04_Reasoner_388-404 30/10/14 10:23 Pagina 391 THE REDEMPTIVE INVERSIONS OF JEREMIAH IN ROMANS 9–11 391 I. Dissonant Intertextuality between Jeremiah and Romans 9–11 First, the driving question in Romans 9–11 regarding the trust- worthiness of God is more similar to what drives the early chapters of Jeremiah than it is to Isaiah 10. In Jer 4,10, the prophet claims that God’s word has deceived Israel. Paul asserts that God’s word has not failed (Rom 9,6a) 11. While there is no verbal parallel here, if one had to choose between Isaiah and Jeremiah when identifying a canonical background for the intense questions of Romans 9–11, Jeremiah would be the choice. Romans 9–11 plumbs the depths of God’s abandonment of Israel, a prophetic topos more characteristic of Jeremiah than of Isaiah. Second, three times in this section of Jeremiah, God commands the prophet not to pray for his people (Jer 7,16; 11,14; 14,11-12), a prohibition that seems based on a rejection of Israel 12. In the third of these references, Jer 14,11-12, God replies to Jeremiah’s prayer for the Lord’s salvation with not only a prohibition against praying for Israel, since he would not hear such a prayer, but also a predic- tion that he will cut them off by sword, famine and death, specters whose danger Paul has already explicitly denied for those who love God (Rom 8,35.38). But the prohibitions against prayer that seem more directly inverted in Romans are Jer 7,16 and 11,14. Both these prohibitions of the prophet’s prayer for his people are followed by descriptions of the futility of the sacrificial cult, a religious practice possibly alluded to in the mixed criticism ― “I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” 13. Jer 11,14 is linked to Rom 10,1 by the catchword de,hsij. After the divine oracle’s rhetorical questions against Judah’s zeal in the next 10 On the parallels between Paul as prophetic figure in Galatians with Jer- emiah, see S. EASTMAN, Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue. Language and Theology in Galatians (Grand Rapids, MI 2007) 63-84. 11 LXX Jer 4:10 is kai. ei=pa W = de,spota ku,rie( a;ra ge avpatw/n hvpa,thsaj* This verse has already been linked to Romans by C. BRYAN, A Preface to Ro- mans. Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (New York 2000) 159. 12 The references for these three prohibitions against praying are the same between the MT and the LXX. Cf. Dmitri’s remark to Alyosha, “Don’t pray for me, I’m not worth it” in F. DOSTOYEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. C. Garnett; New York 1957) 150. 13 Rom 10,2; cf. Jer 7,16.21; 11,14-15.