Nothing Here Is Said Once

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Jeremiah, Book of” (especially the section on the Greek text), “Gedaliah,” “Mizpah,” “Tahpanhes,” “Elephantine,” “Hophra,” “Queen of Heaven,” “Baruch.”
• Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets (IVP) — “Exile,” “Jeremiah: Book of,” “Israelite History,” “Text and Textual Criticism,” which is where the shorter Greek Jeremiah is handled.
• The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible — “Gedaliah,” “Egypt, Jews in,” “Queen of Heaven,” “Ammon, Ammonites.”
• Where the dictionaries disagree, and the page says so rather than choosing: whether Gedaliah was murdered in 586 or some years later; whether the “queen of heaven” is Ishtar, Astarte, a syncretism of both, or a title rather than a name; whether chapters 39–44 are a single composition or a narrative source expanded by a Deuteronomistic editor; and whether the shorter Greek Jeremiah reflects an earlier Hebrew edition or a translator’s abridgement. None of the four is decidable from any corpus held here.

The people in chapter 42 are not asking a rhetorical question and they are not villains. They had just watched the Babylonian-appointed governor murdered by a man of the royal house, and they had every reason to expect a reprisal column marching south. Going to Egypt was the sensible thing to do. Egypt was two weeks’ walk away, it had grain, and there were Judeans there already. What the chapter is about is not stupidity; it is about what happens when you ask for guidance you have already decided not to take — and 41:17 says plainly that they were camped “intending to go to Egypt” before they asked. Read 42:1–6 and 41:17 together, in that order, and the ten days of waiting in 42:7 become the most uncomfortable verse in the passage.

The Lachish Ostraca are inscribed potsherds found in the burnt guardroom of the Lachish gate, dated by Pritchard’s editors to “immediately before the beginning of the Chaldean siege of Lachish, perhaps in the autumn of 589 (or 588) B.C.” They are, in that edition’s words, “the only known corpus of documents in classical Hebrew prose.” Two of them belong beside this passage.

“And it hath been reported to thy servant, saying, ‘The commander of the host, Coniah son of Elnathan, hath come down in order to go into Egypt; and unto Hodaviah son of Ahijah and his men hath he sent to obtain … from him.’”Lachish Ostracon III — Pritchard, ANET, p. 322

“And let (my lord) know that we are watching for the signals of Lachish, according to all the indications which my lord hath given, for we cannot see Azekah.”Lachish Ostracon IV — Pritchard, ANET, p. 322

Ostracon III is the traffic of Jeremiah 42–43 in the mouth of somebody who is not in the Bible. A senior officer, in the last months before the siege, is going down to Egypt. That road was open, it was used, and it was used by the military. The page does not claim the ostracon refers to anyone in Jeremiah. The name Coniah son of Elnathan is not in the biblical text and the identification is contested. What it establishes is the social fact: going to Egypt was an ordinary option that ordinary commanders took.

Ostracon IV is the last minutes of Jeremiah 39:1. Jeremiah 34:7 says that the Babylonian army was fighting against Jerusalem “and against all the cities of Judah that were left, Lachish and Azekah, for these were the only fortified cities of Judah that remained.” A man in a signal post writes that he can no longer see Azekah. That is a fortress chain going dark, in real time, in Hebrew.

Jeremiah 43:6–7 says Baruch went to Egypt. The Greek of 50:6–7 on this disk names him in the convoy list: … καὶ Ιερεμιαν τὸν προφήτην καὶ Βαρουχ υἱὸν Νηριου … καὶ εἰσῆλθον εἰς Ταφνας — “and Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch son of Neriah … and they came into Tahpanhes.”

The book of Baruch opens by putting him somewhere else.

“And these are the words of the book which Baruch son of Neriah … wrote in Babylon, in the fifth year, on the seventh of the month, at the time when the Chaldeans took Jerusalem and burned it with fire.”Baruch 1:1–2, read from the CATSS Greek text held here

Both cannot be geography. The page does not adjudicate and does not need to: Baruch is a historical witness on the Pleasant Springs canon and Jeremiah is Scripture. What the juxtaposition shows is that within two or three centuries the question “what happened to Jeremiah’s secretary” had at least two answers in circulation, and the one that got written into a book put him with the exiles who obeyed rather than with the refugees who did not.

