Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch Old Testament Commentary

The perfect עבדוּ is to be regarded as a prophetic present. עבד בּ, impose labour, servitude on one, cf. Jer 22:13, i.e., reduce one to servitude. גּם המּה is an emphatic repetition of the pronoun בּם, cf. Gesen. 121, 3. Upon them, too (the Chaldeans), shall many peoples and great kings impose service, i.e., they shall make the Chaldeans bondsmen, reduce them to subjection. With "I will requite them," cf. Jer 50:29; Jer 51:24, where this idea is repeatedly expressed. (Note: Jer 25:11-14 are pronounced by Hitz., Ew., Graf to be spurious and interpolated; but Hitz. excepts the second half of Jer 25:14, and proposes to set it immediately after the first half of Jer 25:11. Their main argument is the dogmatic prejudice, that in the fourth year of Jehoiakim Jeremiah could not have foretold the fall of Babylon after seventy years' domination. The years foretold, says Hitz., "would coincide by all but two years, or, if Darius the Mede be a historical person, perhaps quite entirely. Such correspondence between history and prophecy would be a surprising accident, or else Jeremiah must have known beforehand the number of years during which the subjection to Babylon would last." Now the seventy years of Babylon's sovereignty are mentioned against in Jer 29:10, where Jeremiah promises the exiles that after seventy years they shall return to their native land, and no doubt is thrown by the above-mentioned critics on this statement; but there the seventy years are said to be a so-called round number, because that prophecy was composed nine years later than the present one. But on the other hand, almost all comm. have remarked that the utterance of Jer 29:10 : "when as for Babylon seventy years are accomplished, will I visit you," points directly back to the prophecy before us (25), and so gives a testimony to the genuineness of our 11th verse. And thus at the same time the assertion is disposed of, that in Jer 29:10 the years given are a round number; for it is not there said that seventy years will be accomplished from the time of that letter addressed by the prophet to those in Babylon, but the terminus a quo of the seventy years is assumed as known already from the present twenty-fifth chap. - The other arguments brought forward by Hitz. against the genuineness of the verse have already been pronounced inconclusive by Ng. Nevertheless Ng. himself asserts the spuriousness, not indeed of Jer 25:11 (the seventy years' duration of Judah's Babylonian bondage), but of Jer 25:12-14, and on the following grounds: - 1. Although in Jer 25:11, and below in Jer 25:26, it is indicated that Babylon itself will not be left untouched by the judgment of the Lord, yet (he says) it is incredible that in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the prophet could have spoken of the fall of Babylon in such a full and emphatic manner as is the case in Jer 25:12-14. But no obvious reason can be discovered why this should be incredible. For though in Jer 25:26 Jeremiah makes use of the name Sheshach for Babylon, it does not hence follow that at that moment he desired to speak of it only in a disguised manner. In the statement that the Jews should serve the king of Babylon seventy years, it was surely clearly enough implied that after the seventy years Babylon's sovereignty should come to an end. Still less had Jeremiah occasion to fear that the announcement of the fall of Babylon after seventy years would confirm the Jews in their defiant determination not to be tributary to Babylon. The prophets of the Lord did not suffer themselves to be regulated in their prophesyings by such reasons of human expediency. - 2. Of more weight are his other two arguments. Jer 25:12 and Jer 25:13 presume the existence of the prophecy against Babylon, Jer 50 and 51, which was not composed till the fourth year of Zedekiah; and the second half of Jer 25:13 presumes the existence of the other prophecies against the nations, and that too as a ספר. And although the greater number of these prophecies are older than the time of the battle at Carchemish, yet we may see (says Ng.) from the relation of apposition in which the second half of Jer 25:13 stands to the first, that here that Sepher against the peoples is meant in which the prophecy against Babylon was already contained. But from all this nothing further follows than that the words: "all that is written in this book and that Jeremiah prophesied against the peoples," were not uttered by Jeremiah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, but were first appended at the editing of the prophecies or the writing of them down in the book which has come down to us. The demonstrative הזּה does by no means show that he who wrote it regarded the present passage, namely Jer 25, as belonging to the Sepher against the peoples, or that the prophecies against the peoples must have stood in immediate connection with Jer 25. It only shows that the prophecies against the peoples too were found in the book which contained Jer 25. Again, it is true that the first half of Jer 25:14 occurs again somewhat literally in Jer 27:7; but we do not at all see in this reliable evidence that Jeremiah could not have written Jer 25:14. Ng. founds this conclusion mainly on the allegation that the perf. עבדוּ is wrong, whereas in Jer 27:7 it is joined regularly by ו consec. to the indication of time which precedes. But the perfect is here to be regarded as the prophetic present, marking the future as already accomplished in the divine counsel; just as in Jer 27:6 the categorical נתתּי represents as accomplished that which in reality yet awaited its fulfilment. Accordingly we regard none of these arguments as conclusive. On the other hand, the fact that the Alexandrian translators have rendered Jer 25:12 and Jer 25:13, and have made the last clause of Jer 25:13 the heading to the oracles against the peoples, furnishes an unexceptionable testimony to the genuineness of all three verses. Nor is this testimony weakened by the omission in that translation of Jer 25:14; for this verse could not but be omitted when the last clause of Jer 25:13 had been taken as a heading, since the contents of Jer 25:14 were incompatible with that view.)