Jeremiah
JEREMIAH 1–2; 7; 15; 22; 25–26; 29; 31–32 AND 2 KINGS 24–25 AND LAMENTATIONS 1–5
Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of the Temple by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn.
POETS AND PROPHETS. THE PERILS OF SPEAKING FOR GOD. JEREMIAH’S “CONFESSIONS.” POTSHERDS FROM LACHISH. ANCIENT SIGNATURES. A COVENANT TO COME.
As with Isaiah, scholars are not sure how much of the book of Jeremiah was written by Jeremiah. Many think it is a matter of poetry and prose.
We have already examined some of the issues connected with that most mysterious figure, the biblical prophet. According to modern scholars, people somewhat analogous to biblical prophets seem to have existed elsewhere in the ancient Near East.1 Nevertheless, a large gap still separates them from the great Israelite prophets of the eighth century on: for one reason or another, no attestations of any Mesopotamian Isaiah or Jeremiah have yet been discovered.2 Scholars thus believe that prophecy developed in its own, fairly unique way in biblical Israel and—in part for the political reasons discussed earlier—became an important institution of society, at least to hear biblical authors tell it. But who were these men (and, apparently, women)? What made someone suddenly conceive of himself or herself as God’s messenger?
People have sought to answer this question from biblical times on. In recent years, research has suggested that the prophet’s own society had a definite role to play: its support was vital to the prophet.3 That is probably why prophecy is not much of a factor today in most of the Western world: the office of prophet is largely discredited among us. A few people may still be spotted in Lafayette Park with signs saying, “The World Is Coming to an End,” but very few of their fellow Washingtonians pay them any mind. Elsewhere on the globe, however, prophets are still a reality, expected and supported by their communities, and this support is crucial. The established niche of prophet in their societies has to be occupied by someone, so in each generation certain individuals arise to fill it.
Still, who decides who will be a prophet? For biblical Israel, there does not appear to have been one uniform answer to this question. In fact, in some ways, the Israelite prophet’s situation might be compared to that of the poet. Nowadays, poets just start writing and hope that other people will like what they write. Nevertheless, we know that in far earlier times, being a poet was a profession mastered like any other—indeed sometimes a bard would learn his craft from his father or by being apprenticed, just as a carpenter or a cobbler might. Similarly, biblical prophets at some stage seem to have belonged to “bands” or guilds of prophets (see 1 Sam. 10:5–11; 19:20; 1 Kings 18:4; 19:1; 20:35; etc.), presumably learning their craft from older members; one rabbinic tradition, on the basis of 1 Sam. 10:13 and Amos 7:14, even suggests that the office was sometimes hereditary. At other times, however, it seems that prophets became prophets by being called—perhaps in this way they were a bit more analogous to poets in our own day. (Indeed, there is some evidence that the principal word for prophet in biblical Hebrew, nabi’, means “one who is called.”)4 Their being called to their task was not quite as diffuse as a modern poet’s, however:5 as we have seen, the heavenly voice that called Samuel was so real that he mistook it three times for the voice of his human employer, Eli. Similarly, Isaiah was called in the sense that he was, by his account, transported to God’s heavenly sanctuary and purified there by the seraphim.100 Elsewhere, however, biblical prophets do sometimes sound a bit more like poets as they reflect on their calling: “The Lord GOD has given me a skilled tongue, so that I might know how to sustain the weary with a word” (Isa. 50:4). Indeed, God complains to Ezekiel that people go to listen to him as if he were some sort of entertainer or poet:
My people come and sit down before you to hear the things you have to say, but they do not do them. Their mouths may speak sweetly, but their minds are only on money. You—you are for them like a singer of love songs, with a beautiful voice and skilled at playing. They hear what you say, but they do not do it.
Other things further strengthen this connection between prophets and poets. For example, prophets are sometimes said to have accompanied their prophecies with music, just like ancient Greek or Anglo-Saxon bards. Thus, 1 Sam. 10:5 mentions a “band of prophets coming down from the high place with harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre, prophesying.” Similarly, the prophet Elisha summons a musician, “And when the musician played, the power of the LORD came upon him and he said, ‘Thus says the LORD’” (2 Kings 3:16). Ancient Greek and Latin poets were, from their side of things, rather prophetic at times. The sibyls (female oracles) uttered prophecies in verse. What is more, even the ordinary classical poet’s invocation of his muse announces his quasi-prophetic standing. The muse may have become conventional after a while, but at first she seems to have been a real divine being who was said to transmit her words to the poet: “Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles . . .” Was poetic inspiration, especially back then, terribly different from prophetic inspiration?6
Considering all these matters together, many scholars have indeed come to think of Israel’s prophets as poets, albeit of a very special variety. Biblical society had a ready-made niche for them, and in each generation new prophets arose to fill that niche just as poets do (or did) in ours: unlike poets, however, they did not seek to entertain or even make things up on their own, but to transmit to their listeners words that, however artfully arranged, had come to them from God.
Poetry and Prose
In fact, the similarity of prophets and poets was an idea that had been pursued at various earlier stages in the history of biblical interpretation. Particularly in the Renaissance, biblical prophets-as-poets were sometimes called to witness in defense of poetry against its critics. It was often said that prophets wrote their words in poetic meters, although the precise meters they used stubbornly resisted discovery.7 In the seventeenth century, the English poet John Donne evoked this theme in one section of his well-known poem “The Litanie”:
The Eagle-sighted Prophets too,
Which were the churches Organs, and did sound
That harmony, which made of two
One law, and did unite, but not confound;
Those heavenly poëts which did see
Thy will, and it expresse
In rhythmique feet, in common pray for mee,
That I by them excuse not my excesse
In seeking secrets, or Poëtiquenesse.101
The idea that biblical prophets were “heavenly poëts” seemed to acquire scientific confirmation in the research of one eighteenth-century scholar in particular, Robert Lowth (1710–87). Lowth’s aim was finally to demonstrate scientifically that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other prophets wrote their words in meter, just like Homer or Virgil or Milton. True, Lowth said, given our ignorance of poetic practice in biblical times and the lamentable state of the biblical text itself (which, he felt, had been corrupted beyond repair over centuries of transmission), we will never be able to reconstruct the actual meters used by the ancient Israelites. Still, he remarked, there is one feature of biblical verse that might nonetheless prove that such meters existed. Poetic lines in Hebrew, he pointed out, consist largely of two brief, interrelated clauses of roughly equal length—and in this, as we have seen, he was right.8
This basic line form is found, for example, throughout the book of Proverbs as well as in the songs and prayers of the book of Psalms—the Bible’s poetry par excellence. Thus, even if we do not know the precise meter, we can still use the presence of this two-part line to distinguish poetry from prose. (Scholars were later to conclude that there is no “precise meter,” but Lowth did not know that.) Looking over the Bible as a whole, Lowth pointed out that this sentence form was as common in biblical prophecy as it was in the Psalms. Stylistically, he concluded, the prophets were poets; they wrote in verse.
