Jeremiah and the Yoke Bars (27:1-22) 305stretched arm" (v 5), but even this phrase does not exactly reproduce Deuter-
onomy's "with strong hand and outstretched arm" (see Note for 21:5). The
claim that there is Deuteronomic language in the chapter is rejected also by
H. Weippert (1973: 107-21), Holladay, and Jones. What we are seeing here, in
scholars who follow the Source C assignment of Mowinckel, is the same un-
substantiated claim for postexilic prose encountered elsewhere-e.g., regard-
ing chap. 18. Volz says we are in touch here with the historical Jeremiah, even
though he brackets out vv 19-22 as unoriginal. Actually, primary and second-
ary material are commonly distinguished here not so much on the basis of
vocabulary and phraseology as on the different readings of MT and LXX.
For more than a century and a half, scholars have viewed the MT as a
much reworked version of the LXX, which is quite a bit shorter. Early judg-
ments against the MT were made by Movers (1837), Hitzig (1841), deWette
(1843), Kuenen (1863), and W. Robertson Smith (1892: 103-7, and these
carried over into the commentaries of Duhm and Cornill, somewhat less in
others. Giesebrecht believed that the LXX abbreviated MT, and together with
Hitzig recognized that at least a few LXX omissions were the result of scribal
error. More recently, scholars giving preference to the shorter LXX text of
chap. 27 include Rudolph, Bright, Janzen ( 1973 ); Tov ( 197 5a; 1979), Holladay,
Goldman (1992: 123-88), and McKane, to name some of those more promi-
nent in Jeremianic scholarship. Rudolph, Bright, Janzen, and Holladay admit
to some loss in LXX resulting from haplography, but not McKane. In the
present chapter, Thiel ( 1981: 9) takes the longer MT of vv 19-22 to be original,
and van der Kooij (1994) argues against Goldman that the MT of vv 5-15 is
earlier. In my view, the longer MT is a repetitious but perfectly coherent text
and the shorter LXX a victim of large-scale haplography. No less than 14 argu-
able cases for LXX haplography can be made in the chapter, as opposed to 3 ar-
guable cases of MT haplography (see Notes and Appendix V). It is as apparent
here as elsewhere that the LXX is seriously flawed, translated from a badly-
copied Hebrew Vorlage, and all talk of lectio brevior praeferenda est must be
given up. McKane's cautionary word (p. 686) about scholarly over-reliance on
haplographic explanations in chap. 27 rings hollow, in that commentators who
do admit the phenomenon cite two, maybe three, examples, whereas McKane
himself admits not even one.
It should also be said that where commentators explain omitted LXX words
of hope as later supplements in MT: 1) this is largely a holdover from nine-
teenth-century source criticism, which was evolutionary in nature and deem-
phasized predictive prophecy, refusing to believe that prophets like Jeremiah
gave messages of hope; 2) words of hope here in chap. 27 are in fact well inte-
grated into the oracles of judgment; and 3) Jeremiah preaches a future hope
for Judah also in chap. 24 (vv 4-7 on the "good figs") and chap. 29 (vv 10-14
in the main letter to the exiles), both of which are dated somewhat earlier than
the oracles here in chap. 27.
The upper limit of the present unit is marked by the superscription in v 1,
before which is a petubah in MA, ML, and MP, and also the chapter division.