348 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSremainder of the letter is judgment and, in apportioning the judgment, Jere-
miah-or else Baruch-reverses the order of subjects from the shalom part of
the letter. The remnant in Jerusalem is judged first; then prophets in Babylon
who are preaching lies and romping with wives of their friends.NOTES
29:1. And these are the words. Hebrew wieelleh dibre. The same words open
and close Deuteronomy 1-28 (Deut 1:1; 28:69[Eng 29: l ]; cf. Lundbom
1996a). See also the opening to an early edition of Jeremiah's Book of Resto-
ration (30:4).
the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the remnant of the
elders of the exile, and to the priests and to the prophets, and to all the people
whom Nebuchadnezzar exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon. Hebrew hasseper is a
letter written on papyrus, rolled into a scroll, and sealed. Jeremiah sent a gen-
eral letter to the entire Judahite community in Babylon, the text of which will
now be reported. This letter inspired the later "Epistle of Jeremiah," an apoc-
ryphal work from the Hellenistic period.
the remnant of the elders of the exile. Hebrew yeter ziqne hagg6li1. These are
the surviving elders among the exiles-a rather touching detail. Many elderly
folk would have died in the siege and capture of Jerusalem (6:10-11) or else
on the forced march to Babylon. The LXX omits yeter ("remnant"), but the
term is best retained (Rudolph; Weiser; Bright; Holladay). Rudolph gives it
the meaning "preeminent" (cf. Gen 49:3), but this makes for redundancy with
"elders." Ezekiel, after his call to be a prophet in Babylon (593 B.c.), was
sought out on various occasions by "the elders of Judah/Israel" (Ezek 8: 1; 14: l;
20: 1-3 ), which would have been an influential body similar to the one that ex-
isted earlier in Judah (1 Kgs 20:7; 2 Kgs 23:1; Jer 19:1; 26:17). The "elders of
the Jews" continued to be influential in the later return to Palestine (Ezra 5:5,
9; 6:7, 8, 14). From the Bit MuraSG. archive, discovered at Nippur, we know
that an "assembly of Egyptian elders" was also present in Babylon in the sixth
century B.C. (Eph<al 1978: 76-80).
to the priests and to the prophets. The LXX has pseudoprophetas ("false
prophets"), a term appearing again in v 8 and six other times in chaps. 26-29
(see Note for 6:13).
whom Nebuchadnezzar exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon. The LXX omits,
which can be attributed to haplography (homoeoarcton: >aleph ... >aleph).
GL, Aq, Theod, T, S, and Vg all have the phrase, and it is retained by Volz, Ru-
dolph, and Weiser. In its place the LXX has epistolen eis Babul6na te apoikia
("an epistle to Babylon for the exiles"), which looks like fill-in on a damaged
MS. See "and every freeman and prisoner" for "the princes of Judah and Jeru-
salem" in v 2. Jerusalem's capture by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C. goes unre-
corded in the book, with the Babylonian king's replacement of Coniah
(Jehoiachin) by Zedekiah getting only passing mention in 37: 1. The disgrace is
recorded in 2 Kgs 24: 10-17 and more summarily yet in 2 Chr 36: 10. But it is