broth. The Masoretic Text
shows peraq, a term not attested elsewhere, and this translation reads
instead meraq. The vehement inveighing against a whole set of paganizing
practices does not appear in the previous chapters, and pagan or syncretistic
worship does not seem to have been an urgent issue either in Babylonian exile
or in fifth-century B.C.E. Judah. One is led to the tentative inference that
this is a prophecy dating from the last years of the Judahite monarchy, a time
when, as other sources show, pagan practices were widespread. (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:837)
