370 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSJeremiah because they were deemed incompatible with his judgment preach-
ing to Judah (see Rhetoric and Composition for 46: 1 and 50: 1-3). Here in the
Book of Restoration, because of the overriding themes of hope and salvation,
early critical opinion (Movers 1837; deWette 1843; Hitzig 1866) found this
preaching more in line with Second Isaiah.a Although a "Second Isaiah" (or
"Second Jeremiah") thesis for chaps. 30-31 was denied by Graf, later com-
mentators (e.g., Giesebrecht; Duhm; Cornill) continued to be consumed by
isolating authentic Jeremiah utterances from those deemed inauthentic, the
latter being assigned to a later age. The enterprise continues into the present
day, particularly among German scholars doing redaction criticism (Bohmer
1976; Lohfink 1981; and others).
It is generally agreed in light of verses such as 30: 18 and 31: 38 that the final
composition of chaps. 30-31 must postdate the destruction of Jerusalem. But
with Volz and Rudolph came a major change. These scholars restored much of
the salvation preaching in 30-31 to Jeremiah, the reason being that it was now
thought to emanate from Jeremiah's early career when he was calling for a re-
turn of Northern Israel (cf. 3:12-18). The idea that some of the preaching in
30-31 was originally directed to Northern Israel was present earlier in Duhm,
Cornill, Peake, and others, but for Volz and Rudolph this preaching now sup-
ported Josiah's program to centralize worship in Jerusalem and the king's am-
bition to extend Judah's border northward after Assurbanipal's death (627 B.c.)
and Assyria's departure from the region (Weiser). Herein lay the promise that
"Virgin Israel" would again plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria
(31:4-5), that "the remnant of Israel" would be brought back from the north
country (31:7-8), and that "Rachel's" tears would be dried because her lost
sons would return (31: 16). This early salvation preaching, so the argument
went, was then later recycled to address newly exiled Judahites or else both
Israelites and Judahites who, after 597 B.C., languished in their respective cap-
tivities "in the north."
More recently, but with a good deal less success, Lohfink ( 1981) and Holla-
day (1983) have claimed for Jeremiah certain preaching in chaps. 30-31 from
the Josianic years. Lohfink finds a one-time unified composition in the poetry
of 30-31, but like the earlier source critics, he comes up with this only by elim-
inating passages and judging selected redactional formulas as secondary,
which becomes a highly subjective enterprise and one not particularly con-
vincing (cf. Sweeney 1996: 570). Lohfink's alleged thought progression from
"the North in its misery" (30:5-7, 12-15) to a "call for the return of exiles"
(31:21-22) is also a problem, since the judgment poem of 30:5-7 cannot be
directed to Northern Israel but must address a Judah currently under attack.
Holladay appropriates the Lohfink thesis, but this only creates greater chrono-
logical difficulty for him in reconstructing Jeremiah's early career. In what is
now his second attempt at a low chronology, where Jeremiah is said to receive
•For purposes of the present discussion, I am not deciding whether there is a Trito-Isaiah.
"Second Isaiah" is taken to mean all the prophetic material in Isaiah 40-66.