154 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSNebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans.(^26) And I will throw you and your mother who bore you to another land
where you were not born, and there you shall die.^27 So to the land where
they will carry their great desire to return, there they shall not return.
RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
The present oracle announces Yahweh's rejection of Jehoiachin and his ban-
ishment into exile. In the oracle following, vv 28-30, captivity has already oc-
curred (Giesebrecht; Duhm; Peake; Rudolph; and others). The present oracle
is delimited by a shift to prose in v 24 and a shift back to poetry in v 28. There
is also a beginning "oracle of Yahweh" formula in v 24, which is present in
4QJerc. The medieval codices and 4QJerc have no sections before v 24, but
after v 27 ML has a setumah, and MA and MP have a petu~ah. 4QJerc has no
section there.
Rudolph and Weiser make poetry out of v 24, but they have to delete in or-
der to do it. The idea is much older (Giesebrecht; Duhm; Cornill; Volz) that
vv 25-27 expand upon v 24, two reasons being that v 25 has accumulatio, which
is thought to betray the work of a "Deuteronomic" editor, and v 27 shifts from
the second person to the third. Duhm takes vv 25-26 as an addition to v 24, and
then v 27 is called ein Zusatz zum Zusatz ("an addition to an addition"). All
these views are passe, and the tendency more recently has been simply to take
vv 24-27 as a prose oracle of singular integrity (Bright; Holladay; Craigie et al.;
Jones), which is correct. McKane continues to believe that v 24 is the kernel
out of which vv 25-27 are generated, but his view is to be rejected. The repeti-
tion in v 25 is a fine example of exergasia (Schoettgen 1733: 1249-63; English:
Lundbom 1975: 121-27 [= 1997: 155-63]), which Kimi.ii says intensifies the
power of the sentence.
Although in prose, vv 25-27 contain impressive rhetorical features. In v 25
this repetition appears:
v 25 And I will give you into the hand (beyad) of those who seek your life
and into the hand ( ubeyad) of those before whom you are in dread
and into the hand (ubeyad) of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon
and into the hand (ubeyad) of the Chaldeans
The Hebrew of vv 26-27, whose pronouns translate only with difficulty into En-
glish, contains a word and syntactic chiasmus at the end of each verse: the
verbs are at the extremes, and (we)sam(a), "(and) there," repeats at the center.
The lines taken together also invert verbs with the negative particle:
v 26b lo-yulladtem siim I wesiim tiimutU
v 27b hem menas'fm 'et-napsiim lasub siim I siimii lo yiisubU
v 26b you were not born there I and there you shall die
v 27b they will carry their great desire to return there I there they shall not return