The Letter of Jeremiah does the same thing in the opposite direction, opening διὰ τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἃς ἡμαρτήκατε ἐναντίον τοῦ θεοῦ ἀχθήσεσθε εἰς Βαβυλῶνα αἰχμάλωτοι — “because of the sins you have committed before God you will be led away to Babylon as captives” — and then spending sixty-odd verses proving that foreign gods cannot save. That is chapter 44’s argument, addressed to the other exile.

2 Maccabees gives him an afterlife the book of Jeremiah does not. Read at first hand from the Greek on this disk:

“And Jeremiah came and found a cave-dwelling, and he brought in there the tent and the ark and the altar of incense, and he blocked up the door. And some of those who followed came up to mark the way, and they could not find it … ‘The place shall be unknown until God gathers the congregation of the people together and becomes merciful.’”2 Maccabees 2:5–7, CATSS Greek text

Nothing of this is in Jeremiah 39–44, and that is the point. The canonical chapters end with the prophet losing an argument in a foreign country. Two centuries later he is remembered as the man who saved the furniture of the temple and hid it where nobody could find it. The tradition softened what the book leaves hard. The page reports the two pictures and does not harmonise them.

Jeremiah 7:18 describes an assembly line: children gather wood, fathers light the fire, women knead dough “to make cakes for the queen of heaven.” Chapter 44 shows the same practice still running, in Egypt, forty years later, defended out loud. Who she was is not settled and this page does not settle it. The usual candidates are Ishtar (whose Akkadian titles include sharrat shame, queen of heaven), the West Semitic Astarte, and a local fusion. No Akkadian or Ugaritic corpus is held here, so no title was checked at first hand, and Stage 5 says so. What can be measured is what the Greek translator did with the Hebrew phrase, and he did two different things in the same book — see Stage 3.

The Hebrew phrase is identical in both places. Jeremiah 7:18 reads לַעֲשׂוֹת כַּוָּנִים לִמְלֶכֶת הַשָּׁמַיִם; Jeremiah 44:17 reads לְקַטֵּר לִמְלֶכֶת הַשָּׁמַיִם. Same consonants, same pointing. The Greek held here does not render them the same way, and the difference is not subtle:

βασίλισσα τοῦ οὐρανοῦ stands in four of the 30,348 Greek Old Testament verse units screened here, and all four are Greek Jeremiah 51 — that is, Hebrew Jeremiah 44. It does not stand at Greek Jeremiah 7:18. The unpointed Hebrew consonants מלכת can be read as queen or as מְלֶאכֶת, work / array / host, and the Greek of chapter 7 evidently took it the second way while the Greek of chapter 44 took it the first.

The consequence is measurable and it runs the other way from what you would expect. In Hebrew, chapter 44 is quoting the temple sermon back at itself; a reader of the Hebrew hears 7:18 under 44:17 immediately. In the Greek that link is cut at one end and left standing at the other, because the rare word for the cakes survives the crossing in both places: χαυῶνας stands at Greek 7:18 and at Greek 51:19 and nowhere else in the corpus. So a Greek reader can still hear the baking of chapter 7 in chapter 44 — and cannot hear the goddess. The page reports what the two texts do and does not say that either translator was wrong.

מִצְרַיִם, Egypt, stands in 582 verses of the Hebrew Bible, 54 of them in Jeremiah. Twenty-three of those 54 — well over a third — stand in these six chapters, and they are distributed 0 / 0 / 1 / 6 / 5 / 11 across chapters 39 to 44. The word is absent from the two chapters about the fall of Jerusalem and dense in the last chapter of the book’s narrative. That gradient is the plot: the further the survivors get from the ruins, the more the text says the name of the place they are going. The single occurrence in chapter 41 is 41:17 — the camp near Bethlehem, “intending to go to Egypt” — and it stands four verses before they ask God what to do.

Across the 117 Masoretic rows, screened against every other verse in the Hebrew Bible with single words not counted: 7 stop at two, 41 at three, 30 at four, 9 at five, 14 at six, 11 at seven, 3 at eight, one at nine and one at eleven — and nothing at all stops at zero.

