"Take another
scroll and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll,
which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned. And concerning Jehoiakim king of
Judah you shall say, 'Thus says the Lord, You have burned this scroll, saying, "Why
have you written in it that the king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy
this land, and will cut off from it man and beast?" Therefore thus says
the Lord concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah: He shall have none to sit on the
throne of David, and his dead body shall be cast out to the heat by day and the
frost by night. And I will punish him and his offspring and his servants for
their iniquity. I will bring upon them and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem
and upon the people of Judah all the disaster that I have pronounced against
them, but they would not hear.'" Then Jeremiah took another scroll and
gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote on it at the
dictation of Jeremiah all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah
had burned in the fire. And many similar words were added to them. (Jer
36:28-32, ESV)
Commenting on this text and the fact that Jeremiah’s second scroll was
an expansion of the original, not
simply a reproduction of the original (as some ignorant critics have claimed,
such as Norman Geisler and Richard Abanes), John A. Thompson, a conservative
Protestant scholar, wrote:
The narrative of ch.
36 tells us that in the fourth year of Jehoiakim (605 B.C.) Yahweh commanded
Jeremiah to obtain a scroll and write on it everything concerning Israel and
Judah and all the nations since Yahweh first spoke to him in the days of
Josiah. The tantalizing question is: What was the content of this scroll, and
also of the expanded scroll which
Jeremiah and Baruch produced when King Jehoiakim burned the first one leaf by
leaf? . . . . The second scroll was not
merely a copy of the first but contained additional material described as many similar words. (John A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah [New International
Commentary on the Old Testament; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980], 56, 629,
emphasis in bold added)
Further Reading
Biblical Prophets Changing their Words and the Words of Previous Prophets
