The Cost of Prophetic Preaching (26:1-24) 283weh repent of the evil that he spoke against them? And we are doing
great evil against ourselves!2. Uriah of Kiriath-jearim: Prophet of Yahweh (26:20-24)
26 20 Also, a man was prophesying mightily in the name of Yahweh-Uriah
son of Shemaiah from Kiriath-jearim. And he prophesied against this city
and against this land like all the words of Jeremiah.^21 And King Jehoiakim
heard his words, also all his officers and all the princes, and the king
sought to put him to death. But Uriah heard of it, and he was afraid and
fled, and came to Egypt.^22 So King Jehoiakim sent men to Egypt-
Elnathan son of Achbor and men with him to Egypt.^23 And they fetched
Uriah from Egypt and brought him to King Jehoiakim, and he struck him
down with the sword and cast his dead body into the graves of the common
people.(^24) But the hand of Ahikam son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah, so as not to
give him into the hand of the people to put him to death.
RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
MT 26:1-24 = LXX 33:1-24. The present chapter is a self-contained narrative
reporting a dramatic preaching event in the life of Jeremiah, followed by a
trial, to which has been added the report of another prophet who preached the
same judgment as Jeremiah but who paid for the truth with his life (vv 20-23).
The narrative begins by dating the event in the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign
(v 1) and ends by stating how Jeremiah survived this crisis because of protec-
tion received from Ahikam son of Shaphan (v 24). The structure of the narra-
tive compares with that in chap. 28, which began by dating the event being
reported ( v 1) and ended with a summary statement telling how the crisis
turned out-in that case, how Jeremiah's opponent paid for false prophecy
with his life (v 17).
The present chapter is one of four chapters, 25, 26, 3 5, and 36, that originally
comprised a "Jehoiakim Cluster" of dated prose (with chap. 25 having also
supplemental poetry at the end), on which see Rhetoric and Composition for
25:1-13a. In the present sequence of chapters, where the Jehoiakim Cluster
and a similarly constructed Zedekiah Cluster have been partially dismantled
and Jehoiakim prose has been interspersed with Zedekiah prose (see "Excursus
III: The Composition of Jeremiah 24-36," at the end of 25:1-14), chap. 26
likely owes its position preceding chaps. 27-29 to a common thread running
through all four chapters: namely, Jeremiah's bitter conflict with the priests
and prophets of Jerusalem (Rudolph; Hyatt; Jones).
The upper limit of this narrative unit is marked by a petu(iah in MA, ML,
and MP before v 1, which is also the chapter division. In 26: 1 there is also a re-
turn to prose after the concluding poetry of chap. 25. The lower limit of the
narrative is marked by a petuf:zah in MA, ML, and MP after v 24, which is also a