Rachel

This chapter focuses on Jeremiah’s Book of Consolation as it recapitulates the history of the Babylonian crisis in six poignant poems—from invasion to exile to manumission—and ritually marks each phase of the national crisis. The final composition in this series, Jer. 31:15–22, is of particular significance as it ‘resuscitates’ an ancestral mother, Rachel, and engages her in mourning rituals over Judah, cast as her dead child. This chapter argues that in light of the calibre of the task at hand—to bury a nation envisaged effectively as dead and to ‘inhume’ an entire age, i.e. Israel’s monarchy—Jeremiah engages Rachel in vigorous funerary rites: (1) inconsolable wails (v. 15); and (2) circumambulating choreography (v. 22). This chapter argues that Rachel’s actions should be viewed as part of God’s benevolent scheme of Judah’s restoration and thus as the culmination of Judah’s ritual responses to the Babylonian crisis.