Some notes on Doublets in the Old Testament

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungbook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

23 March 2010

It is not only the New Testament Synoptic gospels that were three times telling the history of Jesus Christ who died for us, also in the Old Testament there are cases of history repeated three times. The book we are using is the book of Abba Bendavid, Parallels in the Bible (Jerusalem: Carta, 1972).

If one places Jeremiah 39:1-4 next to Jeremiah 52:4-7 and 2Kings 25:1-4 we have three accounts about the same material. Yet, there are differences. How does one explain these differences? The are all in the Word of God and all in the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition. There is no reason for any concern. Of course your scholars working with the hermeneutics of suspicion use the differences to argue for errors or adaptions by redactors within Jeremiah and all similar speculations. This is also not necessary.

A number of additions were made in Jeremiah 39 that are nto present in Jeremiah 52 and 2Kings 25. In Jeremiah 39:3 there is an addition of the names of the Babylonian officials. This list is absent in the other two pericopes. Why was this list left out by the other two chapters, Jeremiah 52 and 2Kings 25?

Two reasons can be given for these additions by Jeremiah 39. Either the area where this chapter was different than that of chapter 52 and therefore the information was not known to the audience any more and had to be explicitly listed; or, this list was not available before, but now became accessable in chapter 39 so that Jeremiah or his scribe Baruch, could list and cite from this new source. Chapter 39:1 identify the king as the "king of Judah" and this addition is probably made because the area of the writing of this chapter is not Judah but elsewhere.

Similarly, additions were made in Jeremiah 52 and 2Kings 25 that cannot be found in Jeremiah 39. In Jeremiah 52 and 2Kings 25 the military tactics and the severe consequences are added in 52:4, 5, 6 and 7; and 25:1, 2, 3, and 4. Again, the reason of the addition is not easily to be understood: either the audience did not know about these conditions and therefore it is added to inform them about something they did not know, or, this information was available only by the writer of Kings who wrote in Judah and thus from personal experience. The information was available to either Jeremiah or his scribe Baruch in Jeremiah 39, but either one of them did not chose to add this. The reason for the omission is not clear. There was a recasting of the same information in Jeremiah 39 that explains the difference with Jeremiah 52.

The word order of Jeremiah 39:4 is changed in Jeremiah 52:7 and 2Kings 25:4.

There is the omission of a whole verse that is present in Jeremiah 39:3 and parts of 4 but which is omitted in Jeremiah 52 and 2Kings 25.

There is an interchange of synonyms in the last part of Jeremiah 39:4 in the Hebrew while another root is used in Jeremiah 52:7 and 2Kings 25:4.

A special variant was due to an acoustic misperception and that is probably Baruch hearing Jeremiah preaching the same data but wrote down the similar sound preposition but in fact a different preposition due to a different letter. Phonologically and acoustically these two prepositions are easily confused. It is possible that in one of the copies of the chapters the copy was not by direct reading but either from listening to a sermon or dictation or from memory. The composer heard the text from the speaker (Jeremiah) which means that text had to be reconstructed from sounds in the writer's ears.

The differences are also explained on another level.

The apparent adaptations and elaborations are done with another function in mind. There is more evidence of self-refomulations in Jeremiah 39 and stronger evidence of co-constructed reformulation in Jeremiah 52 and 2Kings 25. With self-reformulation we mean that the composer the presentation of his (probably citing from memory of his written work) examples of which we find in a slightly enlarged form in the documents used for Kings by that text than in his presentation in Jeremiah 39 but those fuller documents were utilized by the composer of Kings and not Jeremiah 39. He might have dictated the shorter account in Jeremiah 39 to Baruch, his scribe from his memory of what he had written earlier in a document, the same document that was used later by the composer of Kings. In the case of the reformulation work of the composer of Kings, the type of reformulation is rather co-reformulation (or working together with data available).

The text is thus not only a horizontal linear organization of units across various linguistic levels. Instead, it is more. It is a communicative-semantic product of an author who creates with the specific objective that he must keep the audience in mind and how they will understand and interpret it. He thus invested the text with an intentional stylistic functional organization regarding a particular extralinguistic context (Kozhina 1995: 33-35). What that particular context was, is not easy to ascertain from the text. There are only certain directives and sometimes each of these directives could have alternative explanations. Instead of only a dual relationship of the author and his text, a quarto-angular relationship is in view here: the author and the text, the author and his audience and the author and His God. There is a reciprocal nature between all of these. The recipient or audience could be in the organizational plan or plot of the author, composer, scribe.

Anyone who says that they do not believe Jeremiah 52 since it is different than Jeremiah 39 not only lacks faith but also Holy Spirit enlightened reason.

Modern pastors frequently adapt the same sermon to different audiences, omitting and adding as the case may demand. Focussing on the audience and their level of context understanding, or on God and what He intended to say, or on the text and the data as it is, the pastor end up delivering the same sermon in three different ways. If he then writes two of them by himself and a scribe write his sermon while he speaks, there will be sometimes acoustic misperceptions or spelling differences. There is no need to invent three pastors. The Word of God speaks for itself and answers it own way. The believer who stand still for a moment and contemplate the way modern people speak and communicate, can easily begin to understand why there are differences in recastings of the same material in the Old Testament.