These Chapters are the final seven in the Book of Jeremiah. The end kind of snuck up on me, if that’s a
coherent thing to say about a Book I started reading in October 2011.
 |
| Destruction of Jerusalem under the Babylonian rule. From the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. |
Chapters 46 through 51 are prophecies of destruction for all
of the kingdoms great and small throughout what we call the Middle East. They are written in poetic style, and are
dire, the kind of thing an orator would shout in order to make people
tremble. There’s a lot of repetition of
metaphor and phrasing, which adds to the impression that we’re reading a speech,
or perhaps a tirade. To a present-day
reader, or at least to me, these chapters are at once unpleasantly vindictive
and dull.
Chapter 46 dooms Egypt.
Chapter 47 dooms the Philistines.
Chapter 48 dooms Moab, and the first half of Chapter 49 dooms the
Ammonites, although both Moab and the Ammonites get very brief footnotes
stating that their fortunes will be restored in the future. Jeremiah 49, a long chapter, continues with
the doom of Edom, Damascus, Kedar, Hazor, and Elam; Elam has the footnote about
restoration, but not the others.
Alas, Babylon
Chapters 50 and 51, which are both quite long, are all about
the destruction of Babylon. This is
interesting, because elsewhere in Jeremiah it has seemed like God was very much
on Babylon’s side. Now that Babylon has
been used as a tool to smite sinful Jerusalem, however, that deal is off, and Jeremiah
states at great length that Babylon will now fall in its turn. God is once again on the side of the Jews,
and the destruction of Babylon will release them to return to Jerusalem.
Now, assuming that the text of the Book of Jeremiah was
actually written in advance of the events it prophesies – and honestly, I think
that what we know about subsequent events from reading Ezra and Nehemiah has to
raise some suspicions about this – it is fair to observe that for as lengthy as
the description of Babylon’s downfall is, it is extremely vague yet with a real
flavor of imminence. Really bad things
of some sort are going to happen to Babylon, and soon. But in reality, it would be several decades
before Babylon experienced the scale of reversals that Jeremiah is laying out
here. To be perfectly frank about it,
even leaving out the details doesn’t make these prophecies particularly
convincing. The timing is just off.
Some Helpful Context
Chapter 52 is an afterward.
In fact, Chapter 51 ends with a statement that The words of Jeremiah end here. (64) Then, there is a very modern-seeming summary
of the history of Judah from the rise of Zedekiah to the exile in Babylon. Zedekiah, if you wondered, ends up in prison
for the rest of his life. Jehoiachin,
who had been King of Judah before him, gets sprung after thirty-seven years in
prison and lives the rest of his life as a royal guest.
The most interesting thing about this chapter is that it
gives numbers on the Babylonian exile.
Now, keep in mind that the Bible tells a fairly unambiguous narrative
about what happens to the Jews: they are taken in exile into Babylon. There are scattered mention of a few poor
farmers and stragglers left behind, but really, everybody who is anybody is
taken by force to Babylon. That is how I
have always understood the story, and that is how I have read it in the
Bible. Which makes this passage rather
startling:
Wow. Even at the much smaller scale of urban settlement in Biblical times, and even if 4,600 people is meant to indicate only heads of household, that’s just not a very large number of people. I think that’s very interesting. Do you think it’s interesting?So Judah went into captivity, away from her land. 28 This is the number of the people Nebuchadnezzar carried into exile:
in the seventh year, 3,023 Jews;29 in Nebuchadnezzar’s eighteenth year, 832 people from Jerusalem;
30 in his twenty-third year, 745 Jews taken into exile by Nebuzaradan the commander of the imperial guard.
There were 4,600 people in all.
No comments:
Post a Comment