What a relief to hear that Dr. Price is ending his part of this debate! We have sat patiently for a year now and watched him plow the same ground over and over, through an endless maze of quibbles and straw men, without ever trying to resolve the real difficulties in his claim that Jeremiah accurately predicted the duration of the Babylonian captivity. He has been given well over a thousand dollars in free publishing space to present his case, and through it all he has apparently thought that if he fought enough straw men, led us down enough tangent paths, distorted enough of my rebuttal arguments, and kept parroting the same claims after they had been answered, he might convince some readers that his position is right. To avoid boring repetition, I will reply only briefly to his regurgitated complaints and "arguments" that I have already responded to.
Jeremiah Not an Actual Person: Once again, Price has accused me of claiming that Jeremiah was not an actual historical character (p. 4, this issue), but I showed in the May/June edition that Price had distorted a section of my article in which I had said only that there were no nonbiblical records that "mentioned a Hebrew prophet named Jeremiah who prophesied during the first year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign that the Jews would be taken into bondage but released after 70 years" (p. 8). So my claim was really that there were no nonbiblical records to corroborate that Jeremiah had made such a prophecy and not that there were no nonbiblical records to corroborate the historicity of Jeremiah. This is just a typical case of Price's fighting straw men rather than trying to address the real problems in his prophecy-fulfillment claim.
The Sixth-Century Origin of Jeremiah: Price has again asserted that I have claimed "that the evidence does not support a sixth-century origin of [Jeremiah]" (p. 2, this issue), but this is another distortion of my position. I have never claimed that none of the book of Jeremiah was written in the sixth century. I have said only that through the use of textual criticism, biblical scholars have determined that the book was "the product of growth over a long period of time, to which many contributed" (July/August 1997, p. 2). This point was discussed at length on pages 2-4 of the issue just cited. In "Primary colors of the Bible" (July/August 1998), I showed that responsible scholars, such as Don Foster of Vassar College, have established the reliability of critical methods that textual critics use to determine forgery and multiple authorship in biblical books, so as long as reputable scholars, using these proven methods, express serious doubts that all of the book of Jeremiah was written by one person in the 6th-century B. C., it is incumbent on Dr. Price as the affirmant to establish beyond doubt that his claim meets all of the criteria of valid prophecy fulfillment. He certainly has not done that as long as there are scores of reputable biblical scholars who, having critically examined the text of Jeremiah, declare that this book is "the product of growth over a long period of time, to which many contributed," for if this book was so written, that would undermine credibility in the genuineness of the prophecy statement that is so crucial to Price's position. He must establish that critical evaluations of the book, which question the authenticity of some of it, are completely without merit, and he cannot do that by just quoting writers who disagree with this view, as he did in this his "last stand." I'll have more to say later about his appeals to writers who disagree with the principles of higher criticism.
The Dating of the Prophecy: Despite the amount of space that I have devoted to answering Price's prating about the date of Jeremiah's prophecy, he has taken us down the same path again without bothering even to acknowledge my response to this irrelevant matter. "The prophecy under debate is dated in 605 B. C.," he said again, "the fourth year of Jehoiakim" (p. 2, this issue). But what has he said in reply to my observation that the passage he has cited in support of this point said only that the word of Yahweh came to Jeremiah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim (25:1)? This text in no way implies that Jeremiah was prophesying that the event he was predicting, i. e., a Babylonian captivity of 70 years, was going to begin at that time. The best that Price can get from this text is a claim that Jeremiah prophesied in 605 B. C. that there would be a captivity of 70 years (v:11), but the crucial matter is when the predicted captivity actually began, and it did not begin in 605 B. C. Price likes to quote scholars (as if finding scholars to quote in support of a religious belief is hard to do), so let's see him find reputable scholars who would agree that the Babylonian captivity of the Judean Jews began in 605 B. C. He can't do it, yet he keeps insisting that the period of captivity began in 605 B. C. and ended in 537 B. C., a span of time long enough to consider Jeremiah's 70 years to be an accurate "round number." I have shown that Price's dates are incorrect on both ends, but a biblicist with a pet theory to defend is not going to allow compelling evidence against it to keep him from preaching it on the roof tops.