That last clause is the finding. On this screen a zero means the verse shares no two consecutive words with any other verse in the Hebrew Bible — the strong, printable result that gave the Obadiah page its two unique verses. Jeremiah 39–44 has none. Not one verse in these six chapters is verbally unique.

And the page prints its own baseline, because a number without one is a sales pitch. Screened chapter by chapter across the whole book, Jeremiah has 41 zero rows in 1,364 verses — 3.0 per cent. At that rate a stretch of 117 verses should contain about three or four. It contains none. These six chapters are the least verbally original stretch of the book, and the reason is countable rather than mysterious: the story they tell is told twice more in the Bible, and the sermon they end with was preached in chapter 7.

The sixteen deepest Hebrew rows — every row in the passage reaching seven or more:

Read the band column, not the run column. Jeremiah 43:10 reaches seven with a band of seven — that is the book’s stock oracle opening, and it means nothing on its own. Jeremiah 41:1 reaches eleven with a band of one, and the eleven words are a date, three personal names and a description of lineage. The two numbers are not the same kind of object and the page will not let them sit side by side unlabelled.

Because none of these rows is unique, the interesting question is not whether the language is shared but with what. Counted over all 117 rows, by which verses appear among a row’s deepest partners:

Thirty of the thirty-two rows that touch the Kings narrative stand in chapters 39, 40 and 41. Thirteen of the nineteen rows that touch the temple sermon stand in chapter 44. The two distributions barely overlap, and the changeover falls at chapter 42 — at the oath. That is why the structure diagram above calls 42:1–6 a hinge and not a middle: it is where the text stops sounding like 2 Kings and starts sounding like Jeremiah 7.

What this page does not say. It does not say that Jeremiah copied Kings, or that Kings copied Jeremiah, or that both drew on a common source, or that an editor assembled chapters 39–41 out of the Kings account. Each of those is a claim about history that a word count cannot reach. There is a large scholarly literature on exactly that question and Stage 5 names it. The count is the finding.

Across the 107 CATSS rows against 7,927 New Testament verses: 106 reach two, 94 reach three, 30 reach four, 8 reach five, 1 reaches eight, and nothing reaches nine. Nothing at all reaches six or seven. The distribution has a hole in it, and the whole top of the table is this:

Four of the seven rows that stop at five are the same phrase landing on the same verse. ἐν ῥομφαίᾳ καὶ ἐν λιμῷ is a Jeremianic formula — it stands in seven of the 30,348 Greek Old Testament verse units screened, six of them in Jeremiah and one in Lamentations — and in exactly one New Testament verse. So the run of eight is not a bolt from nowhere; it is the top of a family that this passage uses over and over. Both facts belong on the page and neither is allowed to hide the other.

Revelation 6:8 is the fourth seal: a pale horse, its rider named Death, given authority over a quarter of the earth ἀποκτεῖναι ἐν ῥομφαίᾳ καὶ ἐν λιμῷ καὶ ἐν θανάτῳ καὶ ὑπὸ τῶν θηρίων τῆς γῆς — to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth. The verse commentaries almost always name behind it is Ezekiel 14:21, which has the same four judgements: sword, famine, evil beasts, pestilence. Measured, the two comparisons are not close:

Ezekiel 14:21 has the whole set — ῥομφαίαν καὶ λιμὸν καὶ θηρία πονηρὰ καὶ θάνατον — but in the accusative and without the repeated ἐν, so not one two-word sequence survives the comparison. Screened against all 30,348 Greek Old Testament verse units screened here, the single deepest verbatim contact Revelation 6:8 makes anywhere is with Jeremiah 44:13, at eight words and a tie band of one; the runners-up reach six. This shelf measured the same thing from the Revelation side first, on the page for Revelation 6:1–8:13, and the two pages agree to the word.

