Ehrlich, Carl S.Conti, Cristiana2025-07-232025-07-232025-02-272025-07-23https://hdl.handle.net/10315/43005Academic studies have investigated the rhetoric of Jeremiah from nearly every angle, yet despite meaningful progress, a notable lacuna remains: the ritualized rhetoric embedded in Jeremiah’s oracles of doom, particularly its connections to Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals, has received insufficient attention. This oversight persists amid a surge of interest in ritual references within ancient Near Eastern treaty-making, notably in Deuteronomy Studies. This dissertation addresses this lacuna by examining the book’s “magical rhetoric,” which, I argue, is discernible within Jeremiah’s canonical framework. In an effort to elucidate how this rhetoric functions within Jeremiah’s oracles, this study draws heavily on comparative analysis and weaves together linguistic analysis, form-critical and genre-based approaches, and theological interpretation to assess the influence of Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft traditions—particularly the first-millennium BCE Assyro-Babylonian Maqlû ceremony—on Jeremiah’s oracles of doom. The analysis focuses on selected pericopes from Jeremiah 1–25 that emphasize curse motifs, bringing them into conversation with Maqlû. Building on this methodological foundation, I propose that the authors of Jeremiah intentionally employed magical rhetoric in response to the socio-political upheavals of their time and did so by infusing Jeremiah’s oracles with ritual and incantatory dimensions. This combination of prophetic and incantatory language addressed and interacted with diverse audiences—spiritual and communal—on symbolic and spiritual levels, reflecting the redactor’s use of ritualized magical rhetoric in the oracles of doom to depict Judah as fatefully ensnared in the deceptions of false prophets and corrupt religious and royal authorities. These imprecations, functioning as divine responses to covenantal breaches, draw heavily on the curses of Deuteronomy 28 (cf. Mastnjak 2016) to convey divine judgment while preserving a hallmark of the book of Jeremiah: the prospect of Israel’s redemption. This study thus reconceptualizes Jeremiah’s prophecy as not only a socio-religious commentary on Judah’s decline in the 6th century BCE but also a performative and symbolic enactment of divine intent through magical rhetoric. Additionally, and perhaps tangentially, this dissertation situates itself within ongoing scholarly discussions on Deuteronomic theology in the prophetic corpus. By analyzing parallels between Jeremiah’s curses and Deuteronomy 28, it traces how Jeremiah reinterpreted earlier legal and covenantal traditions and wove them into a broader prophetic narrative of Israel’s fate, in the wake of the destruction of the first temple.Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.Biblical studiesAncient historyComparative literatureElectronic Thesis or Dissertation2025-07-23JeremiahMagical rhetoricOracles of doomFalse prophecyMaqlûAnti-witchcraft ritualsDeuteronomy 28Ritual languagesProphetic literatureMesopotamian influenceCovenant cursesComparative studies