_Torah_, literally _direction_ or _instruction_, is either a single law or a body of law, revealed by God through priests or prophets, for the religious and moral practice of men. Here it is some traditional or official form of such law, for which the people have rejected the Word of the Lord—His living Word by the prophets of the time (verse 9). Put to shame are the wise, 9 Dismayed and taken. Lo, they have spurned the Word of the Lord— What wisdom is theirs? Was this _Torah_ oral or written? And if written was it the discovered Book of the _Torah_, which in part at least was our Deuteronomy? So far as the text goes the original _Torah_ may have been either oral or written, and the scribes have _falsified_ it, by amplification or distortion,(293) either when reducing it for the first time to writing or when copying and editing it from an already written form. This leaves open these further questions. If written was the _Torah_ the very _Book of the Torah_ discovered in the Temple in 621-20? And if so did the falsification affect the whole or only part of the Book? To these questions some answer No, on the ground of Jeremiah’s assent to _this Covenant_, and the command to him to proclaim it.(294) Others answer Yes; in their view Jeremiah was opposed to the deuteronomic system as a whole, or at least to the detailed laws of ritual added to the prophetic and spiritual principles of the Book.(295) Another possibility is that Jeremiah had in view those first essays in writing of a purely priestly law-book, which resulted during the Exile in the so-called Priests’ Code now incorporated in the Pentateuch. In our ignorance both of the original form of Deuteronomy and of the extent and character of the activity of the scribes during the reign of Josiah we might hesitate to decide among these possibilities were it not for the following address which there is no good reason for denying to Jeremiah. VII. 21. Thus saith the Lord,(296) Your burnt offerings add to your sacrifices and eat flesh(297)! 22. For I spake not with your fathers nor charged them, in the day that I brought them forth from the land of Egypt, concerning burnt-offering and sacrifice. 23. But with this Word I charged them, saying, Hearken to My Voice, and I shall be to you God, and ye shall be to Me a people, and ye shall walk in every way that I charge you, that it may be well with you.