Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 68:2 (Jun 2025)
Article: Flourishing In Babylon: Anatomy Of A Prooftext
Author: A. Duane Litfin

Flourishing In Babylon: Anatomy Of A Prooftext

Duane Litfin

Duane Litfin is President Emeritus of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Abstract: Jeremiah’s instruction to the Babylonian exiles to “seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you … and pray to the Lord on its behalf” (29:7) has come to be understood as evidence of God’s solicitude for the flourishing, not just of the exiles but also their Babylonian captors, thereby turning this verse into a widely used prooftext for the notion that contemporary urban-dwelling Christians bear a similar obligation to their own secular city. This article argues, on a variety of linguistic, lexical, and contextual grounds, that this interpretation of Jeremiah 29:7 is mistaken. When properly construed, this verse offers no evidence of divine solicitude for the cultural flourishing of the exiles’ captors. Christians are called to “do good to everyone,” not just “the household of faith,” but if one is to avoid the pitfall of prooftexting, Jeremiah 29:7 should not be enlisted in making this case.

Key words: human flourishing, shalom, Babylon, exiles, Jeremiah 29:7, Jeremiah, the city, welfare, peace.

What is a biblical “prooftext”?

In one sense a prooftext need be nothing more than a passage of Scripture accurately cited in support of some particular claim. More typically, however, the term bears a pejorative sense. In this case prooftexting is what happens when a biblical passage is wrenched from its context and then, like the proverbial wax nose, twisted into teaching something foreign to itself. The foreign content need not be heretical; it may (or may not) be true or taught elsewhere in the Bible. Even so, the prooftexter’s guilt remains. The offense prooftexters commit is not (necessarily) heresy, but a different crime: decontextualizing a scriptural passage so as to put it to work as divine warrant for ideas that the passage, when accurately construed, does not in fact support.

Most experienced students of the Bible can come up with a list of examples, from both testaments, of passages they have seen thus abused. These would likely be common prooftexts that have been around a long time. The candidate I wish to add to the list in this article, however, has become newly conspicuous only in recent years. The passage is Jeremiah 29:7: “Seek the welfare [שָׁלוֹם, shalom] of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its b...