Reading Jeremiah 29

Reading Jeremiah 29:4–7 dialogically, this study situates the passage at the crossroads of the book’s textual–historical multivocality, intertextual conversations, and contemporary experiences of multiplaced belonging. It contends that common exile–return templates—presuming one homeland and linear restoration—are unsettled by a present-tense ethic of inhabiting place that holds together memory, rupture, and responsibility. Framing multivocality as a hermeneutical principle and multiplacedness as an exegetical lens, the article foregrounds contemporary, multiplaced readers as agents who practice an interpretive ethic—recognizing divine presence within fractured, momentary locales and assembling belonging across places without collapsing layered identities, while encouraging one another beyond linear-restoration scripts. Accordingly, the study reads the city as an interpretive metaphor for nodal, layered belonging amid rupture; urges attentiveness to home within multiplaced realities; and commends the cultivation of dialogical relations as a way of living

Dialogical self · Homeland · Metaphor · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Christian Theology and Mission · Development, Ethics, and Society