Jeremiah 21-36 A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary by (Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries)

502 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTS

In the narrative, hinneh ("look") occurs in vv 7, 17, 24, and 27; hinneka ("look

you!") in v 24.

The two judgment oracles for the nation contain an inversion in which the

phrases about Yahweh being "provoked to anger" first follow aml then precede

the evils causing the provocation:

V the houses on whose roofs they burned incense to Baal,

and poured out drink offerings to other gods

in order to provoke me to anger hak'isenf

VI the children of Israel have only provoked mak'isfm >otf

me to anger with the work of their hands ...

which they did to provoke me to anger lehak'isenf

And they set up their wretched things in the house upon which

my name is called to defile it. And they built the high places of

Baal that are in the Valley of Ben-Hinnom to give over their sons

and their daughters to Malech

NOTES

v 29

v 30b

v 32

vv 34-35

32:1. The word that came to Jeremiah from Yahweh. On this superscription, see

Notes for 7: 1 and 21: 1. The T expands to "word of prophecy." The "word" here

is not the oracles of vv 3b-5 that came earlier to the prophet (cf. 34:2-3) but

"the word" of v 6 given fully in v 7 (Kim]:ii).

in the tenth year of Zedekiah, king of Judah (that was the eighteenth year of

Nebuchadrezzar). The tenth year of Zedekiah and eighteenth year of Nebu-

chadrezzar was 587 B.C. (Tadmor 1956: 230). In Zedekiah's eleventh year the

city was taken ( 1 :3). Synchronistic chronology, to be expected now with the

Babylonians dominating world affairs, occurs elsewhere in the book (see Note

for 25:1). Many of the Elephantine legal papyri contain a double date, Baby-

lonian and Egyptian (Kraeling 1953: 51; Horn and Wood 1954: l; Porten,

"Elephantine Papyri" in ABD 2: 450). The term sana ("year") repeats in the

Babylonian date because of the compound number (GKC §1340).

2. At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and
   Jeremiah, the prophet, was confined in the court of the guard, which was in the
   house of the king of Judah. The LXX omits "at that time" (we'az), but it is
   translated in T, S, and Vg and is best retained (Giesebrecht). The LXX also
   omits "the prophet" after "Jeremiah," which it does elsewhere in the book
   (see Appendix VI); but here the ommission could be attributed to haplogra-
   phy (homoeoarcton: h ... h). This is the second and final siege of Jerusalem,
   after Jeremiah was remanded to the court of the guard (37:21) and after the
   Egyptian advance forcing a temporary lifting of the siege ( 3 7: 5). The re-
   sumption of the siege took place on First Adar 1 (February 24), 587 B.C. The
   incident reported here did not take place during the Babylonian withdrawal