Jeremiah.
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.