New in ANEM: Jeremiah’s Egypt: Prophetic Reflections on the Saite Period

Jeremiah’s Egypt: Prophetic Reflections on the Saite Period

Aren M. Wilson-Wright 

ISBN

9781628374636

Volume

ANEM 30

Status

Available

Publication Date

June 2023

Jeremiah’s Egypt: Prophetic Reflections on the Saite Period is the first book-length work to highlight the importance of Egypt for understanding the historical context and literary development of the book of Jeremiah. Based on a comprehensive reconstruction of Egyptian-Judahite contact in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, Aren M. Wilson-Wright shows that the numerous references to Egypt in the book of Jeremiah are highly personal reactions to the injustices perpetrated by the Egyptian regime and its self-serving Judahite collaborators, some of which such as Jeremiah 25 see Babylon as a means of escaping Egyptian domination. Her analysis reveals that the key choice animating the book of Jeremiah is not Judahite autonomy versus Babylonian domination but rather Egyptian domination versus Babylonian domination. Additionally, Wilson-Wright advances several innovative redactional and text-critical proposals related to the book of Jeremiah and suggests historical anchor points for future redactional and linguistic approaches to dating the text.

Aren Wilson-Wright is an independent scholar based out of Chicago. She received her PhD in Hebrew Bible from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Zurich and Radboud University. She is the author of Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age (2016) as well as nearly two dozen articles.