n the Book which Jeremiah spake after Jerusalem had gone into exile, and
even after he had been hurried down into Egypt by a base remnant of his
people.(24) Moreover, the historical appendix to the Book carries the
history it contains on to 561 B.C. at least.(25) Again there are passages,
the subjects of which are irrelevant to their context, and which break the
clear connection of the parts of the context between which they have
intruded.(26) The shorter sentences, that also disturb the connection as
they stand, appear to have been written originally as marginal notes which
a later editor or copyist has incorporated in the text.(27) To this class,
too, may belong those brief passages which appear twice, once in their
natural connection in some later chapter and once out of their natural
connection in some earlier chapter.(28) And again in VII. 1-28 and XXVI.
1-9 we have two accounts, apparently from different hands, of what may or
may not be the same episode in Jeremiah's ministry.

These data clearly prove that not only from the time when the Hebrew and
Greek editions of the Book started upon their separate lines of
development, but from the very beginnings of the Book's history, the work
of accumulation, arrangement and re-arrangement, with other editorial
processes, had been busy upon it.

The next question is, have we any criteria by which to discriminate
between the elements in the Book that belong either to Jeremiah himself or
to his contemporaries and others that are due to editors or compilers
between his death soon after 586 and the close of the Prophetic Canon in
200 B.C.? The answer is that we have such criteria. All Oracles or
Narratives in the Book, which (apart from obvious intrusions) imply that
the Exile is well advanced or that the Return from Exile has already
happened, or which reflect the circumstances of the later Exile and
subsequent periods or the spirit of Israel and the teaching of her
prophets and scribes in those periods, we may rule out of the material on
which we can rely for our knowledge of Jeremiah's life and his teaching.
Of such Exilic and post-Exilic contents there is a considerable, but not a
preponderant, amount. These various items break into their context, their
style and substance are not conformable to the style and substance of the
Oracles, which (as we shall see) are reasonably attributed to Jeremiah,
but they so closely resemble those of other writings from the eve of the
Ret