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A Mouth Full of Fire: The Word of God in the Words of Jeremiah is unavailable, but you can change that!

“I am putting my words as a fire in your mouth; these people are tinder and it will consume them” (Jeremiah 5:14). In the book of Jeremiah, not only is the vocabulary of “word” and “words” uniquely prevalent, but formulae marking divine speech also play an unprecedented role in giving the book’s final form its narrative and theological shape. Indeed, “the word of the Lord” is arguably the main...

of God is an idea that may be clear to anybody, whether or not they are disposed to receive the word when it comes. In short, the word, when singular, is a message that comes from God and is received by humans (Jeremiah, for the most part). When this message is spoken by humans—as we shall see—it is generally described as words, plural. Interestingly, the three occasions on which the word (sg.) is attached to Jeremiah rather than to the LORD44 are all moments when Jeremiah’s special status as the
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