21. Lenten Readings: Jump to Jeremiah 36 (Jehoiakim burns Jeremiah's scroll)

1. Going in chronological order, Jeremiah 36 clearly dates like Jeremiah 25 to the year 605BC during the reign of Jehoiakim (36:1). [1] Jeremiah takes a scroll of all his prophecies since the days of King Josiah to the king (36:2) -- with Jeremiah's first prophecies starting in 627BC. One can wonder if these prophecies were largely Jeremiah 1-20, with the possible inclusion of Jeremiah 25 as well.

Yahweh sounds hopeful that the house of Judah might turn from its evil ways (36:3). This statement is probably a reminder that the concept of God knowing all the future was probably not yet entirely solidified. If God knows the future -- indeed, if God has deep insight into human behavior -- he would know the overwhelmingly likely response. And he did know.

We seem to have two or three choices. The open theist and panentheist says that the future doesn't exist and so is unknowable or that God chooses not to know the future so we have free will. They take the text too literally at this point.

The orthodox option believes that God knows exactly what Jehoiakim will do because God is truly and really all-knowing and omniscient. God is walking through history with Jeremiah who does not see the future in its entirety. God is reading from a script that he has known for eternity past. He is doing it for Jeremiah's and the later audience of Jeremiah's sake. 

Even in revelation, God meets us where we are. Something along these lines is the historic, orthodox perspective that preserves God as God and not God as some really nice, sooped-up Zeus.

But Jeremiah may not entirely understand this fully yet. The Bible displays a flow of revelation. The earlier parts have a true understanding, but their understanding sometimes is not as precise as later parts, particularly the New Testament. Psalm 139 is generally considered a focal point on this subject, where God is said to know every one of the psalmist's days before he was born (139:16). [2] Going off that comment, God would know the day Jehoiakim burned Jeremiah's scroll.

This can be a scary line of thought, but it is a clear conclusion if one believes that God is all-knowing. If you and I could guess what Jehoiakim would do, then Yahweh certainly would have predicted it -- even if he didn't know the future. If taken with strict literalism, the passage seems to limit God's knowledge inadvertently. For God to be God, we have to take this text as God walking through the situation with Jeremiah even though he knows what will happen. [3]

2. Going in chronological order, this is the first time we encounter Baruch, although he is mentioned in Jeremiah 32:12 as a witness to Jeremiah's land purchase. Baruch is the scribe who writes down Jeremiah's oral prophecies. We can wonder if he was primarily responsible for the initial collection of Jeremiah's prophetic ministry onto scrolls.

Remembering Jeremiah 25, the priest in charge of the temple had beaten Jeremiah. He is not allowed in the temple now (36:3). So, Jeremiah sends Baruch with the scroll instead. Baruch is to read the entire scroll to the people of Judah on a "fast day." It is unclear whether this is a regularly scheduled fast day or whether the religious establishment and king have called a special fast. Probably the latter.

Jeremiah still has hope that they will return to Yahweh (36:7).

3. So Baruch reads the scroll at the entry of the New Gate to the temple. The son of a temple official named Gemariah then goes to king's house and tells officials there about it. It is commanded that Baruch come to them with the scroll to them. Baruch reads it to them at their request, and they seem open to hear it. They clearly consider Jeremiah to be a legitimate prophet.

They question Baruch. Is this truly a dictation from Jeremiah. Yes. Then they sent Baruch away and told him and Jeremiah to go into hiding. They apparently know how the king will respond.

Finally, the king is informed. It is the ninth month (November-December), and a fire is going. The king is not alarmed. None of his servants rent their clothes. Instead, the king has the scroll burned. I think it's hard for us to appreciate how shocking an action this was. Prophets were untouchable.

Instead, the king orders the arrest of Jeremiah and Baruch, as they had anticipated. So, Jeremiah simply dictates the scroll again, even adding to it. He predicts disaster and that there will soon be no one to sit on the throne of David. Jehoiakim's body will be cast out into the street. [4]

[1] Jeremiah 36 in the Masoretic text (MT) is chapter 43 in the Greek Old Testament (LXX).

[2] The headings of the psalms were added after the psalms were written, presumably as the psalms were collected. The headings are traditional but not usually considered inspired. For that reason, this psalm is anonymous even though it came to have David's name on it. It seems rather later than David in its theology.

[3] Nowhere is this dynamic of biblical revelation clearer than in Moses exchange with God in Numbers 14, where God tells Moses he is going to destroy Israel but Moses talks him down. This is a clear case of anthropomorphism where God is portrayed like a furious man wanting to beat up someone. Some Christians may like these passages a little too much and miss the fact that, in them, God was meeting us in human terms to help our understanding. God was painting a picture for us. He was "stooping to our weakness." 

An all-knowing God doesn't literally get angry because he has always known what was going to happen. God's "anger" is for the benefit of our understanding. 

[4] The final fate of Jehoiakim is unclear. 2 Kings 24:6 simply says he slept with his fathers. However, since the prophecies of Jeremiah were collected after the event, it's hard to imagine that this is not how Jehoiakim ended up. Jeremiah 22:18-19 has a similar prediction. Josephus gives a tradition of its fulfillment at the command of Nebuchadnezzar (Antiquities 10.96-97).

