Who is speaking? Who is addressed?: A critical study into the conditions of exegetical method and its consequences for the interpretation of participant reference-shifts in he book of Jeremiah

It appears to be a common phenomenon in the OT texts that the references to participants are unstable with regard to their gender, number and person characteristics. As a consequence, textual coherence is constantly at risk from a modern perspective. This applies especially to prophetic and poetic texts. While, for example, within the speech of YHWH in Jer 50:26-40 Babel is referred to in 3sgF (Babel=she) during the first clauses, the dialogue proceeds with addressing Babel in 2sgM (Babel=you [masculine]) before it switches back into 3sgF (Babel=she) forms and then continuing with 3plM references (Babel=they). As a consequence it is often unclear to the reader whether the reference to a participant has shifted because a new participants was introduced, or because the speaker has shifted, or because the speaker is no longer speaking to the same dialogue partner. Within the reading process the reader is constantly asking questions like “Who is speaking?” and “Who is addressed?”. This book, then, brings the generally ignored but omnipresent textual phenomenon of participant reference shifts into focus. In this book we decide to discuss the phenomenon of participant reference shifts as they appear in the book of Jeremiah. Since this book contains almost 600 of these shifts it delivers enough data for getting at grips with the phenomenon and allowing a meaningful data-oriented analysis. In our analysis of the phenomenon we pursue two aims. On the one hand, we let the few but diverse comments about the origin and function of these participant reference shifts by different exegetical traditions cause an investigation into the ontological and epistemological foundations of exegetical methodology. On the other hand, our exegetical interest will analyze the distributions of the shift phenomena in the book of Jeremiah phenomenologically in order to derive patterns and suggest possible, data-oriented functions of these shifts in the book of Jeremiah. In the first chapter we present our methodological reflections. They contain a general phenomenological analysis of the processes and interrelated entities that make interpretation possible, a phenomenological description of the biblical text and a representation of the different and conflicting interpretations given on some of the most important phenomena of the biblical text. After our methodological reflections, we are entitled to argue in the second chapter for the need of a text-linguistic analysis of the book of Jeremiah. This is an indispensable first step to be taken by any exegetical methodology, independent of their specific operative frameworks of interpretation. Our attitude towards data as well as our treatment of data receives a clear expression in this second chapter. However, the presented analytical instruments, which will visualize the text-grammatical structure of the text, will not allow for a “complete” interpretation of textual data. This is because we present our text-linguistic analysis not as a complete exegetical methodology. To propose a complete exegetical methodology cannot be part of this dissertation as it involves the construction of an interpretation of Reason, implying the research into the fields of ontology and epistemology. After our methodology is laid out we confront in the third chapter the different commentary traditions and their treatment of PNG-shifts with our PNG-shift database (see 5.2) and assess their interpretations by means of our hermeneutical framework as developed in chapter 1. This results in the detection of what we explain in our methodological reflections the final and the formal condition of each respective commentary tradition. The basic difference between diachronic and synchronic approaches becomes visible.