What this page will not say. It will not say that John quoted Jeremiah. Revelation carries no citation formula anywhere — not once in twenty-two chapters — so there is no textual signal to appeal to, and the shelf’s rule is that direction of influence is never asserted without one. It will not say the phrase was rare in the air John breathed: it was Jeremiah’s stock threat, used five times in this passage alone. What the page says is the measurement: the deepest verbatim contact between Jeremiah 39–44 and the New Testament is eight consecutive Greek words, tie band 1, and they are a sentence spoken to refugees in Egypt about what was going to happen to them there.

1. Luke 2:12 is the control. Jeremiah 44:29 opens with five Greek words that are also the first five Greek words of the angel’s sentence to the shepherds — καὶ τοῦτο ὑμῖν τὸ σημεῖον, “and this shall be the sign to you.” Run of five, tie band 1, the deepest contact that verse makes with the entire New Testament. In Jeremiah the sign is that God will punish; in Luke it is a baby in a feeding trough. Nobody should build anything on it, and the fact that nobody should is the reason it is printed here. If a five with a band of one can be an accident, an eight with a band of one is a bigger number and not a different kind of thing.

2. Two more fives that are idiom, not contact. Jeremiah 44:21 reaches five with Acts 7:23 — ἀνέβη ἐπὶ τὴν καρδίαν αὐτοῦ, “it came up on his heart,” a Semitic idiom for remembering, used of God in Jeremiah and of Moses in Acts. Jeremiah 44:8 reaches five with Acts 7:41 — ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις τῶν χειρῶν, “in the works of their hands,” the ordinary Greek for idols. Both are Stephen’s speech, and neither is quoting Jeremiah. Three of the eight deepest New Testament contacts this passage makes are coincidences, and the page says so before it says anything else.

3. The Greek is missing the material that would test the Hebrew finding hardest. The Hebrew block that is most duplicated elsewhere — 39:4–13, which reaches nine with 2 Kings 25:11 and eight with Jeremiah 52:9 — is precisely the block the Greek Jeremiah on this disk does not have. That is a fact about two texts and it is easy to build a story on. The page refuses to. It does not say the Greek is earlier, that the Hebrew block was imported from Kings, that a scribe filled a gap, or that Rahlfs’s text is defective here. No Qumran witness and no Göttingen apparatus is held; the two observations are printed next to each other and left there.

• Commentaries. William Holladay, Jeremiah 2 (Hermeneia, 1989) — the standard technical treatment of chapters 26–52. William McKane, Jeremiah XXVI–LII (ICC, 1996). Jack Lundbom, Jeremiah 37–52 (Anchor Yale, 2004), the fullest on exactly these chapters. Leslie Allen, Jeremiah (OTL, 2008). Georg Fischer, Jeremia 26–52 (HThKAT, 2005), which argues the opposite of the usual line on the Greek.
• On chapters 37–45 as a unit. The old proposal that these chapters are a “Baruch narrative” or passion narrative goes back to Bernhard Duhm and Sigmund Mowinckel; Christopher Seitz, Theology in Conflict (1989), and Kathleen O’Connor have argued the case differently since. The distribution counted in Stage 4 is offered as data these works interpret, not as a verdict on them.
• On the relationship with 2 Kings 24–25 and Jeremiah 52. This is a standing question in the literature on the Deuteronomistic History and on the composition of Jeremiah; see the commentaries above and the discussion in Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Nothing on this page adjudicates it.
• On the two editions of Jeremiah. Emanuel Tov, The Septuagint Translation of Jeremiah and Baruch (1976); Hermann-Josef Stipp on the Masoretic Sondergut; Albert Pietersma and Marc Saunders in NETS; and the Qumran editions of 4QJer^b and 4QJer^d.
• On Judeans in Egypt. Bezalel Porten, Archives from Elephantine (1968) and the Porten–Yardeni Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Neither was consulted for this page and nothing here rests on them.
• Ancient Near Eastern comparisons. James Pritchard, ANET (3rd ed.) — the Lachish Ostraca at pp. 321–322 were read at first hand from the copy held here for this page.

No Qumran text is held here, and for this passage that gap is load-bearing. The decisive witnesses for the shorter Greek Jeremiah are 4QJer^b and 4QJer^d, reported to preserve a short Hebrew text agreeing with the Greek against the Masoretic Text. This page prints Jeremiah 39:7 with an empty Greek column and cannot say whether any Hebrew manuscript ever lacked 39:4–13. Anyone wanting that answer must go to the Qumran editions; this page has not.

