Uprooting and Planting: Essays on Jeremiah for Leslie Allen, ed.

John Goldingay (2007)

JEREMIAH 31:22B: AN INTENTIONALLY AMBIGUOUS,

MULTIVALENT RlDDLE-TEXT

Alice Ogden Bellis

"YHWH has created something new in the land: a female encompasses

a strong man." Although the message of the first colon presents no
problems and the meaning of the individual words in the second colon is
for the most part clear, the intention of this text is far from obvious. Over
the centuries interpreters have wrestled with this elusive line with no
clear consensus having been reached. This paper surveys the various
solutions and suggests that the poet may have intended the colon to be a
riddle1 with intentionally ambiguous,2 multiple meanings (polysemy) to
be heard simultaneously in a kind of ancient complexpun.
Although there is disagreement on the beginning of the poetic unit
which this line concludes,31 take the unit to be 31:15-22.

1. On biblical riddles, see H. Torczyner, "The Riddle in the Bible," HUCA 1

(1924): 125-49.
2. On deliberate ambiguity, see P. Raabe, "Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter,"
JBL 110 (1991): 213-27.
3. B. W. Anderson, "'The Lord Has Created Something New'—A Stylistic
Study of Jer 31:15-22," CBQ 40 (1978): 463-78; John Bright, Jeremiah (AB 21;
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), 225-26; Walter Brueggemann, To Build, To
Plant: A Commentary on Jeremiah 26-52 (ITC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991),
64; Ronald E. Clements, Jeremiah (Interpretation; Atlanta: John Knox, 1988), 186;
Terence E. Fretheim, Jeremiah (Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys, 2002), 433-38;
William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 2: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet
Jeremiah Chapters 26-52 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 156; C. F.
Keil, The Prophecies of Jeremiah, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1874), 23-31;
Gerald L. Keown, Pamela J. Scalise, and Thomas G. Smothers, Jeremiah 26-52
(WBC 27; Dallas: Word, 1995), 116; Ernest W. Nicholson, Jeremiah: Chapters 26-
52 (Cambridge Bible Commentary; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
6 Uprooting and Planting

Thus says YHWH:

A voice in Ramah is heard—
lamentation, bitter weeping.
Rachel, weeping for her children,
refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more. (31:15)
Rachel represents the northern kingdom of Israel because the sons of her
older son Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, and her younger son Benjamin
were eponymous ancestors of the major northern tribes. Thus Rachel's
children are the tribes who were lost in the Assyrian exile,4 but to the
extent that after the fall of the northern kingdom Judah reclaimed the
name Israel (and some of the former northerners were able to move to
Judah), the lost children may also be understood as the exiles in Babylon.
In the next line the narrator quotes God's comforting response to
Rachel:
Thus says YHWH:
Keep your voice from weeping,
and your eyes from tears;
For there is a reward for your work, says YHWH:
they shall come back from the land of the enemy.
There is hope for your future, says YHWH:
your children shall come back to their own country. (31:16)
As surprising as this news must have been to the listeners who had
grown accustomed to the Babylonian exile, God provides evidence to
back up the hopeful words by quoting Ephraim:

64-67; J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1980), 572-73; and Phyllis Trible, "The Gift of a Poem," Andover Newton Quarterly
17 (1977): 271-80, understand the unit to be w. 15-22. Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah
(OTL; London: SCM Press, 1986), 595-607; Douglas R. Jones, Jeremiah (NCB;
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 391-96; William McKane, A Critical and
Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 2 (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996),
796, 803; Wilhelm Rudolph, Jeremia (HAT 12; Tubingen: Mohr, 1958), 179-82;
and Artur Weiser, Das Bitch des Propheten Jeremia (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1956), 287-90, understand w. 15-20 and 21-22 as separate units.
J. Schmitt, "The Virgin of Israel: Referent and Use of the Phrase in Amos and
Jeremiah," CBQ 53 (1991): 365-87, understands the unit to be w. 2-22. Jack Lund-
bom, Jeremiah 21-36 (AB 2IB; New York: Doubleday, 2004), 452, sees the larger
poetic unit as 30:5-31:22, of which 31:15, 16-17, 18-19, 20, and 21-22 are
individual poems.
4. Some commentators suggest that Jer 30-31 reflects Jeremiah's preaching to
the old northern kingdom during Josiah's reign when there was hope that this terri-
tory might be reincorporated into Judah. See Bright (Jeremiah, 284) and Holladay
(Jeremiah 2, 2).
 BELLIS Jeremiah 31:22b 1