He had a point. Even in English, it is easy to see how the lines from Isaiah cited in the last chapter are different from ordinary prose. They break into little, two-part sentences:
A voice was saying, “Speak up!” | but I said, “What can I say? ||
Humanity is only grass, | and all its glories are like a little wildflower.||
Grass dries up and the flower withers, | for the breath of the LORD blows over them.” ||
The same is true of Isaiah’s sharp advice to King Ahaz and his court:
If you don’t stand tall | you won’t stand at all.||
(In Hebrew, Isaiah’s two-part line is also strikingly assonantal: ’im lo’ ta’aminu, ki lo’ te’amenu.) And it was not just a matter of formal devices like meter or assonance; the speech of prophets was often strikingly metaphorical:
Hear, O heavens, and listen, earth | for the LORD is speaking: ||
“I raised sons, brought them up | and they rebelled against Me.||
An ox knows [that is, obeys] its master | and an ass its owner’s trough. ||
Israel does not know | My people does not begin to understand!” ||
Ah, sinful nation | people laden with wickedness ||
Offspring of evildoers | depraved children ||
They have left the LORD | spurned Israel’s Holy One || and turned away. |||
The people of Israel are like ungrateful sons; God “raised” them in two senses—not only as a father raises his children, but also in the sense that He “exalted” them (another sense of “raised” in Hebrew) and made them great (“made great” is, more literally, the verb translated above as “brought up”). Despite this, they have refused His authority. Isaiah then provides an insulting, and rather telling, analogy. Oxen and asses are frequently paired in biblical Hebrew, but the two animals are quite different in one respect, obedience. An ox knows his master in the sense that he generally obeys, lowering his neck to take on his master’s yoke; an ass, on the other hand, is frequently disobedient, sometimes kicking or even lying down in the middle of the road and refusing to budge. When it comes to mealtime, however, even an ass heeds its owner’s call, that is, it knows “its owner’s trough.” But Israel is worse even than an ass; it does not “know” God even in this second sense—that is, it does not realize Who supplies its food. In fact, it does not even begin to understand this fundamental truth.102
It was for such clever conceits, as well as because of Isaiah’s strikingly consistent use of the two-part line seen above (especially in chapters 40–66), that Robert Lowth declared Isaiah “the most perfect model” of a poetic prophet, “at once elegant and sublime, forcible and ornamented.”9 But what of the biblical book that follows that of Isaiah, that of the prophet Jeremiah?
The Man from Anathoth
With the book of Jeremiah, the historical scene shifts to the early sixth century BCE, the last days of the southern kingdom’s independence. The northern kingdom, Israel, was long gone, swept away by the Assyrians in the late eighth century BCE. But now a new foe arose to threaten the little kingdom of Judah: the Babylonians.
Babylon, the southern part of Mesopotamia (stretching roughly from today’s Baghdad southward to the Persian Gulf), had previously been dominated by the Assyrians to their north, but in the late seventh century the southerners succeeded in driving out their oppressors. The Babylonians then pressed forward into Assyrian territory; the city of Asshur fell to them in 614 BCE and Nineveh in 612. Egypt, alarmed at Babylon’s growing strength, had begun sending troops to reinforce the Assyrians in 616—to little avail. In 610 or 609,10 the Babylonians defeated the combined Assyrian and Egyptian garrison at Harran and chased their armies into Syria. Finally, at the decisive battle of Carchemish in 605, the Babylonians routed the Egyptian forces. The Babylonian giant now shook itself off, stood up, and looked around; after that battle, it was the only great power left in the region.11 The general who had led the Babylonians to success at Carchemish, Nebuchadnezzar, was crowned king in 604. He was to reign for the next four decades.
Like the other inhabitants of Judah, Jeremiah would watch these events to the east with growing alarm. But when, according to Jer. 1:1–10, he began his career as a prophet, life must have appeared far more tranquil. Born in Anathoth, a few miles from Jerusalem, Jeremiah was a priest by birth, perhaps a descendant of the famous Abiathar, who had served as David’s high priest for a time before being exiled to Anathoth (1 Kings 2:26). No doubt a bright and promising young man, Jeremiah may have studied in his early years in Jerusalem itself; at any rate, he was never far from the capital and the corridors of power. Judah’s ruler at the time was King Josiah, a decisive and powerful monarch who, as we have seen, ushered in an age of religious reform. Josiah’s Reform was founded on the exclusive devotion to Israel’s God, the centralization of all sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple, and the rooting out of anything that smacked of the worship of other gods. Under such a king, a man like Jeremiah, equally devoted to the same causes, could scarcely have anticipated a difficult future. Nevertheless, he reports that, at the time when he was summoned to be a prophet, he was—just like Isaiah, Samuel, and Moses before him—reluctant to take on the job.
Now the word of the LORD came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you came out of your mother, I had consecrated you. I hereby appoint you to be a prophet to the nations.” But I said, “Oh no, Lord GOD! I do not know how to make speeches—I am too young.” But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You will go wherever I send you, and you will say whatever I tell you to say. Do not be afraid of anyone; I will be with you to save you, says the LORD.”
Then the LORD put out His hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, “I hereby put My words in your mouth. See, I am appointing you today over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”
The simplicity and directness of Jeremiah’s call have long made it a favorite subject of writers and artists. God had assigned Jeremiah his mission even before he was born. To be told this in so many words was no doubt reassuring, but also troubling; now it was up to the young man to begin to carry out his divinely assigned task. According to God’s words, two-thirds of Jeremiah’s mission was to be negative, “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow”—this would not be a happy time. But the last two verbs, “to build and to plant,” at least held out some hope for the distant future.
Inspiring as it may be, some modern scholars are reluctant to attribute this passage (and, indeed, a good deal more in the book) to Jeremiah himself.12 As noted earlier, “call narratives” eventually came to be conventional; people simply expected to be told that the prophet in question had not been a self-promoter, that, in fact, he had at first resisted God’s call. More than one scholar has been struck by the similarities between this account of Jeremiah’s call and other call narratives already seen. Thus, like Moses on Mount Horeb, Jeremiah objects to God’s summons on the grounds that he is not a particularly good orator; Moses had told God that he was “heavy of speech,” while Jeremiah here protests that he does not “know how to make speeches.” Still more strikingly, the central gesture in Isaiah’s call narrative, whereby one of the seraphim touches his mouth with a burning coal, is paralleled here by God’s gesture: He “put out His hand and touched my mouth.” These resemblances do not prove that the account of Jeremiah’s call is inauthentic—indeed, God may have purposely touched Jeremiah’s mouth precisely in order to make vivid his resemblance to his prophetic predecessor. But some modern scholars are suspicious, especially in view of the broader backdrop of current theories about the book as a whole.
