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For my write-up today of Karel Van Der Toorn's Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, I'll touch briefly on Chapter 7, "Manufacturing the Prophets: The Book of Jeremiah as Scribal Artifact."
What I got out of this chapter is that the Book of Jeremiah was the work of scribes (and I think that Van Der Toorn dated them to the exile), who were basing the book on their own recollections of Jeremiah as well as the recollections of his disciples. These scribes added to the book---and that's evident from the existence of two different versions: the LXX (which was based on a Hebrew version, as we can tell from a Qumran finding), and the longer MT. Van Der Toorn does not think that the story of Baruch's scrolls in Jeremiah 36 (which looks like the story of Moses replacing the shattered tablets with new ones) is historically accurate, but that it does make a true point: that the scroll that we have for the Book of Jeremiah was not the original one, and that things were added to a later copy. Moreover, for Van Der Toorn, Jeremiah's confessions were scribal fiction---based in part on stories of Moses and Elijah, on Psalms, on Micah, etc.---and they were designed to depict the perils of the prophet, as well as for instruction and edification.
This chapter addressed, in a sense, a question that I have had: How could the prophets write books that were so anti-establishment, when writing required a sponsor---due to its cost? A king certainly wouldn't sponsor a message that criticized him, would he? While Van Der Toorn notes that Jeremiah had friends in the establishment, and that Jeremiah himself was a Levite, Van Der Toorn seems to maintain that prophetic literature was written down when the prophets had a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the establishment---perhaps because their prophecy about Jerusalem's destruction had come true. I do not know how literature was produced in the exile, however, for I wonder who sponsored scribes during the exile.