Indeed I heard Ephraim pleading:

"You disciplined me, and I was disciplined;
like a calf untrained.
Bring me back, let me come back,
for you are YHWH, my God.
For after I had turned away, I repented;
and after I was perceived, I struck my thigh;
I was ashamed, and I was dismayed
because I bore the shame of my youth." (31:17-19 )
God continues by responding to Ephraim's words:
Is Ephraim my dear son?
A delightful child?
As often as I speak against him.
I do remember him again.
Therefore my innards grow warm over him;
I do love him, says YHWH. (31:20 )
In the next lines male Ephraim morphs into the female virgin of Israel,
and God gives directions:
Set up road signs for yourself,
make yourself guideposts;
set your heart on the highway,
the road by which you5 walked.
Return, O virgin of Israel,
return to these your cities.
How long will you dither.
O faithless daughter? (31:21-22a)
The final line of the poem should explain how the exiles in Babylon can
return to their mother, Rachel, and to their cities in Palestine, but it is not
clear how 31:22b accomplishes this:
For YHWH has created a new thing in the land:
a female encompasses a strong man.
The questions to be answered are who or what the female stands for, who
or what the strong man represents, and how the verb relates to the two
nouns.
The traditional Christian interpretation since the time of Jerome has
been that the woman is Mary who encompasses the man-child Christ in
her womb. Thus Mary becomes the new Rachel and Christ, the new
Israel. As ingenious as this solution to the riddle is, it certainly is not

5 . Reading the Qere.

8 Uprooting and Planting

what the poet intended. Calvin6 dismissed this reading and instead
understood the line as a military image, that a woman—Israel—would
encircle, that is, besiege, a strong man—Babylon. This would allow the
exiles to return home and Rachel to receive her lost children. Since Israel
is not normally depicted with feminine imagery,7 Calvin's Israel could
easily be understood as Jerusalem. The problem with this interpretation,
as modified, is that Babylon, being a city, would also have been
considered female.8 However, if the strong man is understood to be the
king of Babylon, this difficulty disappears.
The medieval Jewish commentator Rashi suggested that the woman
Israel (again, we may substitute Jerusalem) would circle around the
strong man who stands for YHWH as she seeks God in repentance.9 This
interpretation is suggested by the choice of verb. The poet uses 331DH in
part as a result of a desire to create alliteration and assonance, especially
with the key word in the first colon rnmizn. Alliteration involving D and
D is found in a number of biblical verses.10 There is more to the poet's
word choice than euphony, however. The two roots 31^ and HDD are
etymologically related.11 In the parallel texts 2 Sam 6:20 and 1 Chr
16:43b, 31B in the former is replaced by DUD in the latter. Thus the
original audience might have felt not only an aural, but also a semantic
connection between DH1DH and 11331BPI. The one who had turned away
from God in the past would now turn toward God. From a Jeremianic
perspective this would have been considered to be a radically new thing,
akin to the new covenant in Jer 31:34.
Rashi's reading responds well to the spiritual aspect of God's com-
mand in 31:21-22a to the virgin of Israel, namely, Jerusalem, represent-
ing the people in exile, to return to her cities, that is from spiritual exile
back to a relationship with God. Kimchi agreed with Rashi and further
suggested that after the virgin of Israel seeks God, God would return to
her and redeem her.12 By implication, the Israelites would be able to
return home physically as well as spiritually. Thus, the instructions to set

6. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and the
Lamentations, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 113-15.
7. See Schmitt, "The Virgin of Israel."
8. See, for example, Jer 50:2,9-15,23-30,35^*0; 51:2-4, 6-9,11,13-14,33,
36-37,41-43,45,47-48,52-53,55-57, where Babylon is consistently referred to as
female.
9. Complete Tanach With Rashi (CD-Rom; Brooklyn, N.Y.: Judaica, 1999).
10. Immanuel M. Casanowicz, Paronomasia in the Old Testament (Boston:
Norwood, 1894), 29.
11. TDOT 10:129.
12. Miqra '6t gedolot, vol. 8 (repr., New York: Pardes, 1951).
 BELLIS Jeremiah 31:22b 9

up road markers (Jer 31:21) would have been followed, allowing the
exiles to return home. Rachel's complaint would also have been
answered, as she would receive her lost children back again.
In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther suggested that the line should
be understood to mean that those who formerly behaved like women
would become men, and in the nineteenth century Ewald revived this
approach with the idea of "a woman changing into a man."13 This reading
involves a minor change in pointing resulting in the verb form being
transformed from a Polel to a Polal. A female, understood as the virgin
of Israel addressed in the previous line, would turn into a strong man.14
This change would allow him/her to overcome the forces of Babylon and
return home. It also responds to the concerns expressed in Jer 30:5-7 that
Israel was weak like a woman.
John Schmitt15 suggests that the virgin of Israel in v. 21 is not Jerusa-
lem, but rather Samaria, representing the lost northern territories that at
one time during Josiah's reign Judahites hoped would be annexed. He
then understands the female in v. 22 as Jerusalem, who will embrace the
strong man Ephraim when he returns to the fold. Although this is a
thoughtful solution, there are several problems. It is unclear whether the
return of formerly lost territory could be viewed as the radically new
thing that YHWH was going to do. Former territories were surely returned
to their previous countries from time to time. Even more problematic is
the change in gender of the returnee. God had just told the female virgin
of Israel (i.e. Samaria in Schmitt's reading) to return in v. 21, but in v. 22
it is male Ephraim who is returning. Furthermore, the implicit switch in
referent for "virgin of Israel" from Samaria (v. 21) to Jerusalem (v. 22) is
difficult.
Bernhard Anderson16 poses another solution to the puzzle, that the
woman is Rachel and that she envelops in her womb a man-child who

13. Martin Luther, Die Deutsche Bibel 11/1 (Weimar Ausgabe; Weimar:
Bohlaus, 1972), 294; Heinrich Ewald, Die Propheten des Alien Bundes, vol. 2
(Stuttgart: Krabbe, 1841), 156-57; cited by Keil, Jeremiah, 28-29.
14. A variant of this solution sees the female virgin of Israel turning into the
strong man Ephraim. However, having the city Jerusalem (representing the Israel-
ites) turn into the tribe Ephraim (also representing the Israelites) is problematic. In
the ancient Near Eastern perspective, symbolically the (female) city was "married"
to the (male) God and the residents were viewed as the offspring. See A. Fitzgerald,
"The Mythological Background for the Presentation of Jerusalem as Queen," CBQ
34 (1972): 403-16. The transformation of the mother into her children would
probably have seemed quite odd to an ancient audience.
15. Schmitt, "The Virgin of Israel," 383-86.
16. Anderson, "The Lord Has Created Something New."
10 Uprooting and Planting

