Devotional Commentary on Jeremiah 43

 

As far as content is concerned, this chapter is one of a sour, wicked remnant and leaders more so. After Neb left to Babylon, his official Nebuzaraddan had given the remainder of Jews under the authority of Gedaliah of Mizpah but he was killed. The leaders Azariah and Johanan did not accept the warning of Jeremiah as given in chapter 42 not to go to Egypt but said that he is speaking falsely (verse 2) and Baruch is inciting him against them (verse 3) and they took everyone and went down to live at Tahpannes in Egypt. God gave Jeremiah then a message that stone need to be hidden (verse 9) at the entrance of Pharaoh’s palace in this place. At the same spot is then predicted that Neb will come and place his throne there and some will die, some will be hurt by the sword and others will go in captivity (verse 11). The gods of Egypt will be burnt and monuments of Beth-Shemesh shall be burnt and the houses of Egypt (verse 13). The chapter ends with this content.

 

What is a golden opportunity for readers in this chapter, is to become acquainted with a Dead Sea Scroll from Cave four: 4QJerd. When this fragment fell into the hand of scholars like Emmanuel Tov of the Hebrew University in Israel, he and others concluded that it is: a shorter text than our Hebrew Bible; slightly different and some spellings; and thus with Evolutionistic Darwinianism in the mind [shorter must be first and longer must be last] or “artificial Hegelianism” as William Albright use to say, they said that 4QJerd is a text that preceded our Hebrew Bible and is thus more original. Result? Our “longer” Hebrew Bible is a fake addition with not really the Word of God since it was adapted later with whatever editorial reasons. Already the red cards are out, is it not? For an Adventist it should be. Why? We are Creationists and Charles Darwin “invented” his Evolution theory after his daughter died in a spiritist sanitorium of the president of the spiritism society, James Gully, research is indicating, kind of a mental shock with the death of this child of his where he read at her death-bed the atheistic books of fundamentalist Protestant turning agnostic: Francis William Newman into skepticism and the rest you need to read in the article by Dennis Klass, The Longlasting Effects of Parental Bereavement: The Case of Charles Darwin” 2013 (see online, a must reading). An eye-opener. Thanks emeritus professor in psychiatry Dennis Klass for this information.

 

So what is the real answer to this fragment that is shorter than the presumed text of codex Alleppo from 1008 A.D. which is the complete preserved Word of God by Jews through the ages and which is identical to another fragment 4QJerc which we discussed already in Jeremiah 30. There it was identical with 99% precision. How come one Dead Sea Scroll is identical to our Hebrew text and one Dead Sea Scroll from the same book is shorter? Something must have happened.

 

During the time of these scrolls, and there is Carbon-dating results placing the scrolls circa 150 BCE and later, at the Library of Alexandria during the Ptolemaic Hellenistic Period after Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 BCE, that the scholarship degenerated at the scribal schools of that ancient university and Higher Criticism was at play (see Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Volume II, 1972). In fact, the Iliad of Homer from before 150 BCE is longer than the Iliad of Homer after 150 BCE, thus a phenomenon of brevity, or abbreviation attempts were at play.

 

When a comparison is made between the two texts, our Hebrew text and the Dead Sea Scroll 4QJerd here, it is interesting that the place where the variants occur is almost as if the original of that scribe, which we do not have, may have been torn and stitched so that misreadings and omissions occurred. My suggestion is given below.

 

Furthermore, if it is not meant to be a copying of the text but a functional text, a shorter school exercise by a teacher to his students, a hymn, then the text will be changed as people took Psalms and reworded them as hymns for hymnal through the ages. The same way. We will then not call it a biblical text but a para-biblical text.

 

When Jeremiah 52 will be presented, it will be seen that Jeremiah himself sometimes wrote doublets in which he reworked himself, adjusted here and there and reformulate with synonyms and also shortened the text. Scholars like Tov, criticizing our Hebrew text from which the KJV and other translations were made of, never mentions this aspect.


Here is a Hebrew version of our Bible which is the same as Codex Aleppo 1008 A.D. followed below as the text of the Dead Sea Scroll that is been discussed here. See the uneasy letters indicated not with bold. The last picture is my theory that maybe the original was torn and stitched causing reading problems. They are from my own research.

Dead Sea Scroll Jeremiah d fragment from Cave 4 compared to Masoretic text Alleppo 1008 A D.jpg

Dead Sea Scroll Jeremiah d fragment from cave four possible theory for origin of variants.jpg


Dear God

We are surrounded by voices that want to destroy Your Word and since they are not faithful they have no energy to seek proper answers. Help us to keep our faith in Your Word. Amen.