Law, Wisdom, and the Poetics of Precarity in the Book of Baruch

The audience for the book of Baruch is portrayed as a subjugated and demoralized transnational group struggling to develop viable forms of subjectivity in the wake of self-inflicted trauma. At the heart of the book is a liturgical poem about the law and wisdom that summons its readers to repent, rather than surrender their “glory” to foreign entities (3:9–4:4). Inspecting the poem alongside the oracle against Tyre in Ezek 28 and the nomistic poem about wisdom in T. Levi 13 sheds light on a number of the poem’s features, including its configurations of myth, its rubrics of agency, and its relation to other parts of the book.