Devotional
Commentary on Jeremiah 27
This
chapter I want to dedicate in memoriam of Kenneth D. Mulzac. His dissertation
at Andrews was on Jeremiah and we were together in the Septuagint studies under
Johann Erbes. My wife took his Jeremiah class.
Ken would
agree with me that if we properly want to understand this particular chapter in
the Septuagint it is necessary that we place the Greek Septuagint next to the
Hebrew text (called Masoretic Text) and then compare what was omitted (-) and
what was added (+). What Ken and I would do next is to translate carefully the
Greek back into Hebrew so that one can see better the differences between the
two texts. One can see the comparisons and differences better.
(Source: E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 1992: 322-324)
Someone
who did this is Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University. He translated the Greek
of this chapter back into Hebrew. Below I will give his results. Have you ever
listened to a courtcase on DNA findings? The slide after slide presentation and
discussion is done and half of the audience is asleep and another half left the
court. This is what it will look like when I put up the paper of Emanuel Tov
here. The LXX means that it is the Greek Septuagint. The MT means that it is
the Hebrew text or what I call the original Jeremiah preserved by Jews in
accuracy, a higher accuracy than the Septuagint was preserved by Christians.
Sorry to say it but it is the truth. There is not one Greek manuscript that is
the same as another. Do we have the Septuagint original? No. None of the
Editors of the critical editions ever claimed that. Septuagint is a modern
elusive task. Elusive means slipping away and murky waters. YELLOW will mean
phrases absent in the LXX but present in the MT or Hebrew. YELLOW on a BLANK
means that the LXX added something that was not in the Hebrew or MT.
With
this, Ken and I can describe to you what happened here since the differences
can be explained. There is one thing we need to do more: which text has
priority over the other? LXX is shorter and MT is longer. Who added or who
subtracted? Tov blames the MT or Hebrew of adding later and calls the LXX the
original. I differ and say that the MT is the original and the LXX omitted
phrases or added here and there. “Two men sat behind bars: the one saw mud, the
other one stars.”
I am
going to say that the Hebrew text as we have it is the original Word of God and
that the Greek they have reconstructed for us is secondary or subordinate. I
also say that the Septuagint is a degenerative text full of errors. The Hebrew
is more precise although there are also slips in the copying process. For
example the 4QDana manuscript dealing with Daniel is almost 99% the same as the
oldest full Hebrew text that we have from the year 1008 called the codex Aleppo.
What remarkable accuracy over such a long period. It cannot go unnoticed. It is
the key for selection here.
The Greek
left out the whole first verse telling about the beginning of the reign of
Jehoiakim in 609 BCE when Jeremiah had this vision (verse 1). In verse 2 the
Greek left out the brackets here: “So said the Lord [to me]”. Think about it,
if someone writes that the Lord speaks [to me] then it means he wrote it
himself. Is that not so? If someone else left out the [to me] then it is no
longer the original writer but someone later. The Hebrew must be older here
just on sensibility. I am sure Ken would have accepted the point the same way.
Those who
remembered Ken, he use to talk slowly but his brain worked three times faster
than he speaks. You speak half a sentence and his brain already worked out the
rest of the sentence and is ready for a counter-answer, with respect and
dignity of course.
Jeremiah
was to go to surrounding nations of Israel and told them that the Lord is going
to put them in bondage with Neb of Babylon and the way to do it is to put bars
on his neck (verse 2). A demonstration message. An artistic display saying
something to the public of that country.
Verse 3
in the Greek is the same as the Hebrew except that before Jerusalem is an extra
addition reading “to which is called”. The sentence reading in the Greek: “by
the hand of the ambassadors who come, to which is called, Jerusalem.” Why would
a Greek translator wish to explain to a Hellenistic audience that Jerusalem is
called Jerusalem unless it had another name? The only time it would have
another name is when he was writing in another culture who could not pronounce
Jerusalem properly or had a different linguistic form for it. If the original
had an abbreviation for the name of Jerusalem then he would add “to which is
called” to give the full form. The Greek is later and the Hebrew is older.
In verse
4 the Greek left out [of Hosts] and just read “Lord, the God of Israel”. Were
they afraid that the Greeks will be worried if their God had soldiers/angels
fighting in war? Are they avoiding “militaristic terms” here to avoid conflict
with their Hellenistic audience?
Then an
obvious slip of the eye occurred so that haplography happened. The problem is
that there are too many “earth” words in this verse 5. It appears twice at the
end of a phrase, so what happened? The scribe was reading unto earth, looked
away and when he looked back again he remembered that the last word he was
using is earth and seeing earth down the line of verse 5 he continued with what
is afterwards but in the process left out what was between earth and earth!
