Introduction

A NOTE ON THIS RENDERING

THE WITNESS — A SEPARATE SEPTUAGINT BOOK

This is the Letter (or Epistle) of Yirmeyahu, the completion of the Baruch cluster on this shelf. It survives in GREEK — the oldest witness is a Greek fragment from Qumran — with no surviving Hebrew, and is generally held to have been composed in Greek by a Hellenistic Jew. The Vulgate and the King James fold it in as the SIXTH chapter of Baruch; the Orthodox and the Assyrian canons print it as a book in its own right. The House follows the latter: it stands here as a separate book, rendered from Brenton's Septuagint English and Hebraized in the House manner, the fourth Greek witness of the Yirmeyahu–Baruch cycle beside Baruch-LXX and the three apocalypses. NOT A LETTER, BUT A HARANGUE AGAINST THE IDOLS Though it presents itself as a copy of a letter Yirmeyahu sent to the exiles (as he did indeed send one, Yirmeyahu 29:1), it is in truth a sustained and scornful sermon against idolatry, built upon Yirmeyahu's own mockery of idols (Yirmeyahu 10:1–10) and kin to Yeshayahu 44 and Tehillim 115 and 135. It is divided not by chapters but by a REFRAIN — “they are no gods: therefore fear them not” — that returns like the toll of a bell. The House sets that refrain plainly each time it comes. THE LIVING YAHUAH AND HIS MALACH, AGAINST THE DEAD GODS The one word of consolation in the whole letter is set at its head (verses 6–7): “O YAHUAH, thee must we worship; for My MALACH is with you, and I Myself do care for your souls.” Against gods that cannot save themselves from rust and moth, that must be wiped of dust and fastened behind locks lest they be stolen, stands the living Elohim who Himself keeps the souls of His exiles and sends His malach among them. The whole book is the shadow of that one contrast. SEVEN GENERATIONS, NOT SEVENTY YEARS The letter tells the exiles they shall remain in Bavel “seven generations” (verse 3), where Yirmeyahu himself had said SEVENTY YEARS (Yirmeyahu 29:10). The House prints the number as it stands and does not harmonise it: the longer reckoning is one of the marks that this letter was written long after the prophet, by one who deplored an exile that would not end. BEL, LEFT STANDING The chief god of Bavel is named once — “they entreat BEL that he may speak” (verse 41). As with the Greek's own substitutions elsewhere in the House, the foreign deity-name is left standing and not Hebraized; the House names the idol as the book names it, the better to mock it. THE PRIESTS OF THE IDOLS The servants of these gods are kept as “priests” in plain English throughout, and are not dressed as KOHANIM. The House does not lend the Aaronic word — the word of them that serve the living Elohim — to the shaven, wailing attendants of dead wood who sell the sacrifices and clothe their own wives from the idols’ garments (verses 28, 31, 33). THE TONGUE The names are set in the House manner — Yirmeyahu, Bavel and the Bavelim, Nevuchadnetzar, the Kasdim, the goyim, the malach. The Name YAHUAH stands for the divine “Lord” and ELOHIM for “God.” As with Baruch-LXX, the load-bearing terms take the green gloss at first appearance and stand plain thereafter. The measuring details — the silver and gold and purple, the bats and swallows and cats upon the idols’ heads — are left exactly as they stand. RULE X.4 The text is rendered as it stands. Its scorn is not softened: the gilded wood that cannot rise when it falls, the women with cords in the ways, the priests with rent garments and shaven heads roaring as at a funeral, the scarecrow in the garden of cucumbers that keeps nothing — all are set plainly, the satire of a man who had seen the temples of Bavel with his own eyes. Interpretation belongs to this note; the verse keeps the letter’s own voice.