Speaking in Prose
Almost as soon as modern scholars began to analyze the book of Jeremiah in detail, they became aware of a certain unevenness in the work. Sometimes the prophet spoke in the short, two-part sentences that are the mark of biblical poetry. At other times, however, his sentences were longer and syntactically more complicated—he sounded more like Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, addressing the people in highly rhetorical prose. Still other parts of the book make no pretense to being Jeremiah’s own writings: they speak of him in the third person, and some of the things he is quoted as saying parallel Jeremiah’s own words elsewhere in the book—almost as if someone who knew him was summarizing the highlights of Jeremiah’s career. So how much of the book did he himself actually write?
Many scholars believed (and some still do) that poetry is an older form of expression than prose. This belief was largely an inheritance of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, in particular as articulated by the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), teacher of the great poet Goethe and himself the author of an influential book about the Bible, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–83). Herder felt that poetry went back to “humanity’s infancy” and was thus naturally emotional, sincere, a bit flighty at times, and frequently unrestrained. Prose, by contrast, was a more mature and sober form of expression; it represented a later stage of human development but lacked the vitality and energy of poetry. These generalizations seem somewhat silly today, but they exercised great influence on Herder’s countrymen throughout the nineteenth century, especially German biblical scholars. The idea that the only authentic part of the book of Jeremiah consisted of its poetic oracles achieved its definitive form in another influential book by the commentator Bernhard Duhm, Das Buch Jeremia (1901).
Duhm divided the book into three classes of material: poetic prophecies, presumably going back to Jeremiah himself; sermonic first-person prose that at times resembles the style of Deuteronomy (and thus, presumably, not Jeremiah’s own words, though perhaps based on some things he once said); and third-person narratives about Jeremiah, perhaps originally composed by Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch son of Neriah (mentioned in Jer. 32:12, 13, 16, and so forth). Surprisingly, this analysis of the material is still espoused by many scholarly treatments today,13 although it is far from clear why the poetic passages have any more claim to authenticity than the prose. (Were later editors and interpolators incapable of writing Hebrew verse? Is the looser, semi-poetic style of much of the “prose” an indication that Jeremiah could not have been its author?)14 Before considering these questions, let us consider an example of each of the three kinds of writing identified by Duhm.
Jeremiah the Poet
The word of the LORD came to me, saying: Go announce this to Jerusalem:
Thus says the LORD:
I remember [to your credit] your devotion, your love as a bride—
how you followed Me into the wilderness, in a land not sown.
Israel is holy to the LORD, the first fruits of His harvest.
All who consume of it will be guilty; “Evil will find them!” says the LORD.
This is indeed a good example of the pithy, compressed style of Hebrew verse—a great deal is said in very few words. God begins by mentioning the period following the exodus, the time when He and Israel were first “married.” “You were a devoted bride,” He recalls, “following Me into the sandy wasteland after crossing the Red Sea. How did you know where your next meal would come from? Yet you followed Me.” Thinking of this now, God says, “I chalk it up to your credit [more literally, it says, “I recall for you the devotion of your youth,” but the “for you” really means “for your benefit now”].15 Your youthful devotion to Me will stand you in good stead in time to come.”
The next two lines are even more compressed (though Jeremiah’s own listeners would certainly have understood them right away). As we have seen, the people of Israel were conventionally described as holy in the sense that they belonged to God. Indeed, as God’s “firstborn” (Exod. 4:22), Israel was holy more precisely in the sense that the firstfruits of the harvest were holy—whatever is born first or harvested first was automatically God’s property. But what, this passage asks, will this mean for Israel in practical terms? According to biblical law, someone who eats the firstfruits is essentially stealing from God (Exod. 23:19); even eating the tiniest bit of them was punished most severely. So, since Israel is holy in the same way, attacking her or taking even the slightest piece of her territory is also considered “eating” what is God’s—God will surely punish anyone who tries!103
This is the poetic style at its best—clever, compact, easily remembered. One can imagine these lines being passed on by word of mouth throughout Judah: “Did you hear what the prophet said? Everything is going to be all right.” It is difficult to guess when exactly Jeremiah might have uttered these reassuring words, but apparently they did not remain his message for long. As the Babylonian threat became increasingly palpable, what he had to say turned more and more somber.
Perhaps the best-known example of Jeremiah’s “prose” is his so-called Temple Sermon, in which he denounces those who are still saying everything will be all right:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: Stand at the gate of the LORD’s house [that is, the Jerusalem temple] and declare there the following: Say, Hear the word of the LORD, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to bow down to the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your doings, and I will dwell with you in this place. But do not trust those lying words, ‘The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD is here.’16
For if you indeed mend your ways and your doings, and if you indeed treat one another justly; if you do not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place; and if you do not follow other gods (which will only hurt you), then I will stay with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers of old, forever and ever.
But instead, you put your trust in lying words—and to no avail! Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, sacrifice to Baal, and go after other gods that you never paid mind to in the past—and then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say, “We are safe!” so as to keep on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by My name, become a robbers’ hangout for you? I too have been watching, says the LORD.
Just go to My place at Shiloh, where I once had established My name, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of “My people,” Israel. So now, since you have done all these things, says the LORD, and even though I have spoken to you time and again, you have not listened, and even though I have called you, you have not answered. Therefore I will do to the house that is called by My name, in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your fathers, exactly what I did to Shiloh. And then I will get rid of you, just as I got rid of all your brethren, the whole people of Ephraim.
What Jeremiah says is rather the opposite of what Isaiah had said to his countrymen during the Syro-Ephraimite crisis. God is with us (that is, ‘Immanu-El), Isaiah had said, dwelling in His temple in Jerusalem; He will not let it be captured by foreigners. This had apparently become the common wisdom among Jeremiah’s contemporaries, and the drumbeat refrain that he cites—“The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD is here”—had apparently put many people’s minds at ease. But, Jeremiah tells them, the northern kingdom (“Ephraim”) also had a temple of the LORD at Shiloh—and look at what happened to it, and to them! The same thing will happen to you if you do not start acting completely differently.
Even if the words are not arranged into pithy, two-part sentences, they are certainly quite memorable, and given the parallel account (to be examined presently) in Jeremiah 26, it is difficult to believe that the prophet himself did not say something very much like these things one day at the gates of the Jerusalem temple. Nevertheless, scholars point out that certain phrases—“the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow,”17 “follow other gods,” “the land that I gave to your fathers of old,” and “I establish[ed] My name”—are stereotypical expressions found frequently in the book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history.104 Unless Jeremiah was consciously alluding to Deuteronomy (but why just to Deuteronomy?) or had himself been particularly immersed in that book—perhaps as one of the Deuteronomistic historians—it is difficult to avoid the hypothesis, these scholars say, that his original message was at some early point recast in the idiom of Deuteronomy.18 If so, then one has to regard this passage, for all its force, as something other than the very words Jeremiah uttered, something other than what scholars sometimes call the prophet’s ipsissima verba.19
In any case, the message that the real Jeremiah delivered could scarcely have been less shocking than its Deuteronomistic reworking, at least judging by the reaction of the temple officials and others who stood by while Jeremiah spoke. That reaction is catalogued in the third sort of text distinguished by scholars, the third-person narratives about Jeremiah.
