Menu
ToES Diary November 2017
By Admin | ToESWriting
Started NaNoWriMo novel “Joseph, Rachel’s son”. A little over 1,700 words, so at that rate I should make it (DV). The story starts with Jacob running away from Laban.
Jeremiah’s dictation seems to have started in the fourth year and the plan was to have Baruch read out the words to the people in the temple on a day of fasting (Jeremiah 36:6). According to Jeremiah 36:9, this happened in the 9th month of the 5th year, which was between 9 and 21 months later. Writing what Jeremiah dictated could have taken quite a while, but nothing like that long if the work was done full time. Maybe Jeremiah was away for some of the time or maybe Baruch was busy with other jobs as well. We are not told, so I will have to guess. It seems most likely to me that Jeremiah was absent passing on the message about the wine of God’s wrath. Somewhere in there, during the 4th year of Jehoiakim, the invasion by Nebuchadnezzar and the first deportation took place also.
Jacob’s sons were always known as his sons and treated similarly on that basis, but how were the differences between mothers handled?
For example, what did the 12 sons call the other wives who were not their mother? Was there a distinction made between the daughters of Laban and the maidservants/wives? Did Zilpah and Bilhah continue to live as Jacob’s wives after their children were born or did they revert to being maidservants? What did the children of Bilhah call her and what did they call Rachel who was “legally” their mother? What did the children of Zilpah call her and what did they call Leah? Who did they consider their “real” mother and who did Jacob consider to be their mother?
Such complications in a family. One man, one woman is so much simpler!
In Jeremiah 36, Jeremiah was told to write all of the words God had spoken to him on a scroll. Jeremiah 36:4 tells us that he called Baruch the son of Neriah.
Why didn’t Jeremiah do the work himself? In Terror on Every Side! I decided to make Jeremiah have terrible handwriting from the start so that he would not want to write the scroll by himself. But what was the real reason?
Jeremiah may have had terrible handwriting, or it may have been a completely different reason. Maybe one of these:
Possibly it was some other reason that I can’t think of. See below for a note about Jeremiah’s writing.
And why Baruch the son of Neriah? We find in Jeremiah 32:12 that Neriah was the son of Mahseiah and Jeremiah 51:59 speaks of Seraiah the son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah who was the quartermaster in the 4th year of Zedekiah. A quartermaster was probably an army position. In Jeremiah 43:3, Johanan suggested that Baruch had set Jeremiah against the people which suggests he may have been somewhat of a leader. Jeremiah 45:5 reports God as saying that Baruch should not seek great things for himself, which may support the idea of him looking to advance himself as a leader.
We know nothing else about Neriah. The name only occurs in Jeremiah. We know nothing else about Mahseiah either: his name only occurs in Jeremiah twice when he is referred to as the father of Neriah (note that although the KJV uses the name “Maaseiah” here, the name is actually different in Hebrew from the name “Maaseiah” which is used in other books of the Bible is also used elsewhere in Jeremiah).
Overall, Baruch was a faithful scribe but we know little of him or his background.
Jeremiah 51:60 states that Jeremiah wrote a book to send with Baruch’s brother Seraiah to Babylon when he went there with King Zedekiah during the 4th year of Zedekiah’s reign. This may mean that Jeremiah physically wrote the book, or it may have been written at his command in the same way as he had Baruch write the scroll in Jeremiah 36. Maybe Baruch wrote this book also and gave it to his brother to take with him.