A Scroll for Future Days (36:1-32) 591Another matter: Atamrum, the respondent of the god Shamash, came here
and thus he spoke to me as follows: 'Send me a competent and discrete
scribe that I have (him) write down the message of Shamash to the king.'
That is what he told me. I have sent Utu-kam and he wrote this tablet; that
man has appointed witnesses. Thus he (the prophet) said to me as follows:
'Send this tablet urgently and the exact wording of the tablet let him (the
king) carry out.' Now, I have sent this tablet to my lord.Malamat points out that this scribe, an expert in his craft, apparently had offi-
cial status. The scribe would also have served as a confidant of the prophet, as
Baruch served Jeremiah. Based on what is known elsewhere about prophetic
activity at Mari, we assume that the prophet delivered his message orally, and
the scribe wrote it down from dictation.
With Baruch being the writing scribe of the first Jeremiah scroll, it has been
argued for more than a century that he was the one who authored the bio-
graphical prose in the book. Now with a distinction no longer being made be-
tween biographical and homiletical prose in the book (Sources B and C), e.g.,
in the works of H. Weippert (1973) and Holladay but anticipated one-half cen-
tury earlier by T. H. Robinson ( 1924: 219), Baruch can be credited with all the
prose. That family members and other professionally trained scribes might
have assisted him need not be precluded. Needless to say, there is no proof for
any of this, but the twin assumptions that Baruch authored the prose and as-
sisted in the compilation of the Jeremiah book make even more sense if 36: 1-
8 and chap. 45 are colophons introducing him as the (primary) scribe respon-
sible for preserving the Jeremiah legacy. That Baruch was introducing himself
in chap. 45 was recognized earlier by Mowinckel (1946: 61-62), who as a result
changed his mind about an anonymous biographer and accepted the view that
Baruch was the author of the biographical (Source B) prose.
and Baruch wrote from the dictation ofleremiah. The LXX simplifies to "and
he wrote," since Baruch's name has just been used. The LXX usually gives the
name (cf. Janzen 1973: 148-49). This is the only explicit reference in the OT
to a scroll's being written from dictation (lit., "from the mouth," mippf), al-
though the practice was common enough in the ancient scribal schools (Wid-
engren 1948: 64, 90-91; Gadd 1956: 39; Rainey 1969: 127; G. R. Driver 1976:
69). This detail shows up occasionally in colophons. Hunger (1968: 8, 134)
cites a colophon on a cuneiform text (#486) in which the scribe says that he
had written his tablet from dictation, not having seen the old copy. On one of
the Aramaic papyri from Elephantine (427 B.c.), the colophon to a legal docu-
ment authorizing the release of a woman and her daughter from slavery begins:
"Written by Haggai the scribe at Elephantine, at the dictation of Meshullam
son of Zakkur" (ANET^3 548). On another of these papyri, this one the marriage
contract of a former slave girl, the colophon states that the document was writ-
ten from dictation (ANET^3 548-49). In the NT, a certain Tertius identifies
himself as the writer of Paul's letter to the Romans (Rom 16:22), and one may
assume that Tertius also wrote from dictation. On writing in antiquity and in