At the beginning of the reign of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah, this word came from the LORD: Thus says the LORD: Stand in the court of the LORD’s house, and say everything I tell you to say; [say it] to everyone from the cities of Judah who comes to bow down in the house of the LORD; do not hold back a word. Perhaps they will listen and each will turn away from his wrongdoing; then I may change My mind about the punishment that I am planning to do to them because of their wickedness. So say to them: Thus says the LORD: “If you do not listen to Me and follow the teachings that I have given you, and listen to the words of my servants the prophets whom I send to you time and again—but you have not listened!—then I will make this house like Shiloh, and I will make this city a curse for all the nations of the earth.”
The priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the LORD. And when Jeremiah had finished speaking all that the LORD had commanded him to speak to all the people, then the priests and the prophets and all the people laid hold of him, saying, “You shall die! Why have you prophesied in the name of the LORD, saying, ‘This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate, without inhabitant’?” And all the people gathered around Jeremiah in the house of the LORD.
When the officials of Judah heard about this, they went up from the king’s palace to the house of the LORD and sat in judgment at the entrance of the New Gate of the house of the LORD. The priests and the prophets said to the officials and to all the people, “This man deserves the sentence of death because he has prophesied against this city, as you heard with your own ears.”
Then Jeremiah spoke to all the officials and all the people, saying, “It was the LORD who sent me to prophesy against this house and this city [and say] all the words you heard. Now therefore mend your ways and your doings, and listen to the LORD your God, so that the LORD may change His mind about the punishment that He has decreed against you. As for me, I am in your hands. Do to me whatever seems right and proper to you. But know that if you put me to death, you will bring [the crime of shedding] innocent blood upon yourselves and upon this city and its inhabitants, for in truth the LORD sent me to you to speak all these words to you.”
What shines through this account is the personal courage of the prophet. Anyone can prognosticate about the future, but saying in the name of the LORD that, unless things change, Jerusalem and its temple would be destroyed was considered to be an actual offense against the city and its inhabitants. Words spoken in God’s name have consequences, as Jeremiah knew well. Surrounded by an angry mob, he nonetheless held his ground—and history would soon prove that his prophecy was correct.
As noted earlier, Duhm and later scholars have supposed that Baruch, Jeremiah’s faithful secretary, was the one who composed such third-person accounts of Jeremiah’s life. Lately, however, this contention has been questioned by scholars. Truly, there is no way to know for sure who wrote this or other biographical passages, or even if all were composed by the same person.20 In this case, however, the description has a firsthand, eyewitness quality that is difficult to chalk up to fictional hagiography. It is also noteworthy that the brief summary of Jeremiah’s address in this passage contains none of the expressions characteristic of Deuteronomy that were identified in Jeremiah 7. This may not prove anything, but it would certainly accord with the scholarly hypothesis that Jeremiah 7 is a reworking of the prophet’s words.21
So what, according to most contemporary scholars, does the book of Jeremiah contain? Without necessarily endorsing Duhm’s prose-versus-poetry analysis, most scholars agree that the book contains some passages that might credibly be identified as Jeremiah’s own words, some other speeches attributed to him but quite possibly the product of Deuteronomistic revision, the third-person biographical material just seen, and, toward the end of the book, a number of twenty-twenty hindsight prophecies that skeptical scholars prefer to associate with the period of the return from Babylonian exile. In the scholarly consensus, then, the book of Jeremiah is a composite not terribly different from the book of Isaiah, although the material originated in a far more concentrated period of time.
The Real Jeremiah
This is not to say that the actual man Jeremiah and the events recounted in his book have altogether disappeared into a haze of scholarly skepticism. As a matter of fact, thanks to the work of archaeologists and ancient Near Eastern historians, there is probably no period in biblical history better known or better documented than that of Jeremiah’s own lifetime. Jeremiah’s actual authorship of this or that passage may be in doubt, and some may even question his existence or importance, but, as we will see, a number of the historical events and incidental details included in the biblical account have been confirmed precisely by Babylonian records and other archaeological finds.
Jeremiah was still a young man when, according to the account in 2 Kings 22, the “scroll of the law” (consisting, modern scholars say, of the legal code of Deuteronomy) was found in the Jerusalem temple and brought to King Josiah. Jeremiah must have been as excited by this discovery as the king himself was106—and indeed, it may be that the prophet was thinking back to that day when he said later:
When Your words were found, I devoured them, and Your words were a joy to me—
It delighted my heart to be called by Your name,107 O LORD God of Hosts.
Jer. 15:16
The sweeping nature of Josiah’s reform and the decisiveness and heroism displayed by that charismatic king no doubt also filled Jeremiah with excitement. And yet, danger was never far from the Judean hills. In an apparently early prophecy, Jeremiah had a vision of “a bubbling cauldron whose front is tipped back from the north” (Jer. 1:13), ready at any moment to spill its contents southward. God then explained this vision to the prophet: “From the north will the evil burst forth, over all the land’s inhabitants.” (This prophecy may have referred to Babylon, even though it lay to Judah’s east, not north. Directly between them was a formidable desert, so that would-be invaders from Mesopotamia would have to first go north and then swoop down southward.)22
Of all the books attributed to biblical prophets, none tells the reader more about the prophet’s own life, including his inner religious life, than Jeremiah. The first twenty chapters of the book are dotted with Jeremiah’s own reflections on his experiences, particularly the pain and loneliness he sometimes felt because of his mission as God’s messenger:
I have not sat around and enjoyed life with the revelers. For fear of Your power, I have sat by myself; indignation is what You filled me with. But why should my pain go on forever? Mortally stricken, my wound will not heal. You have been a failing spring for me, a source of water that ceases to flow.105
Elsewhere he complains:
You tricked me, O LORD, and I was taken in; You really got the better of me.
So now I’ve become a joke; all day long, everyone laughs about me,
because every time I speak I end up railing; “Thieves! Robbers!” I yell.
Yes, “the word of the LORD has come to me”—for shame and embarrassment all day long.
But if I say, “I won’t mention Him, I won’t speak anymore in His name,”
then a fire burns in my heart, it rages inside my bones,
and I am too tired to hold it in; I just can’t.
These passages, taken from what are known as Jeremiah’s “confessions,” present the most vivid picture we have of what it felt like to be a biblical prophet.23 They show Jeremiah at his most human—and his most vulnerable.
Jeremiah’s prophetic activity continued and intensified as the political situation of his country became more and more precarious. Sandwiched between Egypt and Babylon, little Judah was buffeted by a series of upsets that followed the collapse of Assyrian military power and the subsequent rise of Babylon. The first big shock delivered to Judah was the sudden death of its beloved ruler: King Josiah was apparently killed in a battle against the Egyptian king Necho.24 (According to the biblical account, Necho was on his way to fight on the side of the Assyrians against the Babylonians at Carchemish, 2 Kings 23:29–30). Jeremiah is said to have composed laments for Josiah’s death (2 Chron. 35:25).
