A Modern Protestant Theology of Paul

on bringing it into being. Dr Stulman is a senior Jeremiah scholar whose work on Jeremiah over the years has been both creative and sane, while Dr Silver more recently completed a PhD on Jeremiah and has undertaken a number of studies on its text. They complement each other in a number of ways. It has often been noted that 1986 saw an extraordinary publishing collocation in connection with Jeremiah in the publication of William McKane’s commentary, Robert Carroll’s commentary, and the first volume of William Holladay’s commentary. All were prodigious works ploughing distinctive furrows, and one might have expected them to have established parameters for debate about Jeremiah over subsequent decades, perhaps three different sets of parameters. A first striking feature of this Handbook is that it gives the impression of living in a different world of Jeremiah studies. The introduction immediately establishes the point, with the sentence ‘language of trauma gives the book [of Jeremiah] its distinctive character’ on the first page, and its repetition of words such as pain, horror, and disaster; actually the introduction reads more like the preamble to a book on Lamentations than one to a book on Jeremiah. The volume goes on to incorporate studies by thirty-eight scholars, in six groups, on historical and cultural contexts of origin, textual history and structure, some critical questions of interpretation, some major themes within the book (the volume’s most substantial section), some studies of the book’s reception (where Lamentations overtly features), and some key contemporary political issues (‘political’ broadly understood). Whereas one could hardly ask that the volume should have been more informative and thoughtprovoking, I could have wished it had been more critical or iconoclastic over some issues. It takes for granted the notion of Deuteronomism and its importance for understanding the book of Jeremiah, whereas Deuteronomism has become a hazy and contested notion. And it takes for granted that the book of Jeremiah came into existence in a Babylonian context and/or with a sympathy for Judahites who had been in Babylon, and I think the evidence for such convictions is thin. On the other hand, I was glad that it makes little attempt to link the book of Jeremiah with the Persian period and works more with the assumption that it came into being in the Babylonian era, and that it includes little talk of theodicy, which has been a preoccupation in some Jeremiah scholarship. Such idiosyncratic personal opinions apart, I found this volume engaging, absorbing, and mindexpanding. The Oxford Handbooks aim to provide scholars and graduate students with examples of cutting edge research on their subjects and guidance on the progress and direction of debate on different subjects, and this handbook does so.