will be the new Israel. It is possible that Isaiah's Immanuel prophecy

similarly envisions the birth of a new Israel rather than of an individual.17
Anderson's interpretation is reminiscent of Jerome's christological
reading, but fits much better into the historical context of the poem than
does Jerome's reading. One may even wonder whether Jerome's inter-
pretation was a revision of the solution proposed by Anderson (assuming
that he has correctly guessed an ancient interpretation), just as the
Christian tradition reworked the allegorical interpretation of the Song of
Songs from the love between God and Israel to the love between Christ
and the church.
In this approach, the man-child represents an Israel so radically altered
spiritually that he can be described as a new entity, a new creation, the
new thing that God created in the land (v. 22a). One could protest that
Rachel does not want a new child, but her old child back. It is true that in
real life such a substitution would not be satisfactory, but on the level of
poetry it works (as, for example, in the book of Job), in part because the
child in Rachel's womb is not really a new person, but the old one
renewed, much as Jesus' "born again" metaphor was never intended to
be taken literally.
Phyllis Trible18 sees this passage as a chiasm in which the voice of the
masculine Ephraim at the center of the poem is surrounded by the voices
of Rachel at the beginning and of God's instructions to the feminine
virgin [of] Israel at the end. The depiction of God at the end, she argues,
is very motherly. Thus, the male Ephraim is encircled by the females
Rachel, God's feminine self, and the virgin [of] Israel. Even without
arguing for the feminine qualities of God, the sandwiching of male
Ephraim between females Rachel and the virgin of Israel is undeniable.
v. 15 Rachel crying for her lost children
w. 16-17 God's response to Rachel
w. 18-19 Ephraim quoted by God
v. 20 God's reflections on Ephraim
w. 21-22a God's words to the virgin [of/ Israel

Finally, Jack Lundbom19 poses an alternative to the hopeful readings

of other interpreters. He suggests that the words should be understood
negatively—that Jeremiah is expressing shock at the awful situation in
which Israel's warriors are so weak that they must be protected by

17. G. Rice, "A Neglected Interpretation of the Immanuel Prophecy," ZAW9Q

(1978): 220-27.
18. Trible, "The Gift of a Poem."
19. Lundbom, Jeremiah 21-36, 451-52.
 BELLIS Jeremiah 31:22b 11

women. But following the hopeful words of w. 17-19 in which Ephraim

is repentant, v. 20 where God expresses deep love for Ephraim, and v. 21
in which God tells the virgin of Israel to return, a word of hope rather
than one of horror seems much more likely.
That leaves five possibilities for the poet/prophet's intent, which are
not mutually exclusive, but could be a complex pun.
1. A female—the virgin of Israel, i.e., Jerusalem, representing the
Israelites—will circle around a strong man, who represents God,
meaning that the Babylonian exiles will seek God penitently and
thus God will respond redemptively, allowing them to go home
physically.
2. A female—the weak virgin of Israel, i.e., Jerusalem—will
encircle, i.e. besiege the king of Babylon.
3. A female—the weak virgin of Israel, i.e., Jerusalem—will turn
into a strong man and thus will be able to fight off her/his Baby-
lonian enemies and return to Palestine.
4. A female—Rachel—will encompass a new manly Israel/Ephraim
in her womb who will be spiritually attuned to God and thus
physically enabled to fight off his enemies and return home.
5. Structural females, Rachel (31:15-17) and the virgin of Israel
(31:21), encircle male Ephraim (31:18-20).
It may seem that such a complex understanding of this short line is
reading too much into three words. This is possible, of course, but the
fact that Hebrew poets did frequently engage in wordplay,20 some of it
rather elaborate, supports the possibility of the kind of quadruple entendre
that the first four solutions suggest. The fifth solution, Trible's structural
approach, is of a different sort and complements the substantive ones.
One issue is whether an ancient audience would have heard the verb as
both a Polel (first, second, and fourth interpretation) and a Polal (second
interpretation). Paul Raabe21 calls this kind of wordplay, in which a word
evokes another word through homophony, metaphonic punning. A
simple example is found in Jer 1:11-12 where TpD, "almond branch,"
the joyful first sign of spring, ironically evokes IplB, "watching," what
God will be doing to perform the divine judgment against Judah.
Similarly, in Amos 8:1-2, Amos sees a vision of summer fruit, j^p,
which evokes j"*p, the end (of Israel). Of course, in these two examples