I have been over and over this matter, but Price has largely ignored it. I have even pointed out that if we concede (incorrectly) that the captivity began in 605 B. C., Price still could not get the 70 years that he needs to claim accurate prophecy fulfillment. Cyrus issued his decree in 539 B. C. that permitted the captives in Babylon to return to their homelands, so if Price will just subtract 539 from 605, he should be able to see that the answer is 66. He has begged for a two-year leeway that would have allowed time for the captives to travel from Babylon to Jerusalem, but he has ignored my observation that Jeremiah's prediction was that the captive nations would "serve the king of Babylon seventy years" (25:11). A people traveling back to their homeland after having been granted their freedom by royal decree could hardly be described as captives who were "serving the king of Babylon." Besides, Babylon had been conquered by this time and absorbed into the Persian empire, and it was a Persian king who had granted the Jews their freedom to return home. So in what sense could Price think that they were "serving the king of Babylon" during this hypothetical two-year journey to Jerusalem? Any way he looks at it, Price just can't get a Babylonian captivity of 70 years or one even close enough to be considered a "round number." It does seem that a prophet guided and inspired by the omniscient, omnipotent Yahweh in his prophecy utterances could have performed a bit better than Jeremiah did in this matter.
The Integrity of Jeremiah's Text: Price tried desperately to show that "(t)he Hebrew text behind the Septuagint translation must have been sufficiently well established in the third century for the translators to have regarded it as authoritative" (p. 2, this issue), but he has failed to give us a reasonable explanation for why two very different versions of the book of Jeremiah were circulating simultaneously. A difference in theological views would be the most likely explanation. Some groups apparently considered the short (Septuagint) version the right one; others apparently considered the long (Masoretic) version the right one. In "The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible," Harvard Professor Frank Moore Cross discussed textual variations in biblical manuscripts and showed that many of them were the result of "variant streams of tradition" that have been recognized as "`recensions' or `families' or `local texts'" (Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, Random House, New York, 1992, p. 146). In other words, it is the consensus of reputable scholars that variations in manuscripts developed because of regional differences in theological views. Jeremiah was one of the books in which Cross noted significant variations.
Perhaps the Hellenized Egyptian Jews had a penchant for brevity, because Cross pointed out that Greek scholars in Alexandria had also produced a short edition of Homer (p. 150). However, regardless of why some Jews of the time may have preferred a short edition of Jeremiah while others in different regions preferred the longer version, there were clearly two versions in use, and this fact doesn't help the popular biblicist view that men like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah sat down and, while under the "inspiration" of God, wrote their books, which were thereafter carefully preserved by conscientious, meticulous scribes. If Jeremiah was so written, then why did its material need to be radically reorganized and why did substantial additions need to be made to it? These are questions that will continue to cast serious doubts on the integrity of the book of Jeremiah until better answers than Price's have been given. Even he has admitted that "it is true that the text of Jeremiah has a greater portion of variations than most of the other Old Testament books" (May/June 1997, p. 3), but he brushes this fact aside with that claim that "it is not true that such variations compromise the integrity of the book." He has yet to explain to us why so many variations in a book allegedly written in the 6th century B. C., whose text cannot be traced farther back than the 3rd century B. C., should not be considered sufficient reason to wonder what may have happened to the text during the three-century "developmental period" Cross referred to, for which we have no textual records. That's the problem that Price has not and cannot satisfactorily resolve, but resolve it he must in order to sustain his claim that late in the 7th century B. C., Jeremiah predicted that the Judean Jews would be held captive in Babylon for 70 years. If by chance he could solve this problem, all he would prove is that Jeremiah made a prophecy that failed, because I have shown that no chronological evidence supports Price's claim that the captivity lasted close enough to 70 years to consider that it was accurately fulfilled even in "round-number" terms.
Another False Analogy: In search of evidence to show that the text of Jeremiah has been preserved essentially as the prophet and/or his scribe Baruch wrote it, Price referred to six manuscripts of Jeremiah that were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but even he admitted that "some" of these were "from the tradition behind the Septuagint, and others from the Masoretic tradition" (p. 2, this issue), so all that Price has shown by this is that as late as the time of the Essene settlements at Qumran, two entirely different versions of this book existed. Hence, there is certainly no proof in the Dead Sea discoveries to support the view that a text of Jeremiah basically free of tampering has been passed along to us.
