242 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSBabylon has become a threat to all nations, not just Judah, and the idea that
Jeremiah's preaching at this time would have only to do with the fate of
Judah is hardly credible. The conclusion here is one that has been reached
with respect to other parts of the Jeremiah book, viz., that the longer MT is
consistently the better and more original text and that the shorter LXX is im-
poverished because its Hebrew Vorlage suffered from an unusually large
number of omissions due to haplography (Appendices III and V); additionally,
in the translation from Hebrew to Greek it sometimes abridged or attempted
simplification of its Hebrew Vorlage (Volz; Thiel 1973: 264-65; G. Fischer
1991 ). The clearest indications of abridgment or simplification are the LXX's
dislike of repetition and its omission of duplicated passages the second time
they occur (see Rhetoric and Composition for 30:8-11).NOTES
25:1. The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people ofludah. On this
particular superscription, which except for here and in 44: 1 appears in the
form "The word that came to Jeremiah from Yahweh," see Notes for 7:1 and
21: 1. The T expands to "word of prophecy."
in the fourth year oflehoiakim son oflosiah, king ofludah. The fourth year of
Jehoiakim was 605 B.C., an important date in the ancient world because in this
year the Babylonian army under Nebuchadrezzar defeated the Egyptians at
Carchemish, bringing Syria and Palestine firmly within its grasp. In 605 Jere-
miah delivered judgment oracles against Egypt ( 46:2), prepared a scroll of ora-
cles and other prophetic utterances from the time his public ministry began
(36:1), and delivered a personal oracle of salvation to Baruch ben Neriah, the
scribe who wrote up the scroll (45:1).
(that was the first year of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon). Other synchro-
nisms of Judahite and Babylonian chronology are found in 32:1; 52:12; and
2 Kgs 25:8. The LXX omits the present synchronism and the one in 52:12 but
not the ones in 32:1 and 2 Kgs 25:8. Many scholars (Schwally 1888: 178 n. l;
Giesebrecht; Duhm; Cornill; Bright; Janzen 1973: 100; Tov 1985: 221; Holla-
day; McKane) take the Babylonian date as a learned gloss, but this largely has
to do with their bias in favor of the shorter LXX text. The synchronism could
be original (Peake; Volz; Rudolph; Weiser). Aquila has it. Many of the later
fifth-century Elephantine papyri, written by professional scribes, contain a
double date, Babylonian and Egyptian (see Nate for 32:1). There is a slight dis-
crepancy in correlating the two dates. Nebuchadrezzar took the throne in Sep-
tember 60 5 upon the death of his father, Nabopolassar, but his first official year
did not begin until April 604 (Tadmor 1956: 229; Bright 1981: 326). The prob-
lem seems to be that the Babylonian calendar reckoned an accession year from
the time the king ascended the throne until the following New Year (=April),
when his first regnal year began.
the first. The feminine singular adjective ri>sonft is a hapax legomenon
in the OT, but in the mind of the Judahite narrator most likely refers to