ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the prophet who speaks is represented elsewhere as walking around in a yoke, telling Israel to submit. The vocabulary of power permeates. It sees that the prayer life and religious experiences attributed to Jeremiah take a form that looks a great deal like homoerotic sadomasochism. Even if the text cannot be reduced to an S/M scene, a hermeneutics informed by sadomasochism seems able to shed more light on this particular biblical text than now-common hermeneutics of rape. The chapter encounters eleven verses of poetry, which are generally divided by scholars into two separate poems, both of which are counted among the laments or confessions of Jeremiah. Images of sexual seduction and overpowering are used here to speak symbolically about Jeremiah's experience of being a prophet. The chapter suggests that such assimilation should not be accomplished too hastily. For the sexual connotations of Jeremiah 20, such as they are, can be understood in terms of male homoeroticism.
