Читать книгу Jeremiah 26-52 - Carolyn Sharp - Страница 13

Among many differences between Jer^MT and Jer^LXX, the most prominent is the variation as regards where the oracles about foreign nations are located. In Jer^LXX, these oracles come after 25:13a, whereas in Jer^MT, the OAN are located after Jer 45. The order of the oracles, too, is different:

JerLXX	JerMT
ElamEgyptBabylonPhilistiaEdomAmmonKedarDamascusMoab	EgyptPhilistiaMoabAmmonEdomDamascusKedar and HazorElamBabylon

Scholars have debated possible logics underlying the divergence between the Jer^MT and Jer^LXX positioning and order of these oracles. Macrostructurally, it would make elegant literary sense for the MT editors to have rearranged the OAN so that Egypt anchors the collection as the first significant enemy from Israel’s sacred history and Babylon takes the position of final foe.⁵³ Of interest is the list in Jer^MT 25:17–26 (= Jer^LXX 32:3–12) of nations and their rulers drinking from the divine cup of wrath. For clarity as relates to the positioning and order of the OAN, I am omitting the other people groups named there and list only those that occur in both places:

Egypt

Philistia

Edom

Moab

Ammon

Elam

Sheshach⁵⁴

Discernible in the list is a west-to-east geographical trajectory. Neither the Jer^MT order of OAN nor the Jer^LXX order agrees fully with the list of nations that are to drink the cup of wrath. But it makes good sense for fuller oracles against (some) nations to follow directly from the cup-of-wrath passage, as happens in Jer^LXX. The Jer^MT collection of OAN begins with Egypt and Philistia and has Moab followed by Ammon, as happens also in Jer 25. This suggests to many scholars that the Jer^MT OAN order was shaped secondarily in light of the list in Jer 25. Similarly, the addition of Babylon [Sheshach] drinking last corresponds with the oracles against Babylon being placed at the end of the OAN in Jer^MT. There is a certain drama about the order of OAN culminating in the lengthy two-chapter diatribe against archnemesis Babylon. As Carroll notes, “In the MT positioning of 50–51 it is difficult to avoid the impression that the editors have deliberately concluded their work with the ritual dismissal of Babylon as the last word of Jeremiah.”⁵⁵

Yet whether a scholar finds such correspondences and structured literary effects to gesture toward original intention or later shaping depends on their prior assumptions.⁵⁶ When comparing two iterations of material, one more chaotic in organization and the other more transparently structured toward certain kinds of congruence or literary effects, I do suspect that editorial shaping has created the second situation. As regards the Jer^MT positioning and order of the OAN, an artistic sensibility may well have sought to bring coherence to disparate or disorganized materials, even if that scribal work cannot be said to have controlled all aspects of the material.⁵⁷ I add a caveat: to discern purposeful shaping within one corpus (here, the Jer^MT OAN) does not necessarily mean that the other corpus (the Jer^LXX OAN) had been the underlying original. Other scholars, such as William McKane, argue that because of such correspondences and a perceptible “geographical order,” the Jer^MT order “is perhaps more original.”⁵⁸ Lundbom is convinced that scribal error is a more pervasive feature of Jer^LXX than others have seen. He argues about Jer^MT 25:15–29 = Jer^LXX 32:15–29 within a critical trajectory that includes other Jeremiah texts, “there are nine arguable cases for LXX haplography, in addition to which are other clear cases in which the LXX has either misunderstood or misread the Hebrew. The shorter LXX text is once again not the better or more original text … rather, it is a seriously flawed text.”⁵⁹ A different approach has been pursued by Nathan Mastnjak, who argues that the Jeremiah traditions may be profitably viewed as a “collection,” suggesting a move away from postulating a linear trajectory from a supposed original version to a later version. According to Mastnjak, Jer^LXX and Jer^MT “can be imagined as independent organizations of a collection of textual materials that were previously unordered.”⁶⁰ My own position is that many variants between Jer^MT and Jer^LXX can be argued with extreme plausibility to have arisen through filiation trajectories explainable by text-critical methods, but that some variants cannot be explained by those lights.

Wherever one stands on this issue, it should be acknowledged that the perception of structural significance or lack of same always involves speculation, however erudite such speculation may be. Here are two instructive examples from beyond Jeremiah studies. Whether considering subgroup linkages within the Book of the Twelve or the path of Assyrian military advancement as reflecting the listing of town names in Micah 1, scholars look for chronological ordering, geographical patterns, and catchwords. Where observable elements can be mustered toward a particular theory, scholars will muster them, sometimes with more ingenuity than can plausibly be predicated of the ancient authors. It may be that different factors affected different dimensions of the variations regarding the OAN in Jer^MT and Jer^LXX. Many scholars find it significant that in Isaiah and Ezekiel, the OAN come in the middle of those books. They argue on the basis of this tiny sample that such an order was expected and may be deemed “classic,” therefore the Jeremiah OAN must have been originally in the middle too. Yet Amos does something innovative in having oracles against foreign nations at the beginning of his book as part of a patterned rhetorical sequence that ultimately snares Judah and Israel. It is possible that Jer^MT does something innovative as well, and we cannot with certainty mark that innovation as a later development solely on the basis that Isaiah and Ezekiel have OAN in the middle of those books. With many scholars, I strongly suspect that the Jer^LXX order is earlier, or more precisely, that the Jer^MT order and placement seem to have been secondarily shaped, but I demur from the level of confidence that some adopt.⁶¹

Geoffrey Parke-Taylor avers that the considerable number of late additions to the OAN in Jer 46–49 may be seen as “confirming McKane’s view of a rolling corpus.”⁶² One might articulate this differently: Jer^MT scribes may have been interested, late in the text’s formation, to enhance the text by interweaving intra-biblical allusions from Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and other sources. This would not, in fact, confirm a haphazard growth of local additions with no broader horizon of scribal motivation, but instead would suggest a purposeful enrichment of existing oracles’ authority as venerable texts congruent with the older sacred traditions of Israel and Judah. Literary effects might be localized, to be sure, but the amplification of tradition may have been broader-reaching in its purposes and in the scribal ethos that promoted the working out of discrete moments of witness in the Jeremiah traditions.