In a ridiculously false analogy, Price referred to 190 manuscript fragments that were found at Qumran. From this he argued that scholars have been able to determine "the textual tradition from which the manuscripts were copied" (p. 3). I don't disagree that the textual tradition of fragments can be determined, but there is a substantial difference in determining what "textual tradition" fragments may have been copied from and in determining exactly how the entire book that a fragment was copied from may have read at the time of the copying. In other words, if a fragment is discovered that turns out to be Jeremiah 25:9 as it reads in the Masoretic version (which mentions Nebuchadnezzar by name, whereas the same verse in the Septuagint does not), this fragment alone would show scholars only that Jeremiah 25:9 in the Masoretic version used at Qumran read essentially as it does in the Masoretic text of Jeremiah that has been transmitted to us. However, it would not prove that the entire Masoretic text of Jeremiah as it was used then was the same as it is now.
In an attempt to show otherwise, Price compared the finding of fragmentary body parts to the finding of manuscript fragments. "If the police find the skull and a few bones of a dead body," he asked, "can they not legitimately conclude that the whole living body once existed?" The answer is certainly yes, but there would be many things about the person that the discovery of a skull and a few bones could not determine. If the person whose body it is had been someone whose left arm had been amputated below the elbow, the discovery of a "few bones" could not determine this unless the left arm bones were included in the discovery. If this person had had a birthmark on his forehead, the discovery of a skull and "few bones" would not reveal this. If this person had had six digits on the right hand, the discovery of a skull and "few bones" would not show this unless the bones of the right hand were included in the discovery. If no hair was found with the bones, we could not know whether the person was a blond, brunet, or redhead. We can therefore see that Price's analogy is false and that the discovery of a few fragments of a biblical manuscript would not show that the entire manuscript from which the fragments were copied was exactly like the version of that book as it exists today.
Another Straw Man: Price spent almost two columns on an irrelevant discussion of a manuscript of Isaiah that was found at Qumran. He listed fourteen categories of variations in this manuscript from the Masoretic text of today in order to make a point about the general insignificance of the variations, but since the book of Isaiah is not the book of Jeremiah, this entire section of his article was irrelevant. It was just another straw man that he could beat on to draw attention away from the obvious fact that he cannot establish that the book of Jeremiah--the one that contains the prophecy under discussion--has been transmitted to us virtually unchanged from the way that Jeremiah wrote it.
The Aramaic Targum: After the Isaiah tangent, Price turned next to the Aramaic Targum to try to show that it "gives good reason to place the Masoretic text of Jeremiah in at least the sixth century" (p. 3, this issue). Price didn't explain what this "good reason" is, so I guess that he just expects us to take his word for it. Well, he did cite Ernest Wurthwein's opinion that "(t)he Jewish tradition associating it [the Targum] with Ezra (cf. Neh. 8:8) may well be correct" (p. 3, this issue). From this, I assume that Price expects us to accept as fact what some writer thought "may well be correct." If it "may well be correct," what is the evidence that it is? Nehemiah 8:8, which Wurthwein referred to, merely states that a group of men whom Ezra had selected to read publicly the book of the law "gave the sense and caused them to understand it." That's pretty flimsy evidence on which to date the making of the Aramaic Targum.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the Targum did date back to the time of Ezra. Price would still have the same problem: How can he prove that a Targum written at that time included the book of Jeremiah and has remained essentially unchanged ever since? If the Masoretic text itself was undergoing changes, what reason do we have to suppose that the Targum didn't? The translation of Wurthwein's book that Price quoted was published by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, MI, so maybe Price would be willing to consider another opinion about the Targum that was published in an Eerdmans book: "(T)he further claim that some of the extant written Targums are as a whole pre-Christian is vigorously debated" (Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, 1987, p. 985). The article goes on to say that "despite the uncertainty with regard to dating," the Targums are relied on extensively in various branches of biblical studies. However, the fact that they cannot be reliably dated isn't much confirmation of Price's claim that they show "good reason to place the Masoretic text of Jeremiah in at least the sixth century." The oldest existing targumic writings date only to the 2nd century B. C., and these are fragments that were found at Qumran. That's about four centuries too late to prove Price's claim.