20. On wordplay in the Hebrew Bible as well as the larger ancient Near Eastern
context, see E. Greenstein, "Wordplay," ABD 6:968-71, and the literature cited
there, and Scott B. Noegel, Puns and Pundits: Wordplay in the Hebrew Bible and
Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Bethesda, Md.: CDL, 2000).
21. Raabe, "Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter," 217.
12 Uprooting and Planting

the pun is spelled out, unlike Jer 31:22b where, if it is intended, it is

implicit rather than explicit.
John Kselman22 provides a more complex example of this phenome-
non in Prov 11:5-6, which also adds weight to the possibility that several
meanings are intended to be understood in Jer 31:22b. The two lines read
as follows:

The righteousness of the perfect shall make its way straight,

but the wicked will fall by his evil doing/into his net.
The righteousness of the upright will save them,
but the treacherous are ensnared by desire (or words) / into disaster.

In the first line, the word inUCTQ, "by his evil doing," may evoke a
homophonous word inETQ, "into his net." When this second word is
heard, the meaning of the colon becomes, "but the wicked will fall (by
his evil doing) into his [i.e. God's] net."
In the second line the word mn may mean desire or word, either of
which would make sense: "but the treacherous are ensnared by desire or
word(s)." However, nin may also mean disaster, in which case this line
would mean, "but the treacherous are ensnared by desire (or words) into
destruction." One would expect a third-person masculine plural pronomi-
nal suffix on mn, "their desire" (DHin) or "their word(s)," but a suffix
would not work with the meaning "destruction." A final n instead of the
final H would make the word an absolute form, and this would work for
all three meanings, but a simple change in vowel from the patach to a
cholem would turn the word into a plural, which would also work for all
three meanings. Whichever solution is chosen, both lines may have
double meanings that are parallel to each other. This kind of sentence-
long polysemy is called amphibology.23
I have argued elsewhere24 for an amphibological interpretation of Hab
2:4b, "the righteous shall live by his/its faith(fulness)," where the verb
"live" may refer to both physical and spiritual survival and the third-
person masculine singular pronoun may refer to (1) God's faithfulness
), (2) the trustworthiness (n]DN) of the vision which God presents

22. J. Kselman, "Ambiguity and Wordplay in Proverbs xi," VT 52 (2002):

545-48.
23. Greenstein, "Wordplay", 6:969.
24. Alice Ogden Bellis, "Hab 2:4b: Intertextuality and Hermeneutics," in Jews,
Christians, and the Theology of Hebrew Scriptures (ed. Alice Ogden Bellis and Joel
Kaminsky; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), 369-85.
 BELLIS Jeremiah 3 l:22b 13

to Habakkuk, and possibly to (3 ) the individual's faith or trust (pDK) in

God's trustworthiness (HDDR). The third possibility is based on the
premise that the word n]ftN may evoke the shorter word pQK from the
same root.
Although it is impossible to be certain what was in the mind of the
author, the frequency of wordplay in Semitic languages in general and in
Hebrew in particular suggests that the meaning of Jer 3 1 :22b may be
multi-layered. In addition, in Jer 3 1 : 1 5-22 the two central related prob-
lems are that Rachel has lost her children and that the Israelites need to
return to their God and their land. These two problems are substantively,
poetically solved by the first four resolutions that are adopted in this
paper: (1 ) that the female is the virgin of Israel, i.e., Jerusalem, who will
encircle the strong man, i.e., God, repentantly seeking God's favor, who
will in turn enable the Israelites to return to their land; (2) that the female
is the virgin of Israel, i.e., Jerusalem who will besiege the king of Baby-
lon; (3 ) that the female is the virgin of Israel, i.e., Jerusalem, who will
turn into a strong man, thus enabling her to fight off her enemies and
return to Palestine; and (4 ) that the female is Rachel who will encompass
a man-child, the new or renewed Israel in her womb. The fifth solution, a
structural rather than a substantive one in which male Ephraim is sand-
wiched between females Rachel and the virgin of Israel in the poem,
supports the four substantive ones rhetorically. The combination of the
five solutions is theologically and aesthetically rich, in keeping with the
Hebrew prophetic and poetic traditions.