There followed a period of anxious waiting as the new Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, sought to extend his power to the lands to his west. From his standpoint, Judah was just another ripe fruit waiting to be picked. He began, however, with Judah’s northern neighbor Syria, which fell to the Babylonians in the last years of the seventh century BCE. Next came Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean coast to the west of Judah. Outflanked, Judah’s king Jehoiakim had no choice but to bow his head and become a reluctant vassal of Nebuchadnezzar.
After three years, however, Jehoiakim made a tactical error. The Babylonian army failed in its campaign to subdue Egypt in 601 BCE, and this debacle seriously weakened Nebuchadnezzar; it took him two full years to rebuild his army.25 In this situation of instability, serious political disturbances broke out within the Babylonian Empire, and these apparently emboldened Jehoiakim to declare Judah’s independence from its Babylonian overlords and cast his lot instead with Egypt. At first the Babylonians ordered their proxies—Arameans, Moabites, Ammonites—to initiate raids into Judah (2 Kings 24:2). In 598 BCE, however, the now-reconstituted Babylonian army undertook a full-scale invasion of Judah.
The picture of Nebuchadnezzar that emerges from the various accounts of this and other invasions is of a brutal and pitiless tyrant. One precious record that has survived from his kingdom is the Babylonian Chronicle, which gives a terse account of the king’s various conquests, frequently studded with boasting reports of his own rapacity and cruelty.26 For example, the previously mentioned conquest of Ashkelon is narrated in these terms: “He marched on Ashkelon; he took it in the month of Kislev [November/December], seized its king, pillaged and [plu]ndered it. He reduced the city to a heap of rubble.”27 Similarly, about Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Judah in 598 the Babylonian Chronicle writes:
The seventh year, in the month of Kislev [=November/December], the king of Akkad [Nebuchadnezzar] mustered his troops, marched on the Hatti,108 and set up his quarters facing the city of Yehud [Jerusalem]. In the month of Adar [March], the second day, he took the city and captured the king [Jehoiachin].109 He installed there a king of his choice [Zedekiah]. He colle[cted] its massive tribute and went back to Babylon.28
Included in this first shipment of spoils were, according to the biblical account, all the funds accumulated in the king’s treasury as well as the monies of the temple and its golden ornaments and other valuables, plus “all the noble men, seven thousand of them, and a thousand craftsmen and smiths—all of them warriors and fighters” (2 Kings 24:16).
Zedekiah, newly installed as king by Nebuchadnezzar, at first had little choice but to do Babylon’s bidding—and so he did. He was only slightly older than the previous monarch—twenty-one at the time of his accession—and, in addition to his own lack of experience, he suffered from a lack of competent advisors and administrators: most of them had been deported to Babylon. In any case, Zedekiah did his best to remain a faithful Babylonian vassal for some time. But then, heartened by troubles elsewhere in the Babylonian Empire (and probably egged on by Egypt), he revolted, apparently believing that Nebuchadnezzar’s army would be unable to intervene with full force against him. This was a second, and still more disastrous, blunder for the Kingdom of Judah. Babylonian troops marched back into Judah in 588 BCE and prepared to take Jerusalem in what was to be a prolonged, and cruel, siege.
The Lachish Ostraca
In 1932, a team of British archaeologists began excavating the ancient city of Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir), southwest of Jerusalem. Today Lachish is a pile of stones, but in biblical times it was a fortified city of some importance. Among the things that the archaeologists discovered there was a cache of ostraca—pieces of broken pottery used for jotting down brief messages (potsherds provided a cheap and convenient writing surface). The ostraca were inscribed in biblical Hebrew, and a few of them appeared to be brief notes sent by a subordinate to “my lord Yaosh,” who may have been the military commander at Lachish.29 Although fragmentary and often hard to decipher, these ostraca seem in several places to refer to the progress of Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion. Thus, at one point Letter 4 reports: “And may [my lord] know that we are watching for the signals of Lachish according to all the signs which my lord gave. For we do not see Azekah.” Azekah was another fortress town about ten miles north of Lachish. What is interesting in this is that the book of Jeremiah itself reports that the prophet had spoken to King Zedekiah “when the army of the king of Babylon was fighting against Jerusalem and against all the cities of Judah that were left, Lachish and Azekah; for these were the only fortified cities of Judah that remained” (Jer. 34:7). It seems quite possible that Letter 4 was written at very much the same moment: the letter writer, at some remove from Lachish, was nervously waiting to see some sign of life from there. If he could no longer see anything coming from Azekah, perhaps that was because the Babylonians had already conquered it.30
Jerusalem was, inevitably, the Babylonians’ main target. The Babylonians’ tactics with regard to Judah’s capital were altogether standard—they proceeded as any army would in attacking a well-stocked, walled town.31 In such cases the attackers would begin by surrounding the town’s outside walls, perhaps trying to smash through them, or the (often more vulnerable) main gates, with battering rams. Sometimes they would also seek to scale the walls with ladders, or else to dig their way into the city underneath the walls. But such tactics would not work with a city that was well defended and well prepared. Some cities, including Jerusalem, were protected by an inner as well as an outer wall; these were not easily breached.32 The attackers would therefore concentrate on the main part of the conflict, the maintenance of a strict siege that would seal the city off from any contact with the outside world. Those behind the city walls might periodically try to attack the enemy soldiers from atop the city walls or through sorties, inflicting individual casualties. Apart from this, however, they had no choice but to stay where they were, surviving on stores of grain and other edibles that had been put aside beforehand. The war was thus basically a waiting game. The attackers were waiting until the city’s food or water gave out, while the citizens hoped that the attackers’ supply lines, or patience, would be exhausted first. Sometimes it went one way, sometimes the other.
A graphic picture of the Babylonians’ siege of Jerusalem emerges from another biblical book, Lamentations. Although the book is traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, modern scholars believe it may be the work of different hands. Its first four chapters describe life under the siege itself, while the fifth seems to reflect what happened immediately after the fall of the city. They present a striking picture of human suffering:
My eyes have no more tears and my insides are like clay.
My feelings are numb at my people’s catastrophe,
as little babies, infants, lie helpless in the streets.
They whine to their mothers, “I’m hungry!” “Something to drink!”
but they’re left like the helpless corpses in the city streets,
as they languish in their mothers’ arms . . .
Even jackals offer the breast to suckle their young,
but not my people; they have turned crueler than an ostrich in the desert.
From thirst, a baby’s tongue is stuck to the roof of its mouth,
and little children beg for bread, but no one gives them a crumb.
People who once fed on dainties are wasting in the streets,
and those who dressed in purple sift through garbage.
This nation’s sin must be greater than Sodom’s,
which was crushed in a flash, untouched by human hands.
