The order of chapters and verses of the Book of Jeremiah in the English Bibles, Masoretic Text, and Vulgate, in some places differs from that in the Septuagint according to Rahlfs or Brenton. The following table is taken with minor adjustments from Brenton's Septuagint, page 971. The order of Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint/Scriptural Study based on Alfred Rahlfs' Septuaginta differs in some details from Joseph Ziegler's critical edition in Göttingen LXX. Swete's Introduction mostly agrees with Rahlfs' edition.
Hebrew, Vulgate, English
Rahlfs' LXX
Brenton's LXX
49:1-5,23-27,28-33
30:1-5,29-33,23-28
30:1-5,23-27,28-33
49:7-22
n/a
29:7b-22
49:34
25:20
26:1
49:35-39
25:15-19
25:35-39
42:1-22
49:1-22
Parashot
The parashah sections listed here are based on the Aleppo Codex. Jeremiah 49 is a part of the prophecies in Jeremiah 46-49 in the section of Prophecies against the nations . : open parashah; : closed parashah.
Structure
This chapter is divided as follows:
: Against Ammon
: Against Edom
: Against Damascus
: Against Kedar and Hazor
: Against Elam
Verses 1–6: Against the Ammonites
The punishment of the Ammonites is mainly due to land-grabbing or wrongful land-acquisition, as if Israel is without heir. Therefore, Yahweh will destroy Rabbah, Ammon's capital city, and give the annexed land back to Israel.
Verse 1
"Milcom": Hebrew: "Malcam", lit. "their king"; an Ammonite god ; or "Molech".
Verses 7-22: Against Edom
Two poems and two prose comments are addressed to Edom. The Jerusalem Bible dates this oracle to around 605 BCE. Like the section against Ammon, these oracles begin with a series of rhetorical questions:
Verse 7
The reference to wisdom is "perhaps a reference to Edom 's ancestral connection with Jacob".
Verse 8
Eventually Yahweh is the one to punish the Edomites. Verses 14-16 announce in poetry the sending of an unnamed messenger among the nations. O'Connor argues that "by implication, Jeremiah is the messenger", although Obadiah 1:1 has very similar wording attributed to the prophet Obadiah:
Verses 23-27: Against Damascus
These cities are "worried and troubled" in the Good News Translation. The reference is to the northern cities of the kingdom of Damascus: Hamath is located and Arpad north of Damascus. As they are all inland cities, biblical commentator A. W. Streane argues that the wording There is trouble on the sea "is quite unsuitable topographically to this context", preferring to translate this line as "because of care, like the sea, they cannot rest". Similarly, the Good News Translation has "anxiety rolls over them like a sea, and they cannot rest".
Verses 28-33: Against Kedar and against the kingdoms of Hazor
Verse 28
Verse 30
Nebuchadrezzar is the addressee of the poem's command to attack. The attack would be directed at the Arab tribes: Kedar signifies the Bedouin who lived in tents: "Take their tents and their flocks". The kingdoms of Hazor were likely to have been a confederation of Arab tribes "who have never been attacked, and therefore live securely without walls or ramparts for their defence". Hazor is not the city called Hazor mentioned in, "which was in the land of Canaan, whereas the kingdoms of Hazor, here mentioned, were evidently in Arabia, in the neighbourhood, at least, of Kedar". O'Connor notes that "no reasons for their fate appear in the poem, unless being at ease implies a profligate arrogance."
Verses 34-38: Against Elam
Zedekiah was installed by Nebuchadnezzar as the king of Judah when Jehoiachin was deposed in March 597 BCE. Nebuchadnezzar evidently attacked Elam, in the winter of 596 BCE; it may have been a fulfillment of this prophecy. Elam's devastation is described in cosmic and meteorological terms. Susa, the ancient capital of Elam, now Shush, is east of Jerusalem on modern roads, a measure of the vast dimensions of the "international turmoil created by Babylon's imperialism".
Verse 39: Elam restored
Streane notes that '"Elamites" are mentioned among the persons present on the great "day of Pentecost". His opinion is that "both in the narrative in the Acts and in this prophecy, the Elamites are chiefly mentioned as representatives of the distant and less civilized Gentile nations".
