What would Plato be without Socrates, or Timothy without Paul, or Luther without Augustine, or Foucault without Nietzsche, or Bob without Woody, or Elvis, The Beatles, and every hair-spritzed glam rocker to follow them without the blues riff? Ask this and you get a sense of the architectonic influence that the book of Deuteronomy has over the prophet Jeremiah.
Unlike his Judahite predecessor Isaiah, Jeremiah drank deeply of the theological vintage of the book of Deuteronomy. That is not to say that Isaiah was not familiar with the ancient law book; his corpus of work is thick with Deuteronomic language and imagery: the holiness of God, concern for the disenfranchised, the synergy between personal holiness and cultic worship. But for Jeremiah, it is different. For him, Deuteronomy is an immovable force, a covenantal mass that holds a wholly central position around which his entire prophetic agenda satellites.
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