The Greek here is Rahlfs, not Ziegler. Every Greek figure on this page is a figure about the CATSS digitisation of Rahlfs’s Septuaginta. No Göttingen apparatus is held, so no variant is known to this page and nothing is claimed from one. The eight-word run at Jeremiah 51:13 is Rahlfs’s reading, and if Ziegler differs by so much as a preposition the central Greek measurement changes.

The Greek New Testament here is the SBLGNT via MorphGNT. No New Testament apparatus was consulted, and Revelation is a book with a busy one.

The Kings comparison is a word count, not a source theory. Stage 4 counts which rows have 2 Kings 25 or Jeremiah 52 among their deepest partners. It cannot distinguish Jeremiah drawing on Kings from Kings drawing on Jeremiah, from both drawing on an archival account, from an editor harmonising the two later. A reader who leaves this page believing any one of those has read more than is written.

The Elephantine papyri were not read at first hand. They are the obvious external control on Jeremiah 44 — a real Judean community in Egypt, with a real temple, and documents naming a goddess alongside Yahweh — and they sit at ANET pp. 491–492 and 633. The copy of Pritchard held here stops at printed page 326, so those pages could not be opened, and no Aramaic corpus is on this disk. Everything this page says about Judeans in Egypt outside the biblical text is therefore background, not evidence.

The Babylonian Chronicle was not read at first hand either, for the same reason — it stands at ANET p. 563, past the end of the copy held. The dates in Jeremiah 39:1–2 are printed as the Hebrew gives them and are not checked against a cuneiform tablet here.

No Akkadian or Ugaritic corpus is held, so the identification of the queen of heaven with Ishtar or Astarte was not tested against any divine title at first hand. Stage 2 names the candidates and stops.

Herodotus on Apries was not consulted. The Greek historian’s account of Apries being deposed by Amasis and later killed is the usual external note on Jeremiah 44:30. No copy of Herodotus is held on this disk and the page makes no claim about the fulfilment of that oracle.

No commentary was consulted at first hand. The works listed above are named as where a reader should go. No claim on this page rests on any of them.

The ESV column was typed from the printed 2016 text edition, because no ESV API key has ever been issued to this site. Any transcription error is ours.

Where the page is weakest. The Hebrew finding — nought zero rows in 117 — is robust, because a zero row is a property of the corpus and the corpus is fixed. The Greek finding is fragile in exactly the way edition-dependent findings always are. It rests on one verse of one edition of one book, and on the shelf’s decision to screen 30,348 verse units rather than the whole Septuagint, which is larger than what is held here. A critic should press the Ziegler question first, and the page would rather write that sentence itself.

• They asked God for guidance after they had packed. Jeremiah 41:17 says the company was already camped near Bethlehem “intending to go to Egypt.” Four verses later they ask Jeremiah to pray and swear to obey the answer “whether it is good or bad.” Ten days later the answer comes and they call it a lie. The oath was sincere and it was also decoration. Anyone who has ever asked for advice they had no intention of taking should read Jeremiah 42 slowly.
• The one unconditional promise in these chapters goes to a foreigner and a court eunuch. Ebed-melech the Ethiopian is told he will live “because you have put your trust in me” — the only person in the passage of whom that is said. He had done exactly one thing: pulled a prophet out of a cistern when nobody else would. The book keeps his name and does not keep the names of most of the officials.
• Chapter 44 is the hardest chapter to answer because the people are arguing from evidence. When we made offerings to the queen of heaven we had bread; since we stopped, we have had sword and famine. That is a real argument and it is empirically true of the years they are describing. The prophet does not deny the data; he reverses the reading of it. Christians who expect faith to be validated by outcomes should notice that this passage puts that expectation in the mouths of the people who are wrong.
• One concrete response. Think of one decision you are currently praying about. Write down, honestly, what you have already decided. Then either tell God that, or change the decision. Do not do both. If you can, say the sentence out loud to one other Christian this week — that is the step Jeremiah 42 shows nobody taking.