The prophecies of Jeremiah, it is affirmed, were delivered at various
times between 625 and 585 B.C., and a final redaction of them was made
by him about the latter date. The book, as it now appears, is in such
a disordered condition that Christian scholars have to separate it
into numerous parts and rearrange them in order to make a consecutive
and intelligible narrative. Dr. Hitchcock, in his "Analysis of the
Bible" (p 1,144), says: "So many changes have taken place, or else
so many irregularities were originally admitted in the arrangement
of the book, that Dr. Blayney, whose exposition we chiefly follow,
was obliged to make fourteen different portions of the whole before
he could throw it into consecutive order."
The following is Dr. Blayney's arrangement of the book: Chapters i-xii;
xiii-xx; xxii, xxiii; xxv, xxvi; xxxv, xxxvi; xlv-xlviii; xlix (1-33);
xxi; xxiv; xxvii-xxxiv; xxxvii-xxxix; xlix (34-39); l, li; xl-xliv.
This disordered condition of Jeremiah indicates one of two things:
a plurality of authors, or a negligence, if nothing worse, on the part
of the Bible's custodians that Christians will be loath to acknowledge.
The book, as a whole, was not written by Jeremiah. He did not write
the following:
"And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the captivity
of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, in the five and
twentieth day of the month, that Evil-Merodach king of Babylon, in
the first year of his reign, lifted up the head of Jehoiachin king
of Judah, and brought him forth out of prison" (lii, 31).
The release of Jehoiachin by Evil-Merodach occurred 562 or 561
B.C. Jeremiah had then been dead twenty years.
This book is not the work of one author. The thirty-seventh and
thirty-eighth chapters were not written by the same person. Much of
the thirty-eighth is a mere repetition of the thirty-seventh; and
yet the two are so filled with discrepancies that it is impossible
to accept both as the writings of the same author.
Jeremiah, it is declared, wrote both Kings and Jeremiah. He could
not have written the concluding portion of either. The last chapter
of 2 Kings and the last chapter of Jeremiah are the same, and were
written after the time of Jeremiah.
Ezekiel.
The period assigned for Ezekiel's prophecies is that beginning
B.C. 595 and ending B.C. 573. Christians assert that the first
twenty-four chapters of the work were written before the destruction
of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. The whole work was undoubtedly written
after this event.
The Talmud credits its authorship to the Great Synagogue. If this be
correct, Ezekiel had nothing to do with its composition; for he was
not a member of the Great Synagogue. Ewald, while claiming for him
the utterance of its several prophecies, believes that the book in
its present form is not his work, but that of a later author.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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