__________________

Introduction to Jeremiah

Scroll I (same in MT and LXX)
Jeremiah 1 (Josiah, 628BC)
Jeremiah 2 
Jeremiah 3
Jeremiah 4
Jeremiah 5
Jeremiah 6
Jeremiah 7
Jeremiah 8
Jeremiah 9
Jeremiah 10
Jeremiah 11 (Jehoiakim, 609BC)
Jeremiah 12
Jeremiah 13-18
19. Jeremiah 19-20 

Scroll II (different order in MT and LXX)
20. Jump to Jeremiah 25 (605BC, Jeremiah 32 LXX)

20. Lenten Readings -- Jump to Jeremiah 25

1. The ordering of the text of Jeremiah is a puzzle. On the one hand, there is the chronological order. We are jumping to Jeremiah 25 because it is likely the next chapter in the order in which Jeremiah prophesied. Jeremiah 21, which comes next in the Hebrew text we have, skips to the reign of Zedekiah. 

But Zedekiah's reign started in 597BC. There are clearly more prophecies from the reign of Jehoiakim in the book of Jeremiah. This includes not least Jeremiah 25, which dates to 605BC, the fourth year of Jehoiakim's reign. The ordering of Jeremiah from chapter 20 seems to have prioritized themes over chronology, grouping like material together.

To make matters even more complicated, the order of the chapters in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, often imprecisely called the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX), is quite different from our English Bibles. The order of our English Bibles largely follows that of the Masoretic Text (MT), the main Hebrew text that has survived, dating to around the 900s/1000 in its current form.

The Greek textual tradition of Jeremiah is thus much older than the MT and probably preserves an earlier, more "original" order. We thus face a conundrum. The English text of Jeremiah that we now have likely includes about 13% later material added by Jewish tradition now found in the MT. Meanwhile, the order of the LXX is much closer to the way the prophecies of Jeremiah were originally preserved.

2. The situation reminds me a little of the situation we faced when it became clear that the Greek text behind the King James had verses and a few sections that were not likely in the original version of the Bible (e.g., Mark 16:9-20; John 7:53-8:11). God must not have been too displeased with this material because it was in most Bibles for over 1500 years. Similarly, Jeremiah as we have it has been in the Bibles of Jews and Christians for over 1000 years at least.

The question reveals assumptions we didn't know we had. Is the goal to "get back" to the original or is the text God has preserved just as or more important? Modern assumptions want to "get back" to the original manuscripts or the original voice of the author. But isn't what God is saying to us pretty important? After all -- ideally or not -- it is our understanding of the text today that determines how we live and how the text forms us. Like it or not, I am not shaped by an understanding of the text I do not have -- even if there is a more accurate, more original understanding!

I personally want it all. I want to engage the text of Jeremiah as God has preserved it AND I would like to have insight into earlier forms of the collection of prophecies. In the end, our theories about the earliest ways in which the book's prophecies were collected are ultimately speculative and thus not inspired.

In my opinion, these discussions reveal that the way we often conduct our debates over inerrancy and such are more our problem than the Bible's problem. They are debates that are often more about our desire to control what people today think. Real biblical interpretation is far messier and uncertain. God believes what is true, and we will never get it all right because our brains are finite and fallen. 

We do not have in our minds the Bible as it actually is or was. Inevitably, ultimately, we only have our interpretations of the Bible. We have individual interpretations. We have the collective interpretations of denominations and Christian traditions. We have the collective interpretations of Christians throughout the centuries. None of these are exactly the original meaning.

The first "version" of Jeremiah, probably in the 500s BC, would have been a collection of 3 or 4 scrolls. I think we can plausibly say that chapters 1-20 constituted one of them.

3. So, going in chronological order, we jump from Jeremiah 20 to Jeremiah 25. [1] Jeremiah 25 gives us the date when Jeremiah started prophesying. The chapter is dated to 605BC (25:1). This was also the first year of King Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah tells us he has been prophesying for 23 years up to that point (25:3), from the 13th year of Josiah in 628BC.

Here in Jeremiah 25 we find the prophecy that Judah will go into exile for 70 years. This is not a precise number but 7 x 10, where 7 is a special symbolic number. The first group taken to Babylon took place in 597, which would suggest a return around 527 if the date were precise. The actual return was in 538 BC. Again, some individuals take the text more rigidly than it wants to be taken.

But God will not go more easily on the tool he is using to punish Israel than he is on Israel. Babylon will face judgment as well, and they will never return. [2]

4. The image of a cup of wrath is introduced in 25:15. Revelation 14:9-10 and 18:6 will use this image in its picturing of the judgment of Rome. Although the original prophecy took place in 605, Jeremiah 25:18 reveals that the voice of the text as it stands dates to a later time after the judgment on surrounding nations like Egypt had already taken place. An extensive list of surrounding peoples is mentioned as slated for judgment with God using the hand of Nebuchadnezzar to do it.

And Judah would not be spared either. The guilty "shepherds" of Israel would also be judged (25:34). Yahweh is very angry indeed (25:38).

[1] Jeremiah 25 is chapter 32 in the LXX.

[2] Jeremiah 25:14 is not in the LXX version of the chapter, nor is it attested in 4QJer from Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although it is possible that this absence is because of the fragmentary nature of 4QJer, the text of Jeremiah 25 in this manuscript follows the Greek more than the MT. 25:14 probably was not among the original prophecies of Jeremiah, although it is certainly true.

__________________

Introduction to Jeremiah
Jeremiah 1
Jeremiah 2 
Jeremiah 3
Jeremiah 4
Jeremiah 5
Jeremiah 6
Jeremiah 7
Jeremiah 8
Jeremiah 9
Jeremiah 10
Jeremiah 11
Jeremiah 12
Jeremiah 13-18

Jeremiah 19-20