Jeremy Thompson Catholic PhD in Biblical Languages, Programmer, Runner

So, still no daily Old Testament lectionary reading (except for feast days) until around mid-November.  But, that’s okay for today because I remembered I was gone to a World Youth Day celebration this weekend.  So, I didn’t say anything about this past Sunday’s lectionary reading.  Lots of stuff going on here.  The reading was from Jeremiah 31.7-9, and this is one of the chapters that we find talking about a “new covenant” (if “new” is the proper translation at all).

I’ll start with one interesting point here from verse 9b, which reads: “For I am a father to Israel, Ephraim is my first-born.”  Note that God is referred to as father to Israel.  There is a common misconception among Christians that there is really no image of God as father in the Old Testament.  People who say that simply have not read the Old Testament very closely.  I cite a few more example of this in this post: 7 Verses on the Love of God in the Old Testament.

I was reading in Jeremiah 1 today, and I noticed a feature that I like in my Hebrew-English Tanakh. Word plays are often marked in notes.  For instance, there is a word play between shaqed “almond tree” and shoqed “watchful” (their translation) in Jeremiah 1.11 & 12 that is marked.  So, I looked ahead into Amos because there are a number of prominent word plays near the end of the book.  And, I found that the word plays are marked in a similar manner there.  I don’t know if JPS includes that in all of their editions or just the Hebrew-English ones.   I also looked at my NASB, ESV, and NIV print versions and found that they do this as well.  I think this is a very helpful feature.  It makes readers aware of word plays without having to force an artificial type of translation to communicate the literary feature in English.