Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT exchange.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Dave wrote:-


>I really don't see how you got from point A to point B.  It says in so many 
>words that Jeremiah wrote them, then *afterwards* delivered them to Baruch, 
>and that in front of witnesses.  If Baruch had done the writing because 
>Jeremiah was illiterate, why would he need to hand them over to Baruch?  
>Baruch would already have them.  The fact that Baruch was present means 
>nothing for the question of whether Jeremiah could read or write, so the 
>conclusion above seems like a non-sequitur to me.

If we consider a parallel with the use of a dictaphone (for those old
enough to remember such devices), in my first full-time job my boss
used one extensively, yet when I heard him discussing the letters 
with their recipients he would always refer to them as ``my letter
dated such and such''. His problem wasn't that he wasn't able to read
and write but that he couldn't type, but he never acknowledged to the
recipients either the use of the dictaphone or the typing by the
secretary.

I got from A to B by wondering if the passage would been worded
differently if Baruch had written down the words. Impossible to say.  A
deed of purchase is a legal document and something we might expect a
professional scribe to have drawn up. As to why Jeremiah would have had
to hand them over to Baruch. He had to seal one copy so he would have
handled that one himself. Do we know the roles of professional scribes
well enough to know if handing documents to a scribe for safe keeping
was a common practice or are we seeing something a little unusual?

At Karl's suggestion I looked at Jeremiah 51:60 which I translate as:-

60So Jeremiah wrote upon a single small scroll all the
disaster which would come upon Babylon, all these things written
concerning  Babylon. 

There doesn't appear to be any professional scribe around in this
case. I had always thought Jeremiah was illiterate, but perhaps he
wasn't. From later times we know that people who were able to 
write did use professional scribes, so perhaps Jeremiah had some
ability but used scribes a accordance with the custom of his
day.

Bill Rea, Information Technology Dept., Canterbury  University  \_ 
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