A Song of Sorrow and Praise: The Possible Role of Music in Jeremiah 20:7-13 JONATHAN L. FRIEDMANN Candidate for Ordination, Cantorial School Academy for Jewish Religion Los Angeles, California Scholars have long noted the wealth of biographical information contained in the Book of Jeremiah. From its superscription, the longest in the Bible, we learn that Jeremiah came from Anathoth, a town three miles north of Jerusalem in the territory of Benjamin, and that he was a descendent of the Elide priest Abiathar, who was expelled from the Temple when Solomon appointed Zadok as the sole high priest (1 Kings 2:26- 27). His prophetic career is placed between the thirteenth year of Josiah’s reign (627 BCE) and the eleventh year of King Zedekiah (586 BCE), when the Temple was destroyed. These four decades spanned Judah’s most calamitous period, in which the nationalism, reform, expansion and prosperity experienced under Josiah gave way to a series of disasters. 1 Jeremiah entered this volatile climate as an “outsider” priest (1:1), reluctant prophet (1:4-10), condemner of “false prophets” (e.g., 23:9-40; 33:9-40), supporter of Babylonia when most others favored Egypt (e.g., 25:1-29:32), and disputatious witness to the fall of Judah and the exile that followed—all of which made him profoundly unpopular, bitter and resentful. Yet despite his perpetual cynicism and the many plots fashioned against him, he could not keep from proclaiming the word of God. 1 See Christian E. Hauer and William A. Young, An Introduction to the Bible: A Journey into Three Worlds, 4 th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 145.