A Boost for the Book of Jeremiah
Pastor Dale Morgan
Saturday, Jul. 21, 2007
*A Boost for the Book of Jeremiah*
By David Van Biema
Time Magazine
By confirming the historical accuracy of a tiny detail, a two-inch clay
tablet long in the possession of the British Museum has given ammunition
to those who believe that the Bible — specifically, in this case, the
book of the prophet Jeremiah — is history. That, at least, is what the
believers are claiming.
The tablet itself is certainly genuine. On July 10 the Museum announced
that a Viennese expert working his way through thousands of similar clay
documents in its possession translated one dating from 595 B.C that
described a gift of 1.7 lbs. of gold to a Babylonian temple by a "chief
eunuch" named Nabu-sharrussu-ukin.
A museum official called it "a world-class find." What makes the ancient
but seemingly mundane receipt significant is that the book of Jeremiah
in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) mentions the exact same official
— though under a different transliteration, Nebo-Sarsekim, and a
different title, chief officer, as accompanying the Babylonian King
Nebuchadnezzar when he marched against Jerusalem in 587.
According to some experts, that proves that whoever wrote Jeremiah
wasn't making it up.
It's another chapter in a larger debate between scholars known as
biblical "minimalists" and "maximalists." Maximalists, who include most
conservative Christian experts, tend to accept that those parts of the
Bible that include prolific historical detail are probably historically
accurate. Minimalists tend to think that they were completed centuries
after their alleged dates as propaganda for a later Jewish government.
Jeremiah's story is one of the most vividly rendered lives in the Old
Testament. His biography is accepted as fact by pious Jews and
Christians, as are the book's details regarding the sack of Jerusalem,
in which Nebo-Sarsekim reportedly participated, and the subsequent
Jewish exile "by the rivers of Babylon," commemorated by the Book of
Psalms and Bob Marley. Minimalists tend to regard it as a polemic, until
proven otherwise.
Conservatives are calling the Nebo-Sarsekim tablet, stamped in cuneiform
script, such a proof. Lawson Stone, a professor of Old Testament at
Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, describes
Nebo-Sarsekim's rank as roughly equivalent to Deputy Undersecretary of
the Interior. "The logical assumption," he contends, "is that Jeremiah
wasn't written by a later writer, but a person writing at the time. I
don't know why a later writer trying to create a legendary basis for [a
later Jewish regime] would want to make reference to a third-ranked
Babylonian clerk. This argues that the document is accurate in its
references to the world around it."
However, Robert Coote, an Old Testament professor at the more liberal
San Francisco Theological Seminary, disagrees. Most academics who regard
Jeremiah as a polemic, he claims, would concede that it makes use of
materials originally written in Nebuchadnezzar's age, so there is no
reason for it not to include the name of a minor figure in his court.
"The logical fallacy," says Coote, "is to say that this one
corroboration makes the whole narrative true and accurate."
It will take a lot more cuneiform tablets to convince him. But then, the
British Museum still has a lot left to look through.