Jeremiah and the Yoke Bars (27:1-22) 313more so if we attribute to the prophet the liturgies and Aramaic pun in 10: 1-16,
which earlier scholars denied to Jeremiah but which fit perfectly into the Jere-
mianic thinking and the Jeremianic period. In Jeremiah's prayer after the pur-
chase of the field, creation theology precedes redemption theology (32:17-23).
See also 32:27, which contains a divine self-asseveration similar to the one here.
The idea of Yahweh as Creator of the whole earth doubtless predates Jeremiah,
the suggestion having been made that Jeremiah took over older claims ad-
vanced for Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian gods and applied them in new
ways to Yahweh (Saggs 1978: 43-49; Lang 1983). A storage jar fragment found
in excavations of late-eighth or early-seventh-century Jerusalem turned up an
inscription reading "(God) Creator of Earth," (>l) qn )rr An eighth-century
Phonecian inscription from Karatepe in Turkey contains the identical phrase
(Avigad 1983: 41). Another carelessly written inscription in a burial cave at
Khirbet Beit Lei, eight kilometers east of Lachish, which has been dated to the
time of Hezekiah when Sennacherib was laying waste all of Judah (700 B.c.),
or else to the time of Nebuchadnezzar's final destruction of Judah in 588-586
B.C., bears witness to Yahweh as God of the entire earth. It reads: "Yahweh (is)
the God of the whole earth; the mountains of Judah belong to him, to the God
of Jerusalem" (Naveh 1963: 84; Avigad 1979: 25; CS II 179-80; cf. Isa 54:5).
Frank Cross ( 1970) gives only a slightly different translation (see Note for 34: 7).
J. A. Sanders (1977: 37-41) has argued that affirming Yahweh as God of all
creation, which was part of the monotheizing process in ancient Israel, can be
one criterion among others for true prophecy. He says:To stress the tradition of Yahweh as redeemer, provider, and sustainer and
deny Yahweh as creator would be ... to engage in "false prophecy." The so-
called true prophets never denied that God was the God of Israel who had
elected Israel and redeemed them from slavery in Egypt, guided them in
the desert and given them a home, and/or had chosen David and estab-lished his throne and city .... But in addition to affirming God as redeemer
and sustainer, the true prophets stressed that God was also creator of all
peoples of all the earth.
(Sanders 1977: 37)human and beast that are on the face of the earth. Hebrew )et-ha)adam wifet-
habbehema )aser 'al-pene ha)arer The LXX omits, and some scholars (Cornill;
Tov 1979: 82; Holladay; Goldman 1992: 126-29; McKane) go with its shorter
text, but a greater number support the embellished MT. Hitzig and others
(Duhm; Peake; Rudolph; Janzen 1973: 118; Carroll) attribute the LXX omis-
sion to haplography (whole-word: h)r$ ... h)r$), which it probably is. Giese-
brecht too retains, noting that Aq, Theod, CL, S, T, and Vg all contain the
omitted words. Ehrlich ( 1912: 312) says the phrase in question could be epexe-
gese (= exergasia) on "the earth" and thus original. More recently Goldman has
argued that the phrase is not essential to the theme, but van der Kooij ( 1994:
60-61) disagrees, saying that the phrase makes good sense contextually and