The Cost of Prophetic Preaching (26:1-24) 297
48: 14) or palace police, fleet of foot ( 46:6) and fully capable of pursuing Uriah,
should the king need them.
and the king sought to put him to death. The LXX omits hammelek ("the
king") and has a plural verb; the omission, however, is probably more haplog-
raphy (homoeoarcton: hm ... hm).
But Uriah heard of it, and he was afraid and fied, and came to Egypt. The
LXX omits "and he was afraid and fled" (wayyira' wayyibraM, which may again
be a loss attributable to haplography (homoeoarcton: wy ... wy). Aquila and
Theod have the words. Janzen ( 1973: 21-22, 119) suggests either LXX haplog-
raphy or a conflated MT. Conflation here does not seem to be the answer.
- So King Jehoiakim sent men to Egypt-Elnathan son of Achbor and men
with him to Egypt. The LXX lacks "Elnathan son of Achbor and men with
him to Egypt," which Cornill suggests may be due to haplography (whole-
word: m$fym ... m~rym). Theodotion has the words. Others take them as an
MT gloss (Giesebrecht; Duhm: "could be Haggada"; Ehrlich 1912: 311) or as
a conflate text in MT (Janzen 1973: 100-101; Holladay). A common solution is
to delete the earlier 'anasfm mi~rayim, "men of I to Egypt" (Cornill; Volz;
Rudolph; Weiser; Bright). Many modern Versions do this or else paraphrase
with similar results (NEB; JB; NAB; NIV; NRSV). However, mi$Tayim can be
read "to Egypt," as in v 21; the omission of a prefixed "to" before places of des-
tination is a common ellipsis in Jeremiah prose (see simply "house of Yahweh"
in w 2 and 10, and Note for 24: 1). The T has "and King Jehoiakim sent men to
Egypt," which is adopted by Vg and AV The Lachish Letters (3:14-16) report a
decade later that one Coniah son of Elnathan, commander of the army, had
been dispatched to Egypt on a mission, the nature of which is unclear. He
could have gone to solicit Egyptian help in the face of a Babylonian advance or
to fetch a certain Hodaviah son of Ahijah and his men (ABD 4: 127). This
Coniah, in any case, could be another son of the Elnathan mentioned here
(Ginsberg 1948).
Elnathan son of Achbor. This individual sent to fetch Uriah is the same per-
son who was sitting among Jeremiah's friends in the palace library when
Baruch's reading of Jeremiah's scroll in 604 B.C. was called to their attention,
and who subsequently urged Jehoiakim not to burn the scroll (36: 12, 25). It is
possible that he is also the Elnathan of Jerusalem mentioned in 2 Kgs 24:8,
who was the father-in-law of Jehoiakim. The names "Elnathan" and "Achbor"
have turned up on numerous seals, ostraca, and inscriptions of the period (see
Appendix I).
and men with him. I.e., men under his orders (see Note for 41:2).
- 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. If Egypt was the only place to flee, it was still the wrong
place. With Jehoiakim tied politically to Egypt from the time Neco enthroned
him, until 604 B.C. when Jehoiakim switched allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar,
Uriah's extradition was a routine matter. While this incident need not have
occurred at the same time as Jeremiah's trial, it would have to be dated early