Her [Jerusalem’s] rulers were purer than snow and whiter than milk,
with limbs that were ruddy as coral, frames of sapphire.
Now they are blacker than soot, unrecognized in the streets;
their skin lies shriveled on their bones, dried up like wood.
The ones killed in battle fared better than those killed by hunger:
at least they oozed [blood] from wounds and not from [lack of] grain.
Tenderhearted women boiled their children with their own hands.
Then they ate them as food. [This] is my people’s catastrophe.33
The siege went into its second year and still the Jews held out. But finally hunger, thirst, and the crushing summer heat overcame them. Jerusalem’s walls were at last breached; the end was now in sight. King Zedekiah and his troops took flight by night through the broken walls, hoping to find safety in the desert or, perhaps, on the far side of the Jordan.
But the Babylonian army went after the king in pursuit and caught up with him at the plains of Jericho; all his troops scattered and left him. They seized the king and brought him to the king of Babylon at Ribla; there they put him on trial. Then they slaughtered Zedekiah’s children in front of him, and they put out Zedekiah’s eyes and bound him in bronze chains and took him to Babylon.
Back in Jerusalem, the Babylonians inflicted similar revenge on the city itself, burning down the great temple as well as the private houses in the city, then tearing apart sections of the city walls stone by stone so that no one could dwell there in safety again. Those inhabitants who had not been killed were dragged off as prisoners and marched across the desert to Babylon.
The Burnt Bullae
Among the victims of the Babylonian attack was a small building in Jerusalem that had been used for (among other things) the storing of official documents.34 When the Babylonians put the building to the torch, all the documents went up in smoke. But the fire actually did some good, at least from the standpoint of biblical scholars.
In Jeremiah’s day, a set procedure existed for handling property deeds and other official documents written on papyrus or parchment. The document would be signed by the relevant parties; then it would be rolled up and tightly bound with twine. Next, a wet lump of clay, shaped into a small, almost flat cylinder, would be stuck onto the twine. One or more officials would then sink his seal or signet into the wet clay. The seal usually consisted of the official’s first and last names. After the clay had dried, the text could not be reopened or tampered with without breaking or severing the lump of clay and the seals it bore. In this way, the authenticity of a document could be guaranteed for a long period of time. (The book of Jeremiah contains a description of just this procedure, Jer. 32:9–12.)
Archaeologists have often found such clay seals, or bullae, but because the dried clay is easily damaged, many of them have proven to be unreadable. That was not the case with the bullae in the Jerusalem house, however. The same fire that burned up the documents themselves also fired the dry clay that sealed them, just as if a potter had put them in a hot oven to harden. When archaeologists excavating the City of David in the 1980s dug down to the level of the Babylonian destruction and began to sift through the rubble, they discovered more than fifty little round seals, most of them perfectly preserved thanks to the attackers’ inferno. What a find! Almost exactly 2,500 years earlier, the temple officials of Jeremiah’s day had affixed their seals to documents and deposited them in this house—and now here were their first and last names for all to see. It was as if the archaeologists had discovered Jeremiah’s personal address book.
One seal in particular caught the archaeologists’ eye. It bore the name Gemaryahu ben Shaphan. Readers familiar with the book of Jeremiah knew that name—it belonged to a high official (called “the secretary”) in Jeremiah’s time.
In the fifth year of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah, in the ninth month, all the people in Jerusalem and all the people who came from the towns of Judah to Jerusalem proclaimed a fast before the LORD. Then, in the hearing of all the people, Baruch read the words of Jeremiah from the scroll, in the house of the LORD, in the chamber of Gemariah110 son of Shaphan the secretary, which was in the upper court, at the entry of the New Gate of the LORD’s house. When Micaiah, son of Gemariah son of Shaphan, heard all the words of the LORD from the scroll, he went down to the king’s house, into the secretary’s chamber; and all the officials were sitting there: Elishama the secretary, Delaiah son of Shemaiah, Elnathan son of Achbor, Gemariah son of Shaphan, Zedekiah son of Hananiah, and all the officials . . .
Some of the other bullae were also connected with names known from elsewhere in the Bible—there was even one seal that the archaeologists first believed to be that of Baruch, Jeremiah’s own secretary—but these identifications have subsequently been disputed.35 Whatever the case with Baruch, finding Gemaryahu’s seal had an electric effect on scholars; it was a solid point of connection between a biblical text preserved for more than two millennia and a piece of clay dug out of the ruins of Jerusalem in the late twentieth century.
Seventy Years
Jeremiah lived through his people’s most traumatic hour. From the heyday of Josiah’s reform and the heady feeling of new possibilities that accompanied it, he witnessed his country’s rapid spiral into disaster. Josiah died; his son Jehoiakim simply could not fill his shoes. Jeremiah openly reproved all the country’s officials for their blundering policies, he but saved his sharpest words for the king himself:
Woe to him who builds his up lodgings through unrighteousness, and his upper rooms through injustice;
who makes a worker work for free or does not give him proper wages;
who says, “Let me make myself a fancy palace, with wide rooms at the top,”
with windows and cedar paneling, and painted all vermilion.
Are you king because you’re the best at cedar paneling?
Didn’t your father [merely] eat and drink, and then “make merry” by acting justly and fairly?
He would take up the cause of the poor and the downtrodden—that was what made him merry.
Is that not how to obey Me, says the LORD?
But you—all you care about is money,
and shedding innocent blood, and oppression and violence.
Therefore, thus says the LORD concerning King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah:
No one will mourn him—“Too bad, O brother, O sister!”
No one will mourn him—“Too bad, your lordship, your honor!”
He’ll be buried like a donkey, dragged away and thrown out past the gates of Jerusalem.36
But if most of Jeremiah’s prophetic mission was to denounce unrighteousness and people’s blind faith that, despite their sins, Jerusalem would survive, he also struck a more positive note, especially as the end came closer. In the year that Nebuchadnezzar ascended the throne, Jeremiah is said to have foreseen not only the fall of Jerusalem, but the fall of Babylon seventy years later—at which time the people would return to Judah:
Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts: Because you have not obeyed My words, I am going to send for and fetch all the peoples of the north, says the LORD, including My servant, King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon, and I will have them attack this land and its inhabitants and all these nations around it; I will wipe them out, and make them into a ruin and a thing of dread, an everlasting desolation. And I will banish from them the cries of celebration and shouts of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones and the light of the lamp. This whole land will become a desolate ruin, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
But after seventy years are over, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their sin, says the LORD. I will make it into an everlasting waste. I will bring down upon that land everything that I have decreed for it, everything that is written in this book, which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations.
The number seventy is something of a conventional number in Hebrew and other Semitic languages, a bit like one hundred in English: it means “a lot.” Thus, Jeremiah probably did not intend to make an accurate prediction of the duration of Babylonian ascendancy—if he even said something like the above (which some scholars doubt).37 Indeed, he may have been influenced by external traditions; scholars have long noted a temple inscription of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (681–669 BCE) that speaks of “seventy years as the duration of its [Babylon’s] desolation [that is, punishment].”38 Whatever the case, however, “seventy years” was not far off the mark: Nebuchadnezzar began his depredations in 605 BCE and the Babylonian empire fell sixty-six years later, in 539 BCE.
