Jeremiah 35

Jeremiah 35 is the thirty-fifth chapter of the Book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. It is numbered as Jeremiah 42 in the Septuagint. This book contains prophecies attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, and is one of the Books of the Prophets. This chapter records the meeting of Jeremiah with the Rechabites, a nomadic clan, in which the prophet "contrast their faithfulness to the commands of a dead ancestor with the faithlessness of the people of Judah to the commands of a living God".

Text

The original text was written in Hebrew. This chapter is divided into 19 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text tradition, which includes the Codex Cairensis, the Petersburg Codex of the Prophets, Aleppo Codex, Codex Leningradensis.
There is also a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint, made in the last few centuries BCE. Extant ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint version include Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Marchalianus.

Verse numbering

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 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
35:1-19	42:1-19
28:1-17	35:1-17

Parashot

The parashah sections listed here are based on the Aleppo Codex. Jeremiah 35 contains the "Fourteenth prophecy" in the section of Prophecies interwoven with narratives about the prophet's life . : open parashah.

The obedience of the Rechabites (35:1–11)

This chapter is out of the chronological order of chapter 32-34 and 37-44, as it records the events during the reign of king Jehoiakim. According to Weippert, "the phrases found in the chapter are characteristic of Jeremiah." Huey maintains that it is not "misplaced by accident or through a redactor's ignorance of the chronology of events", but perhaps to "emphasis that Judah's disobedience... had begun much earlier than the closing years of Zedekiah's reign." This section provides an illustration contrasting the covenant infidelity of Israel against God as the Father of the nation and the fidelity of the Rechabites to the commandments of their progenitor. This is another one of the symbolic acts in Jeremiah that have significance for the message of the book.
When Egyptians decided to fight the Babylonians in Palestine, Nebuchadnezzar temporarily lifted the siege on Jerusalem, sending a raiding troops to attack other areas in Judah instead, which drove the Rechabites, among the people living in the countryside, to Jerusalem for safety during that period. Calmet suggests that "it was not till the latter end of Jehoiakim’s reign that the Rechabites were driven into the city".

Verse 1

The introductory statement here shows that this incident is earlier than those in Jeremiah 32–34, which all took place in the reign of Zedekiah.

"The days of Jehoiakim": Jehoiakim's reign was from 609/608 BCE until 598 BCE, then after a brief reign of Jehoiakim's son, Jehoiachin, Zedekiah, Jehoiakim's brother, ruled from 597 BCE until the kingdom of Judah fell in 587/586 BCE.

Verse 11

"The army of the Chaldeans": from Hebrew: חיל הכשדים, ha-; some Bible versions render it as "the Babylonian". The "Chaldeans" were a group of people from southern Babylon where Nebuchadnezzar came from. The book of Jeremiah regularly calls the Babylonians as the Chaldeans, whereas Jeremiah's contemporary, Ezekiel, uses both terms.

Judah rebuked (35:12–19)

Verse 18

"The house of the Rechabites": A close knit descendants of the Kenites known from the story of Jehonadab the son of Rechab, who helped Jehu purging the Baal prophets from Samaria. The Rechabites lived as nomads, rejecting all forms of urban and agrarian life, and refused to drink wine or strong drink and would not cultivate vineyards nor plant any other crops. The complete obedience of the Rechabites is "outlined in a triad of verbs: obeyed... kept... done". Rabbi Halafta was a descendant of the Rechabites. In 1839 the Reverend Joseph Wolff found in Yemen, near Sana'a, a tribe claiming to be descendants of Jehonadab; and in the late nineteenth century a Bedouin tribe was found near the Dead Sea who also professed to be descendants of Jehonadab.

Verse 19

"Stand before Me": an expression found over 100 times in the Old Testament means "to stand before someone with an attitude of service," used of priests, kings or prophets. The Septuagint has the closing as παραἵστημι κατά πρόσωπον ἐγώ πᾶς ὁ ἡμέρα ὁ γῆ . notes that "Malchijah the son of Rechab... repaired the Refuse Gate; he built it and hung its doors with its bolts and bars", cooperating to restore the wall of Jerusalem, approximately 150 years later.