448 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSn) Return, Virgin Israel! (31:21-22)
31 21 Set up road-markers for yourself
make for yourself signposts
Fix your mind on the highway
the way you have gonea
Return, virgin Israel
return to these your cities(^22) How long will you waver
0 turnable daughter?
For Yahweh has created a new thing on earth:
the female protects the man!
RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
MT 31:21-22 = LXX 38:21-22. The present poetry is delimited at the top end
by a setumah in 4QJerc and ML and a petubah in MP before v 21. Delimitation
at the bottom end is by a petubah in 4QJerc and a setumah in ML and MP after
v 22. In v 23 is also a shift to prose. There is a space in 4QJerc before "new
thing" in v 22a (Tov 1997: 199), but this cannot be a section marking. Tov sug-
gests that a scribe left an open space because of a flaw in the leather or the
stitching (p. 182).
Some commentators (Rudolph; Weiser; Carroll; Holladay; Jones; McKane)
have assigned independence or semiindependence to vv 21-22, one reason be-
ing that the discourse now addresses "virgin Israel" ( v 21) after being con-
cerned about "son Ephraim" (vv 18-20). Jeremiah is the speaking voice
(Cornill; Rudolph; Weiser; Hyatt; Boadt), indicated by an absence of messen-
ger formulas and the third-person reference to Yahweh in v 22b. This poetry
combines with the oracle in v 20 to conclude the poetic core on a note of
promise (see Rhetoric and Composition for 30:4-7), although the promise is
somewhat compromised by a parting word about Israel's waywardness and
weakened state (v 22). This could suggest that at one time v 22 was indepen-
dent of v 21. Now both verses address "virgin Israel," who is the remnant of old
Israel, i.e., Judah (see Notes).
The poetry as presently constituted can be taken as a two-stanza poem with
repetition and plays on the verb sub ("return, turnable"):
Return ................ subf ... v 2lc
return .................. subf ...
II ........................ v 22a
turnable ............... hassobeba
'The Kt spelling, halaktf, is the archaic second person feminine singular perfect form: "you
have gone" (see 2:20, 3 3b; et passim); this spelling occurs also in 4QJer'.