Indeed, the same prediction of seventy years appears a bit later. After they had reduced Jerusalem to a smoldering ruin, the Babylonians rounded up most of the city’s inhabitants and deported them back to Babylon. Jeremiah (who, by the biblical account, escaped to Egypt) is then said to have addressed a letter to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, urging them to hunker down and wait out their punishment, whose end, he said, was seventy years off. (Again, scholars doubt that Jeremiah himself wrote this part of the book—many believe it was composed toward the end of the exile or later.)
Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease . . .
For thus says the LORD: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill for you My promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon Me and come and pray to Me, I will hear you. When you search for Me, you will find Me; if you seek Me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
Whenever it was written, this passage seems to sum up well the combination of resignation and hopefulness that must have characterized the Jews’ experience of exile in Babylon. For more or less seventy years they survived there, doing their best to pursue everyday life in a foreign and unfriendly environment, all the while waiting for the day when their fortunes might change. That day came in 539 BCE. The Babylonian Empire collapsed, surrendering to the leader of the victorious Persian forces, Cyrus the Great. Cyrus subsequently issued a decree allowing the Jews to return to their homeland of Judah (Ezra 1:2–4; 6:3–5), which, however, was not to regain its former status as an independent kingdom. Instead, it would henceforth be a (largely insignificant) western province in the vast Persian Empire.39
The New Covenant
Looking back on all that had happened to them in less than a century, many Jews must have struggled to understand how they could have fallen so far so fast, from the optimism of Josiah’s reign to the vassalage of his successors, and then on to conquest and exile. Some, no doubt, understood these events simply in terms of realpolitik: the great empires were simply stronger than any opposition the Judeans could muster. But those who finished off the Deuteronomistic History sought to explain the same events theologically: after all, God had made an agreement, a covenant, with the people of Israel way back at Mount Sinai. If, in the eighth century BCE, the northern tribes had been punished because of the sin of Jeroboam (his establishment of the golden bull statues at Dan and Bethel), a corresponding violation of the covenant must have been responsible for Judah’s downfall in the sixth century. It was not hard to find. While Josiah had been an exemplary king, the same could hardly be said of his father, Manasseh. Manasseh reigned for an extraordinarily long period, fifty-five years, and from the standpoint of the Deuteronomistic history, this had been a horrible period: Manasseh built altars to Baal and put an image of Asherah in the Jerusalem temple, as well as indulging in child sacrifice, magical divinations, and other forbidden practices (2 Kings 21:3–9). As a result, according to the biblical account, God resolved to punish Judah: “I will cast off the remnant of My possession and hand them over to their enemies” (2 Kings 21:14). Even all of Josiah’s subsequent good deeds were not sufficient to reverse this divine decree. In short, it was the sin of Manasseh, his violation of the stipulations of God’s original covenant, that brought about Judah’s downfall.
Once an agreement is broken, is it over forever? To this question the book of Jeremiah provides a memorable answer.
The days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—they broke that covenant, so I rejected them, says the LORD. But such is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after that time, says the LORD: I will put my Torah111 inside them, I will write it on their very hearts: I will be their God, and they will be My people. No longer will they need to teach one another or say one to the other, “Be obedient to the LORD,” for they shall all be obedient to Me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; then I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.40
In these simple words, God promised that His pact with His people was not over after all. Israel had been severely punished with destruction and with exile. But indeed, after the predicted seventy years were over, the people were to return to their ancient homeland, Jerusalem and environs, and resume life as before. In terms of actual content, the new covenant God promised here does not seem to be any different from the old one; the difference lies in its observance.41 In time to come, God promises, obedience to God’s laws will not be externally imposed, and no one will have to ask his or her neighbor what the Torah calls upon people to do. Instead, each person will know the laws and seek to do them, since the Torah will be written “on their very hearts.”
This passage bespeaks one of the most characteristic features of the religion of Judaism. The idea that it is incumbent on the whole society to learn and obey the Torah’s ordinances—that indeed, the renewal of God’s covenant and His future protection of Israel would depend on the people scrupulously obeying God’s laws—meant that attention would henceforth be focused as never before on the proper interpretation and inculcation of those laws within the general population. Still more important, seeking to carry out God’s ordinances in all their particulars was to become something like a form of worship in itself. Of course, this is not the only, or the earliest, biblical evidence of such a turn. All the exhortations of Deuteronomy to keep “this Torah” or “these laws and statutes,” indeed, all the detailed legislation of that book as well as that found in Numbers, Leviticus, and Exodus, pointed in the same direction. What this God demanded in particular was to live according to all the details of His law.
But that was not the only way of understanding the phrase “new covenant.” When, four centuries after Jeremiah, the Jewish people found themselves divided into different groups and schools, one of these—the founders of the Dead Sea Scrolls community—saw Jeremiah’s “new covenant” as a prophetic reference to their own group: since they alone had the proper understanding of God’s laws, it was to them alone that the new covenant had been given:
None of those who have been initiated into the covenant shall enter the Temple to light His altar in vain . . . They shall separate themselves from the “sons of the Pit” [that is, any Jews who were not members of the Dead Sea Scrolls community] and seal themselves off from the impure wealth of the wicked . . . [Instead, they shall] keep the sabbath day according to its [proper] interpretation, and the festivals and the fast day [that is, the Day of Atonement], according to the practices of those who entered the New Covenant in the land of Damascus.
Damascus Document 6:11–19
Perhaps influenced by such thinking, the early Christians, too, came to see their new faith as the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s words about a new covenant. This, as we have already glimpsed, was a great theme of Paul’s letters: the old covenant, based on the observance of God’s laws, was supplanted by a new covenant of divine grace. (For the phrase “new covenant,” see 1 Cor. 11:25.) The same theme is taken up elsewhere:
For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one. Yet He is finding fault with them when He says: “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah . . .” In speaking of “a new covenant,” He has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.
Indeed, the canonical collections of Gospels and various epistles soon came to be called the New Testament, that is, the new covenant (the Greek word for a covenant or property agreement, diathēkē, also means “testament”).
