588 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTScoming next indicates a perspective broader than Judah alone. The issue
seems to be whether the scroll could have contained indictment and judgment
against (Northern) Israel, or whether it would have restricted itself to judgment
on Judah alone. It is true that v 3 hopes for a conversion of only the "house of
Judah" and that Jeremiah's promise to the Northern tribes in 31:1 is one of
hope; nevertheless, it is also the case that indictment and judgment fall upon
"all the tribes of the house of Israel" in Jeremiah's early preaching (2:4;
Calvin). Bright cites also the judgment in 3:6-11, to which one could add the
indictments in 11: 10 and 32:32. Actually, Jeremiah's doom preaching is corpo-
rate and inclusive throughout. Time and again he says it was the "fathers" who
did not listen to the divine word (7 :22-26; 11:7-8; 34: 14), the "fathers" who
chased the Baals and committed evils in violation of the covenant (2:5-9;
11:10; 23:27; 31:32), and the "fathers" who, with the present generation, must
now bear the punishment for breaking the covenant (16:11-13; 23:39; 24:10;
32:18). An inclusive judgment on "Israel and Judah" is certainly possible here.
The reference in v 3 to the "house of Judah" poses no difficulty: only Judah
now is in a position to change its ways.
all the nations. Duhm takes the phrase as a later addition, which only serves
to support his view that Jeremiah is not a prophet to the nations. There is no
textual evidence supporting a deletion of the words. Thiel ( 1981: 49 n. 1) and
McKane take the same line, Thiel saying that judgment on the nations implies
salvation for Judah. All three views reduce the grand scope of biblical theology
to earth-centered politics, where the assumption is that Jeremiah could not
pronounce judgment on both Judah and the nations. The scroll mandated by
Yahweh is to contain prophetic utterances against the nations. Jeremiah was
called to be a prophet to the nations (1:5, 10), and that he was throughout his
long career.
The question occupying the minds of many is what prophecies might have
been included on this first scroll, called by the Germans the Urrolle, and
which ones would have targeted the nations for judgment. We do not know
what was written on the Urrolle; at the same time, speculation about its proba-
ble contents fills the commentaries and other works on Jeremiah. The Urrolle
is assuredly not chaps. 1-6 (pace Rudolph; Bright; Rietzschel 1966: 136; Car-
roll; Holladay; Jones), which is not a self-standing composition (see Rhetoric
and Composition for 6:27-30). It is also not 1-25: 13a, for this same reason and
for others (see Rhetoric and Composition for 25:1-14). I suggested earlier
( 197 5: 30 [ = 1997: 44]) thatthe Urrolle oughtto be looked for within chaps. 1-
20, since this is the earliest identifiable composition in the present book. None
of these proposals, needless to say, will include the "cup of wrath" vision in
25: 15-29, or the foreign nation oracles in chaps. 46-51. Chapters 1-20 do con-
tain some utterances against the nations, e.g., 1:10; 9:24-25[Eng 9:25-26];
10: 1-10, 25; 14:22; and indirectly 18: 7-9. This is not to say that any of these ap-
peared on the Urrolle, only that judgments against nations of the world can be
found in chaps. 1-20. It is probably best simply to stay with what is said here
about the scroll's containing Yahweh's words against his own people and other