Daily Inspiration Quote by Julius Wellhausen

A throwaway line with a scalpel hidden inside it: Wellhausen turns Jeremiah's lament into a statistic, and the statistic becomes an indictment. "As many altars as towns" is not just pious excess; it's a map of religious fragmentation. The prophet's grief reads like an inventory of decentralization, a landscape where devotion has been municipalized and multiplied until it stops being devotion at all and starts functioning like local branding.

Wellhausen, the great architect of modern biblical criticism, isn't mainly interested in Jeremiah's feelings. He's interested in what the lament betrays about social reality. If every town has its own altar, then worship isn't governed by a single authoritative center; it's embedded in village life, patronage networks, and regional loyalties. That undercuts later claims that Israelite religion was always meant to be centralized in Jerusalem. In Wellhausen's hands, Jeremiah becomes evidence for a historical development: a move from many shrines to one, from a messy pluralism to an enforced orthodoxy.

The subtext is polemical in two directions. Against romantic readings of prophetic religion as purely spiritual, it insists on infrastructure: altars are institutions. Against harmonizing theology, it highlights contradiction: Jeremiah's critique presupposes a world in which the thing being condemned is normal. The lament is effective because it's hyperbolic and concrete at once; it conjures a Judah where idolatry (or at least unauthorized worship) is not an exception but the default setting, stitched into the geography.