218 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTS
answered. Elijah, when it came his turn, also cried out: ''Answer me, Yahweh,
answer me," and the fire of the Lord fell (1Kgs18:26, 37).
'What has Yahweh spoken?' Hebrew mah-dibber yhwh. This question employs
the common verb dbr ("to speak"), which reports divine revelations through-
out the book of Jeremiah (10:1; 11:17; 13:15; 16:10; 26:13, 19; 27:13; 30:4; and
often). Balaam, as reported in Num 22:8, says to the elders of Moab: "I will
bring back word to you as Yahweh speaks (yedabber) to me."
36-37. The LXX lacks the following words: "and you pervert the words of the
living God, Yahweh of hosts, our God. So you shall say to the prophet: 'What
has Yahweh answered you?"' This could be attributed to haplography (ho-
moeoarcton: w ... w), although the LXX may have been forced to translate a
damaged or partly unreadable text. Cornill thought that the LXX had a corrupt
text. Theodotion has the omitted words. Also, one will note that what remains
of v 37 in the LXX has been expanded. It reads: kai dia ti elalasen kurios ho
theos hymon ("and wherefore spoke the Lord our God?"). Where then did it get
"our God," if not from the end of v 36? Janzen ( 1973: 99-100, 223-24), conced-
ing that vv 36-38 in both MT and LXX have problems, says the present omis-
sion may result from the accidental loss of a line. This loss could then result
from haplography, although one still wonders how the LXX managed to pre-
serve "our God" from the missing words.
- you shall not again remember. Another stereotyped phrase in the Jere-
miah prose (see Rhetoric and Composition), for which reason the Qal tizkeru
("remember") need not be repointed, with some commentators (Giesebrecht;
Duhm; Cornill; Volz; Rudolph; Bright; Holladay; McKane), to an H-stem
tazkiru ("mention"). They cite LXX's me onomazete, "you shall not speak of"
(cf. AV: "shall ye mention no more"). The expression shall no longer even be
called to mind. It is to be forgotten.
for the burden becomes to each person his own word. The phrase is difficult,
although like the earlier phrase of v 31, "who heed their own tongue and oracle
an oracle," one can discern here a debunking of prophets who speak their own
words and not the words of Yahweh. In v 16 the peace prophets were said to be
speaking "a vision of their own heart, not from the mouth of Yahweh." Refer-
ence then is not to genuine prophecy (pace NEB; REB; McKane; Jones) but to
prophecy that misconstrues words of the living God, Yahweh of hosts (RSV;
NRSV). Nothing is gained by dropping the he) on hammassa) ("the burden"),
as proposed by Giesebrecht and Duhm, or by reading the article as a he) inter-
rogative, as proposed by Ehrlich (1912: 305), Rudolph, and Bright.
and you pervert the words of the living God, Yahweh of hosts, our God. The
verb hpk means "to change, overturn, pervert." For the expression "living God"
(1elohfm ~ayyfm), see 10:10. In 2:13 and 17:13 Yahweh is called "the spring of
living water" (meqor mayim ~ayyfm).
3 7. So you shall say to the prophet. The second-singular imperfect, to)mar, is
here an impersonal directive, such as we have in modern English; the verb
could also be translated "one shall say" (Volz; Rudolph; cf. GKC § l 44h; Prov
19:25; Isa 7:25). Note how the singular imperfect intervenes to set forth a gen-
