Better late than never: happy to report that An Introduction to the Study of Jeremiah came out with Bloomsbury earlier this year. It all started because I was asked to give the Old Testament lectures at the Vacation Term for Biblical Study in 2015, at the same time that I was in Germany working on Jeremiah for my Israel and Judah project. It made sense to lecture on Jeremiah and, when I’d come up with my lecture titles, they looked rather like an introduction to Jeremiah. I’d been impressed with other volumes in the Bloomsbury series, so it was a natural place to approach about working the lectures up into a book.

The volume is written to get the reader quickly up to speed on the current state of the field, whether that’s a student and a complete Jeremiah novice or an established scholar whose main research lies elsewhere and needs a refresher. The series has a special emphasis on method, so the Introduction is focused on introducing readers to the panoply of approaches that scholars have taken to the book of late, including postcolonial theory, feminist criticism, trauma studies, canonical criticism, and theological interpretation. If you spend time with Jeremiah yourself, you’ll realise that corralling the last few decades of scholarship into any semblance of order is akin to wrangling a determinedly rebellious clowder of cats. I elected to structure the book around a series of case studies, looking at what happens when we approach a chapter or group of chapters from a number of different interpretive angles. Given it’s Jeremiah it’s hardly surprising that there were moments when the book made me want to tear my hair out, but I’m quite pleased with the results in the end.

You can find the paperback version here.