Letter of Jeremiah 1:4

Deuterocanon

2 Because of the sins that you have committed before God, you will be taken to Babylon as exiles by Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians. 3 Therefore when you have come to Babylon you will remain there for many years, for a long time, up to seven generations; after that I will bring you away from there in peace. 4 Now in Babylon you will see gods made of silver and gold and wood, which people carry on their shoulders, and which cause the heathen to fear. 5 So beware of becoming at all like the foreigners or of letting fear for these gods possess you 6 when you see the multitude before and behind them worshiping them. But say in your heart, “It is you, O Lord, whom we must worship.”

2 Maccabees 2:2

Deuterocanon

1 One finds in the records that the prophet Jeremiah ordered those who were being deported to take some of the fire, as has been mentioned, 2 and that the prophet, after giving them the law, instructed those who were being deported not to forget the commandments of the Lord, or to be led astray in their thoughts on seeing the gold and silver statues and their adornment. 3 And with other similar words he exhorted them that the law should not depart from their hearts. 4 It was also in the same document that the prophet, having received an oracle, ordered that the tent and the ark should follow with him, and that he went out to the mountain where Moses had gone up and had seen the inheritance of God.

 Notes and References

"... While the Letter [of Jeremiah] is universally acknowledged by scholars not to have been authored by the prophet Jeremiah, determining its actual author, date, and historical circumstances of composition is impossible based on internal criteria alone. Some scholars date it to the 2nd/1st century BCE, for two reasons: (1) The Letter may be referred to in 2 Maccabees 2:1–3, a section commonly dated to the 2nd century BCE. (2) A Greek fragment discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated to the 1st century BCE, has been claimed to contain a small section of Epistle of Jeremiah 43–44. More recently, D. Dimant has suggested that the Letter (like 2 Maccabees 2:1–3 and 1 Baruch) may be related, whether directly or indirectly, to the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C, discovered in fragmentary form among the Dead Sea Scrolls. This would suggest that our text is part of a larger corpus of texts, framed as letters attributed to Jeremiah, circulating in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. How much earlier the Letter may have been composed is more difficult to judge. Some scholars, relying on verse 3, which warns of a long exile of “up to seven generations,” take it to indicate a time of composition prior to 317 or 307/306 BCE, or shortly after Alexander the Great’s conquest. However, given the unlikeliness that the “seven generations” of verse 3 is to be taken literally, and judging from other internal Hellenistic locutions, a date in the 3rd century bce is more likely as a terminus a quo ..."

Wright, Benjamin G. Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture (pp. 1535-1536) The Jewish Publication Society, 2013

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