13, verses 22 and 26, there is some startling sexual assault imagery. This is nothing new to the Old Testament, of course. Since the realization of Adam and Eve of their nakedness due to their ‘original sin’ in the Garden of Eden, the Bible is replete with stories of sexual violence, assault, and senseless death around these narratives. From the request to homosexually rape the angels of God visiting Lot’s house in Sodom and his daughter’s incestual relations with their drunk father (both in Genesis 19), through the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34, to the seduction and incestuous assault of Tamar by her brother in 2 Samuel 13 – and Absalom’s subsequent revenge – there is no lack of sexual violence in God’s Holy Word. And, given the deaths of tens of thousands of children and unborn murdered during and after a battle by the order of either the Lord of one if His spokesmen, the reader is easily overwhelmed by the carnage.

Yet, in Jeremiah 13, there is a new, almost subtle addition to the Holy Word’s rape imagery. This time it is God, and not humans, who is at the center of the language and the very deliberate cause of the violent actions. In the chapter, the Lord, via Jeremiah, is prophesying what He will do to Israel because of their sin in worshipping other Gods. He will not only allow a large number to be carried away by Babylon, but will afflict pain and torture on His Chosen People in various ways. Here are a few lines from the Revised Standard Version (RSV):

·      13: 9 – “I will spoil the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem…”

·      13: 13 & 14 – “I will fill with drunkenness all the inhabitants of this land… and I will dash them one against another, fathers and sons together, says the Lord. I will not pity or spare or have compassion, that I should destroy them.”

The Lord continues, via Jeremiah, to describe further what He will cause to happen to his Chosen. In 13: 21 & 22, He says, “Will not pangs take hold of you like those of a woman in travail? And if you say in your heart, ‘Why have these things come upon me?’ it is for your iniquity that your skirts are lifted up, and you suffer violence.”

It doesn’t stop here. In verse 26, the “poetry” continues: “I myself will lift up your skirts over your face, and your shame will be seen.”

Way to go, Lord God.

Whether taken in a figurative or literal sense (and I think the argument is strong for either), the Lord is constructing imagery and/or instigating actions of sexual violence against his Covenant People.

And why? Ostensibly because ‘they’ (all of them; some of them; the leaders?) sinned by following other gods and thus broke the first Abrahamic Covenant. But they have done this for hundreds of years. And, are not these other ‘gods’ imaginary and of no substance? Are they really of any kind of threat at all to the most powerful being in the universe?