Thus shall ye say
unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they
shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens. (Jer 10:11)
Unlike the rest of the book of Jeremiah, this verse is not in Hebrew but
Aramaic. Some have argued this was due to the fact that the Jews in captivity
would have to give an answer in Aramaic in response to attempts to get them to
commit idolatry:
Targ. has a long paraphrase of the Aramaic gloss (v. 11), the opening
sentence of which is intended as an explanation of why v. 11 is written in
Aramaic, and the same type of explanation appears in Rashi who says that the
letter in question was sent by Jeremiah to Jehoiachin and the exiles. Kimchi,
following Targ., states that this was the answer which the Jewish exiles in
Babylon were required to give to the Chaldaeans when they were commanded to
worship their gods. Only the beginning of the letter (so Kimchi) has been
preserved in the language in which Jeremiah wrote it. There is value in these
remarks in so far as they establish a relationship between v. 11 and vv. 12–16,
for it is not difficult to discern that v. 11 has the character of an Aramaic
summary of vv. 12–16. It should be noted particularly that the reference to the
perishing of the idols which did not make the heavens and the earth (v. 11) is
matched by what is said of them (described as הבל and מעשׂה תעתעים) in v. 15, namely, בעת פקדתם יאבדו. (William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on
Jeremiah, volume 1: I-XXV [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986], 225)
Notwithstanding some (often dogmatically) defending the authenticity of v. 11, many scholars of Jeremiah believe this to be a
later interpolation. Catholic scholar Lawrence Boadt offered the following
brief argument:
Verse 11 stands apart
from the rest of the poem, both because it sounds more like prose than poetry,
and above all because it is not in Hebrew but Aramaic . . . Note that the
thought draws obvious conclusions from what has been said in the preceding
lines. Some reader, official or not, wrote only vv. 8-10, really meant. He
almost certainly placed his comment in the margin of the page, but at some
point many years later, even centuries later, when the scroll had to be
recopied, the new scribe assumed that this line was actually part of the original
prophecy but had been accidentally left out; so he neatly copied it into the
new text where it best belonged The Scriptures
possess many such small additions, but few can be identified so easily as this
one. (Lawrence
Boadt, Jeremiah 1-25 [Old Testament
Message vol. 9; Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1982], 88;
emphasis added)
