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The end of the oppressive empire is at hand: The thrust of the oracles in Jeremiah 50–51 Masoretic text

Summary

This is a biblical-studies article, not an NLP paper. It uses no corpus, model or quantitative evaluation. Terblanche asks why the oracles against Babylon (OAB) in Jeremiah 50–51 of the Masoretic text (MT) sit so uneasily beside the parts of Jeremiah that seem to favour Babylon. Examples of those parts are 27:5–11 and the advice to exiles in chapter 29. He reads both through the lens of Empire Studies. First, he reconstructs how Judah came under Neo-Babylonian control. He then examines how the OAB portray the empire and reject its ideology, in which world rule from Babylon expressed the kingship of Marduk. His conclusion is that both blocks of text share one premise: Yahweh, the creator, holds final sovereignty. They differ in strategy. The pro-Babylonian passages resist covertly by recasting Nebuchadnezzar's power as Yahweh's gift. The OAB attack the imperial claims openly and predict that Babylon will suffer what Jerusalem suffered. This turns an apparent contradiction in the book into two different modes of resistance.

Key points

  • The main texts are Jeremiah 50:1–51:58 MT (the OAB) and Jeremiah 27:5–11, which the author treats as the most pro-Babylonian passage in the book. The MT of Jeremiah is roughly one sixth longer than the LXX form.
  • Chapter 29 urges exiles to settle in Babylon. In contrast, 50:8 and 51:6 tell them to flee, which cuts against Nebuchadnezzar II's policies.
  • Jeremiah 51:11 names the Medes as Babylon's conqueror, but Babylon actually fell to the Persians in 539 BCE. Following Kessler and Goldingay, the oracles therefore seem to reflect the situation between 586 and 550 BCE.
  • Scott's notion of a "disguised transcript" of resistance is used for the pro-Babylonian sections. Pyper's label of Jeremiah as a "comprador" text is rejected for the OAB.
  • The OAB carry an anti-Marduk polemic. Because the Cyrus Cylinder credits Marduk with choosing Cyrus, Cyrus's capture of Babylon would not count as fulfilling these prophecies.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The same core proposition (Yahweh is sovereign) can be voiced as quiet accommodation or as open defiance, so a text's stance must be read separately from its literal content. — For Mova (frames): The speech-act and implicature layer could carry a "covert vs. overt stance" attribute, so that compliant-sounding statements are not automatically labelled as agreement.
  • I2. The oracles nominally address Babylon in the third person, yet their real audience is Israel/Judah, which separates the named addressee from the intended hearer. — For Mova (frames): Speech-act frames could keep distinct slots for the addressee who is named and the audience actually targeted, which helps with fables and rhetoric where a character is spoken "about" for others.
  • I3. A text's internal assumptions can be checked against known history: naming the Medes rather than the Persians as conqueror helps date when the oracles were composed. — For Mova (world): When a text's world model contradicts the compiled knowledge graph, the mismatch can be recorded as evidence about the text's viewpoint or time, rather than simply flagged as an error.
  • I4. A single metaphor applied to two agents (Assyria eats Israel's flesh, Nebuchadnezzar gnaws its bones) encodes both continuity and sequence between successive powers. — For Mova (world): A shared metaphor assigned to multiple entities could be linked as a parallel relation with event ordering, preserving the "successor" reading instead of collapsing the agents into one.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Hebrew & Aramaic

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4102/ve.v46i1.3489

@inproceedings{terblanche2025end,
  title = {{The end of the oppressive empire is at hand: The thrust of the oracles in Jeremiah 50–51 Masoretic text}},
  author = {Terblanche, Marius D.},
  booktitle = {Verbum et Ecclesia 46},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.4102/ve.v46i1.3489},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4102/ve.v46i1.3489}
}

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