Indictment of Judah and the Nations (25:1-38) 241MT these oracles have been relocated to chaps. 46-51 (see Rhetoric and Com-
position for 46:1).
Although I believe that the LXX placement of Foreign Na ti on Oracles after
25:13a is earlier, I also believe that these oracles, once an independent col-
lection, are intrusive in their context and break up a chapter that otherwise
hangs together. Rofe ( 1989: 397) has argued that the insertion of Foreign Na-
tion Oracles in LXX after 25: Ba represents a later reworking, and in this he is
probably correct.
There is wide support for the view, here as elsewhere, that the LXX omis-
sions in the chapter are actually MT plusses (Schwally 1888; Duhm; Comill;
Janzen 1973; Tov 1985; Holladay; Jones; McKane; and others). For some, this
points to a revision of Jeremiah's original message in the MT The view in its
most radical form was formulated by Schwally, who took the entire chapter (as
he did the entire Foreign Nation Collection) to be ingenuine. For him chap.
25 contained no legacy of the Jeremianic preaching-even in his core verses of
1-3, 8-1 la, 13a or 12 (1888: 183). Although Schwally's negative appraisal of
the chapter was dismissed as baseless by Giesebrecht and critiqued more
sharply still by Cassuto (1973c: 204-14), it has affected subsequent interpreta-
tion, and even yet is quoted approvingly by McKane. Duhm considered a large
part of 25: 1-14 to be genuine, although he dated the verses to the postexilic pe-
riod-after Zechariah but before 2 Chr 36:21 and Daniel 9.
I do not agree that the LXX omissions are largely MT plusses. Some may be,
but many are not. We have, for example, seven arguable cases of LXX haplog-
raphy in w 1-14. Then there are the omitted LXX references to Nebuchadrez-
zar/the king of Babylon and Babylon/the Chaldeans (w 1, 9, 11, 12), which
are poorly explained as actually reflecting Jeremiah's preaching in 605 B.C. It
makes much better sense if the Babylon and Nebuchadrezzar references are
retained. Some scholars, in fact, argue that Jeremiah is revealing for the first
time the identity of the foe from the north, now that Nebuchadrezzar has won
a decisive victory at Carchemish (Giesebrecht; Rudolph; Bewer; Childs 1959:
194). Giesebrecht (p. 135) says:
In the fourth year of J ehoiakim the battle of Carchemish was fought, and
through it an important decision of historical proportions was brought
about. The foe from the north, with which Jeremiah had continually threat-
ened, now gained definite form.If Jeremiah, then, is now announcing Babylon to be the foe from the north, the
LXX, for whatever reason, has deleted the Babylonian references, and its text,
instead of being the more original, is rather an impoverished secondary text be-
cause of the deletions. With these LXX omissions, and also deletions and emen-
dations even when the MT and LXX agree, certain scholars (Schwally 1888;
Comill; Hyatt; Holladay) argue that Jeremiah's preaching here had only to do
with Judah (cf. v 2) and that references to the nations enter later in a revision
now preserved in MT (see Notes). But again, in 605 B.C. after Carchemish,