Faculty News: Sr. Barbara Green, OP

On November 21-23, Sr. Barbara attended the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans. The SBL is the largest and probably most representative association of academic biblical scholars in the world. Sr. Barbara was invited to offer a paper in a section called Writing/Reading Jeremiah, since she has been working on that prophet for about three years and presented two papers on the book of Jeremiah at last year's SBL meeting in Boston. Her paper "Sunk in the Mud: Literary Correlation and Collaboration between King and Prophet," focused on the material where the prophet interacts with the last king of Judah, Zedekiah (350 verses, with the main portion in 38:14-28). Sister’s thesis was that the apparent opponents—the prophet Jeremiah and the king Zedekiah—deeply resemble each other and are in fact comprehensively interlocked (each is, at a given moment, described as "sunk in the mud";) their common striving makes visible a project larger than either of them: the characterization of prophecy and the survival of God’s biblical people; the failure of Jeremiah’s speech offers insight into coercive language. The paper concluded with the implication that the interlocked characterization heightens the prophet’s inability to do his apparent job well; at a moment he might have spoken effectively his word—lacking empathy—seems to boomerang; maybe that’s the point for his re-readers, then and now.