Jordan Skornik - 'Clarifying the Literary Vision and Limitations of Jeremiah 36 as a Guide to the Nature of the Bible's Prophetic Literature'

Jeremiah 36 has played a pivotal role in scholarly thinking about the origins of and relationship between prophecy and writing. Some of the topics in which it features prominently include: scribalism and redaction; scroll technology and materiality; the possibility of prophetic collections; and, most famously, the compositional history of the Book of Jeremiah itself. What emerges in these discussions is a certain tension between the potential fictiveness (and symbolism) of the account, on the one hand, and what it might nevertheless reveal about the nature of written prophecy, on the other. In this presentation for the Hebrew Bible Workshop, PhD candidate Jordan Skornik will use Jeremiah 36 as a foil for thinking about the Bible’s prophetic literature qua literature. Refreshments will follow. For information, contact the workshop coordinators, Sun Bok Bae (sunbok@uchicago.edu) or Marshall Cunningham (mcunningham1@uchicago.edu).