284 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSchapter division. MA has a petu~ah and ML and MP a setumah after v 6, which
marks the conclusion of Jeremiah's oracle. MP alone has a setumah after v 9,
the purpose of which is unclear. The same can be said for a setumah that MA
and ML have after v 10. MP has no section there; nor does 4QJerc upon recon-
struction. MA, ML, and MP all have another setumah after v 15, marking the
conclusion of Jeremiah's defense before the court.
The present narrative has long been recognized as providing the back-
ground for Jeremiah's Temple preaching recorded in 7:1-15, as well as con-
taining a summary of that preaching. In fact, it was these two passages'
reporting of a single event that became a lead argument for there being differ-
ent prose sources in the book. Chapter 26 was said to be Source B (biographi-
cal/Baruch) prose, and 7: 1-15 Source C ( sermonic) prose (see Rhetoric and
Composition for 7: 1-15). Giesebrecht attributed the narrative here to Baruch
on the basis of the third-person references to Jeremiah, as well as to other
features. Mowinckel (1914: 24) similarly assigned the narrative to Source B,
which he later took to derive from Baruch. Others from this early period
(Peake; Cornill; Volz) and some more recently (Rudolph; Weiser; Bright;
H. Weippert 1973; Holladay; Jones) have also credited Baruch with the narra-
tive, or at least affirmed that the narrative reports an authentic incident from
the life of Jeremiah. Duhm, too, said that the narrative most likely builds on
Baruch's life of Jeremiah, although he found "midrashic" elements present,
particularly in vv 1-6, where he said not a single word could have come from
Baruch. Duhm could not imagine that Jeremiah would make deliverance of
the nation dependent upon obedience to the law. Volz said simply that
Baruch's style in vv 1-6 was somewhat clumsy. More recent scholars have
tended to disregard the source-critical distinction between early and late
prose, assigning the chapter to a late "Deuteronomic" editor or editors (Hyatt;
Nicholson; Thiel 1981: 3-4; Smelik 1989-90; McKane) or simply denying the
historicity of the incidents reported (Carroll) or both (Hossfeld and Meyer
1974). These views, as I have stated elsewhere, 1) suffer from an unclear defi-
nition of the term "Deuteronomic"; 2) make a false dichotomy between proto-
historical and protobiographical reporting on the one hand, and literary
composition on the other (the two are not mutually exclusive); and 3) lack a
clear methodology for working with the biblical text. Redaction criticism, for
example, is too derivative from source criticism and too lacking in basic prin-
ciples of its own. Duhm could never be accused of not working from basic
assumptions or along clear methodological lines, whatever one thinks of his
assumptions and the conclusions that he came to. Reventlow ( 1969) has seen
the inadequacy of source criticism, but his form-critical views have led him to
conclude that the chapter is a liturgical piece from a later age, not the biogra-
phy of an eyewitness. Carroll's treatment of chap. 26 is largely fantasy and can-
not be taken with any seriousness. In my view, we can dispense entirely with
phantom "Deuteronomic" editors (unless Baruch or a contemporary be one)
and with midexilic or postexilic redactions. The narrative should be taken as
historical by and large (Holladay), written soon after the events it reports took
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