Haplography means writing only halfway. The Greek is in trouble here. The
Hebrew not. Our Bibles are secured. However, E. Tov says that the Hebrew wanted
to add extras and the Greek is original. I met Tov at the Hebrew university and
Paul Lippi (Adventist student of Tov) took me to him. Tov is willing to
speculate about the Greek primacy for the rest of the Old Testament except the
Pentateuch, so Lippi. At the Hebrew University he better not touch the
Pentateuch maybe?
In verse
6 the Greek left out two words that makes the sentence very strange: “[And now,
I,] I have given [all] these lands….” Only the author of the Book can say “and
now” meaning the time in 609 BCE in the vision (verse 6). If the Greek leaves
out these two words it means that it is no longer “and now” and the Greek
translator felt that it is superfluous. To say “all” the lands were given, the
Greeks may criticize the Jews that it is a bit overstated so to understate it
they “edited” the text by leaving out the all. Not exactly all the lands, would
be more acceptable narrative to the Greeks, they felt. Later in verse 6 the
Greek also left out the phrase “I have given to him” out. Why? The phrase
occurs twice in the sentence and to avoid redundancy one is deleted and thus
the text in the Greek shortened, just to appeal to the Hellenistic audience. The
Jews of Alexandria became very secularized as Philo told us, and they did
anything not to look foolish to the Greeks.
Here is a
surprise for all Septuagint lovers. Said one scholar about the papyri of Iliad
of Homer at Alexandria of the period after 150 BCE that “not only lack almost
all the ‘plus’ verses, but also show numerous omissions of lines generally
present in earlier versions” (See M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria II, 1972:
691, note 291). If one places the scholarship at Alexandria library next to the
scholarship of the contemporaneous Dead Sea Scrolls there is a remarkable
correspondence: the same tension, degeneration of texts, sensorship thus hiding
of texts. Jeremiah in Greek is also shorter just like the Iliad of Homer was
shortened as compared to earlier versions of it.
Verse 7
would have embarrassed the Greeks that “all the nations shall serve him [king
Neb] and his son [Evil-Merodach = so Rashi] and his son’s son [Belshazzar = so
Rashi] until the time of his own land come [539 BCE]…” How can a prophet be so
accurate in his descriptions of future events? Thus the sentence was removed
and deleted. There was a time when the Romans did not tolerate prophetic like
books and thus burned them. This sentence would have offended the Romans for
sure. The oldest manuscripts of Greek does not date earlier than 250 CE so it
is difficult to say what the state of the original Septuagint was 500 years
earlier. My feeling is that it was more literal and more precise and more
similar to the Hebrew text or the Word of God as our Bibles read (see online my
article on “Textual Criticism under Scrutiny: Xerox Problems since Epiphanes”
Korean Journal of Christian Studies Volume 75 (2011): 5-19.
For some
reason the Greek translation should not mention “pestilence” in verse 8. They
deleted the word in the Greek. The explanatory phrase by Jeremiah that he is
talking about Neb king of Babylon was deleted as well as the beginning phrase “And
it shall come to pass”. Greeks would not like that kind of talking. Delete. And
that is what they did to please their Hellenistic audience. The Word of God had
to suffer just so that they can save their faces. These days there are
organizations that want to delete gender offensive phrases from the Word of God
to accommodate LGBTQH and give it out as a Bible version to the public! The
Greeks of the Septuagint were first before them.
In the
sentence “who say to you saying” (verse 9) the Greek translator said that there
are too many “saying” in this sentence, thus delete. Redundancy must be
eliminated. Remember that Alexander Aetolia was a Greek grammarian and
text-critic at Alexandria library with an “imaginative exercise in ‘improving’
his authors” (Fraser 1972: 449).
In verse
9 the diviners and soothsayers were telling the kings that they will have peace
and never go to Neb. The last part of the verse “and so that I will drive you
out and you will perish” was seen by the Greek translator as the same info as
the phrase before it, and for redundancy reasons to please the Hellenistic
Librarian styles and scholarship, was left out. What would these Greeks think
of us! That was their concern. Not the Word of God.
The
nation that would surrender would be saved (verse 11) and this sentence was
kept for the Greek except the phase “says the Lord”. If it is already a message
from the Lord, then one does not need to say again that it is the Lord
speaking. That would be the Greek Librarian scholarship complaint of their
prophet’s writing style. Thus, the Word of God must be shortened.
Half of
verse 12 is kept in the Greek about Zedekiah in 586 BCE “into the yoke of the
king of Babylon” was deleted as already understood data and “him and his people
and live” was also omitted for it may have been argued by the Greek translator
that the Hellenistic scholars would say it was already mentioned higher up in
the chapter.