The Several Fifth- or Sixth-Century Witnesses to Jeremiah: Price cited the writers of 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Zechariah, and Daniel as "very early witnesses" who knew Jeremiah's book "and the prophecy under debate in particular" (p. 3, this issue). That Dr. Price would resort to such desperation as this is surprising even for him. I don't have the space to review the literature on these books, but surely Price is aware that these are recognized as late additions to the Hebrew scriptures. In this very issue of TSR, I am continuing a discussion of the book of Daniel to show that, contrary to the biblicist view, this book was written in the second century B. C. during the Maccabean era, so that would hardly make its author a "very early witness" to Jeremiah's book and its 70-year prophecy. The Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah are recognized as the works of a single author who wrote them probably in the 3rd century B. C. and possibly even as late as the midsecond century. The writer(s) of Zechariah dated some of its prophecies in the late 6th century, but critical analysis has required parts of it to be dated at least as late as the 4th century. Zechariah 9:13, for example, refers to the "sons" of Greece as enemies against whom Yahweh would stir up the sons of Zion, but the Greeks were not considered enemies of Zion until after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century B. C. So Dr. Price's "very early witnesses" to Jeremiah and his prophecy turn out to be witnesses who lived and wrote well after the time of Jeremiah.
The Textual Integrity of Jeremiah: Dr. Price devoted two pages to defending the integrity of the text of Jeremiah, but with only another page of space for me to finish my response to him, I will make just three more comments on this issue: (1) Much of the "proof" that he cited on this point involved only the quoting of authors who agree with his position, and as I have repeatedly noted, no religious position is so absurd that one cannot find "scholars" who agree with it. (2) Most of my rebuttals of Price's position have been aimed at showing that the reliability of the book of Jeremiah cannot be established. (3) My citation of passages in Obadiah that are almost identical in wording to passages in Jeremiah (July/August 1997, p. 3) is sufficient to cast serious doubts on Price's claim that the book of Jeremiah has been reliably transmitted through the centuries. I don't recall that Dr. Price even attempted to explain why such doublets as these would exist in books that he believes were faithfully transmitted for centuries by trustworthy scribes. The bottom line is that there are too many reasons why rational people just cannot share Dr. Price's simplistic belief that the book of Jeremiah exists today essentially as the 6th-century B. C. prophet wrote it; and as I have also pointed out, even if Dr. Price could unequivocally establish the textual reliability of the book, he would then have to explain why Jeremiah predicted that the captivity would last for 70 years when clearly it didn't.
Changing Horses in Midstream: In this matter, Dr. Price
has done an about face. He came on board vigorously proclaiming that
the 70-year prophecy was fulfilled with exceptional accuracy in that
Jeremiah predicted a captivity of 70 years and that the captivity
lasted for 69 years, close enough to be considered a remarkable
"round-number" fulfillment ("Prophecy of Seventy Years of Servitude to
Babylon," TSR, March/April 1997, p. 3). Now in his "last
stand," he has apparently decided to switch horses in midstream. He
said that my insistence that "the subjugation to the Babylonian kings
had to be exactly seventy years for the prophecy to be fulfilled" (p.
5, this issue) is in disagreement with "competent critical scholars
like John Bright who said: `This seems to be here no more than a round
number, i. e., a normal life span'" (ibid,). He
proceeded to cite two more "scholars" who claim that the number "was
not to be taken literally, but rather as a round or `perfect' number,
perhaps the length of a man's lifetime." This is a flagrant reversal of
his position, as anyone can verify by reading his initial article in
the March/April 1997 issue, which I quoted above. He defended the same
position in his second article, published in the May/ June 1997 issue
(pp. 4-5), but now he is arguing that the 70 years were figurative and
are so understood by many scholars. A review of our articles will show
that I was, in fact, the one who first brought up the position that Dr.
Price has now switched to (see subtitle "A Figurative View," TSR,
July/August 1997, p. 6). I restated this view as an "alternative
hypothesis" that Price must disprove in order to sustain his case
(July/August 1998, pp. 2-3), and now at the end of the debate, when Dr.
Price has apparently recognized his failure to prove his position, he
seems to have decided that he likes the "figurative" view and has
decided to discard his original claim that the prophecy was fulfilled
with a remarkable "round-number" accuracy. Such wishy-washiness as this
deserves no further comment. Dr. Price has failed to make his case.