The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek even before the end of the biblical period—first the Torah, in the third century BCE, and then, gradually, the remaining books. This Greek translation, known as the Septuagint, has survived from ancient times, since it soon became the official Bible of Greek-speaking Christians. From an early point, people were aware that the Greek version differed somewhat from the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible preserved by Jews. Mostly, the differences were a matter of a word or two, but sometimes they were much greater. In the case of the book of Jeremiah, the traditional Hebrew text is a full 12 percent longer than the Greek—a difference of some 2,700 words! What is more, the chapters are ordered differently: chapters 46–51 of the traditional Hebrew text are found in Greek following Jer. 25:13.42
What is one to make of such differences? For centuries, both Christians and Jews assumed that the Greek text, since it was a translation from the original Hebrew, had taken liberties here and there, skipping and adding and changing things around. The great champion of this view was Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus in 382–83 CE to produce a new Latin translation of the Bible. At first Jerome planned to use the Septuagint as the basis of his new version: he knew Greek well, so it would simply be a matter of turning the Greek text into polished, eloquent Latin (and Jerome was a great Latin stylist). But as he progressed he became convinced that only a direct translation from the Hebrew would do. Learning Hebrew was no easy task in those days—there were no textbooks or grammars or dictionaries. After a time Jerome went to Palestine itself, settling in Bethlehem in 386 and studying under one or more rabbinic teachers.43
He referred proudly to the translation he produced as the Hebraica veritas, the “Hebrew truth.” His basic assumption—that the Hebrew text he had used was right and that the Septuagint was wrong—was shared by subsequent scholars for centuries and centuries. In the post-Reformation era, however, people began to question all sorts of assumptions about the Bible, including, prominently, the reliability of the traditional Hebrew text itself. Soon people were looking back to the Septuagint text, and the idea gradually sank in—though it was not widely understood, even among scholars, until the nineteenth century—that the Septuagint translators had not been overly free in their rendering. They simply had a different Hebrew original in front of them.
Sometimes, a difference of even a single letter can be crucial. Take, for example, the angel’s words to Jacob after their night of fighting at the Jabbok ford:
“Your name will not be Jacob any longer, but Israel, since you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed.”
What did the angel mean by saying, “You have struggled with God and with men”? The “struggled with God” part is easy: it refers to Jacob’s just concluded, night-long fight with the angel. (See above, chapter 7.) But what men could the angel be referring to? Perhaps to himself. After all, he is identified in the passage as a “man”; perhaps “with God and with men” was a kind of combination phrase (hendiadys) summing up what the angel really was, a divine humanoid, both God and man at the same time. If not, then perhaps the angel was saying, “Jacob, you have had a hard life—you’ve had to leave home, you’ve fought with your uncle Laban, and now you’ve fought all night with me, and still you’ve always come out on top. Let your name henceforth be Israel.”
The Hebrew text underlying the Septuagint had one less letter, but this changes the whole meaning. There, the angel’s words are
“Your name will not be Jacob any longer, but Israel, since you have struggled with God, and with men you will prevail.”
Gen. 32:38
The Hebrew text underlying the Septuagint lacked the letter waw (or vav) at the start of the last Hebrew word. With it there, the verb is in the past tense, “with men, and [you] have prevailed.” Without it, the and disappears and the verb is in the future, “with men you will prevail.” If the latter is the right text, then the “men” that the angel is talking about would seem to refer specifically to Jacob’s brother, Esau, who, Jacob had just heard the previous day, was coming to meet him with a mini-army of four hundred men. What the angel says to him is, in effect, “You’ve fought with me all night and won—why should you be afraid of merely human opponents this afternoon?”
If one letter can make that kind of difference, what can one say about a difference of 2,700 words? Is it even proper to say that the traditional Hebrew version of Jeremiah is the same book as that underlying the Septuagint Jeremiah? And Jeremiah is not the only example, although it is the most egregious. The Greek version of Job is also much shorter than the traditional Hebrew version; chapters 4–6 of the book of Daniel are substantially different in the Septuagint; and the Septuagint version of the story of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17) is considerably shorter than the traditional Hebrew version. In the last case it seems pretty clear that the Hebrew version was supplemented (rather than the Greek version having been condensed).
Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s, scholars have been able to compare the traditional Hebrew text preserved by Jews not only with the Septuagint, but with the biblical manuscripts found among the scrolls. (Fragments from more than two hundred biblical manuscripts were found, although many of them consisted of only a few scraps or a fragmentary chapter or two.) The results have been surprising. In some respects, the traditional Hebrew text has proven to be remarkably similar to some of the Dead Sea Scrolls—virtually a word-for-word match. Equally surprising, however, was the discovery that some books—including Jeremiah—seem to have circulated in ancient times in two or more different “editions.” Thus, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts of Jeremiah is very close to the Septuagint Jeremiah, while at least two others substantially agree with the traditional Hebrew text. Did it bother people that there were two different versions in circulation? Apparently not, since both were found in the library of the same community. But why not? And how did the differences between the versions originate?
As biblical scholarship has developed over the past century, a small group of researchers has devoted itself to answering such questions; their field is known as the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. By comparing all the extant versions of the text—the best manuscript representatives of the traditional Hebrew text, numerous Septuagint manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls biblical manuscripts, the ancient manuscript tradition of the Pentateuch preserved by the Samaritans, and yet others—they have tried to reconstruct, in verse after verse, how minute variants in wording might have come about. Sometimes, it turns out, a scribe simply omitted a word in the process of copying. This often happens when the scribe’s eye accidentally jumps from the word or letter he was copying in one place to the same word or letter in another place. (By the same token, scribes sometimes accidentally copy the same word or letter twice, changing the meaning of the text.) But textual criticism has also revealed that the changes are not always accidental. Scribes sometimes deliberately inserted a letter, or a different word, or even a whole phrase, in order to alter the meaning.
In a case like that of the book of Jeremiah, scholars have built up a very complex picture of how the differences between the Greek and traditional Hebrew versions originated. Scribal errors account for some of the apparent omissions in the Greek text, while deliberate glosses and other expansions account for some of the Hebrew text’s greater length. (For example: the scribe inserted a “thus says the LORD” here or there, or added the word “the prophet” to Jeremiah’s name.)44 Most scholars also agree that chapters 46–51 of the traditional Hebrew text had originally been located where they are in the Greek text, after Jer. 25:13. Apparently, then, it was a later Hebrew scribe or editor of the traditional Hebrew text who decided to move these “oracles against the nations” to the end of the book.
Such conclusions are particularly troubling to Christians who uphold the literal “inerrancy” of Scripture.45 All the examples of scribal errors that scholars have assembled make it difficult to maintain that the Bible as we have it is absolutely error-free. More than that, however, textual scholarship has made some Christians ask why they should continue to give preference to the traditional Hebrew text. Just because Jerome thought it was a good idea? After all, if the first Christians mostly read and quoted the Bible in Greek, then shouldn’t modern Christians be using a translation of the shorter, Septuagint Jeremiah—since that was the version found in the church’s official Bible—rather than a translation based on the traditional Hebrew text? Or should we perhaps forget about both of these versions and try instead to restore the earliest form of Jeremiah that can be reconstructed from the various surviving versions—the putative ancestor of all the current Greek and Hebrew texts? Once again, the matter of “original meaning” raises its head. Which text is the right text—the one used now, the one used by the first Christians, the earliest putative form behind all attested texts, or perhaps only the ipsissima verba of the real Jeremiah?