The whole
of verse 13 is dropped out which is a question repeating data again. This is
the way Jeremiah wrote, namely to give all the data again. Why? So that the
simple-minded not can say they do not know what he is talking about. There is
also another reason why it is repeated. I do it with my Korean farmers’
audience listening to my sermon: they doze off with heads dropping in a nap for
a minute or two, so what do I do? I repeat all the data when the head comes up
again just to “update them” in case they did not hear it the first time. That
is what Jeremiah did with his repetition of data that seems redundant to the
Hellenistic Greek Librarians of Alexandria. My feeling is that originally the
Septuagint was translated very accurate, very literal, no omissions but after
Antiochus Epiphanes the scholarship of Alexandria shorted texts and there was a
degeneration of scholarship, also of copies of the Septuagint. What has survived
for us today are these degenerative copies and not the original good Septuagint
that compares nearly 99% with the Hebrew that we have.
All the
verses are then the same as the Hebrew talking about Zedekiah warning about the
false prophets in verses 14-15 but at the end of verse 15 somehow the
translator in Greek thought he needed to add a phrase not in the Hebrew: “you
and the prophets who are prophesying to you, [+to lie to you]”. Jeremiah did
not put it in since it would be redundant for he already spent two verses 14-15
saying the same and talking about these fake prophets.
In verse
16 there is a slip of the memory, maybe the translator of Greek was very tired
and so translating he swap the words and what should be the way Jeremiah wrote
it: “And to the priests and to all this people I have spoken” the translator
made it “and to all this people and to the priests I have spoken”. At the end
of verse 16 reading that the vessels of the Lord will be returned from Babylon “now
hastily” but the LXX or Greek translator deleted these two words. Why? They
were prophesying, these false prophets, that the vessels that were taken in the
days of Jeconiah would be brought back soon as now and in a manner that is
hastily. That was for Zedekiah in 586 BCE warning him not to believe this. For
rationalistic Greeks filled with Higher Criticism of their own Classics like
Homer’s Iliad at Alexandria, it would be unpleasant to talk about immediacy “now”
and “hastily” when nearly 900km separate the two. It takes time. Thus, the
Greek translator wanted to please his Hellenistic audience.
Verse 17
is used by the Greek translator with no change and in verse 18 only the first
part is kept: “But if they are prophets and if the word of the Lord is with
them, let them now entreat”. Because of redundancy the Greek translator wanted
to cut short the repetition of data: “the Lord of Hosts that the vessels
remaining in the house of the Lord and in the house of the king of Judah and in
Jerusalem not come to Babylon” was deleted. Jeremiah’s audience took their nap
and he must repeat the exact data to enter their minds for a proper decision to
be made.
Then the
Greek translator gives a summarizing statement almost the same as a header in a
paragraph at the end of verse 18: “Not have I sent them”. It is continued in
verse 19 as “For so has the Lord” but they dropped out “of Hosts” and “concerning
the pillars, concerning the sea, and concerning the bases” for some reason not
to mentioned. “Remaining in this city” is also deleted. The fact that Jeremiah
mentioned that vessels will remain in the city is very important for he
witnessed it later as well. Only the author can supply such crucial detail.
Someone who was not there that day or in vision cannot historically think back
that maybe vessels were left.
From
verses 20-22 nearly all the redundant repetitions of names of king Jehoiakim,
Nebuchadnezzar, nobles, Jerusalem, Judah, Lord of Hosts, God of Israel,
concerning vessels remaining in the house of the Lord and in the house of the king
of Judah and Jerusalem, were deleted. The Greek translator did not want
repetition. In verse 22 he only read: “They shall be brought to Babylon said
the Lord.” Anything else where the Lord is said to remember and will bring it up
and restore, is cut out. Why? Are these Greek translators so secular that they
did not want the agnostic secular Greeks with whom they associate at the
Library of Alexandria criticize their Hebrew literature?
Dear Lord
You warn
us that we are not to take away from the Word of God anything. We believe in Your
Word and are thankful for what it testifies to us. We are not ashamed of what
You have written or how You have written. We are ashamed how we live. Help us
to always change to Your Word. In Jesus
name. Amen.
- Jeremiah 27 verses 1 to 8 Septuagint and Hebrew compared by E Tov 1992 at 322 to 324.jpg (2.85MB)(12)
- Jeremiah 27 verses 9 to 16 Septuagint and Hebrew compared by E Tov 1992 at 322 to 324.jpg (3.09MB)(76)
- Jeremiah 27 verses 17 to 22 Septuagint and Hebrew compared by E Tov 1992 at 322 to 324.jpg (2.83MB)(10)